DISCLAIMER: This post is my 'free writing'. I sometimes free write, when I'm investigating my own thoughts about something. This post involves touchy (thus controversial) subjects, such as suicide, and are just me discussing my own thoughts around the aspect of suicide notes, in relation to myself. There are points throughout this post where the reader may be alarmed by my typings... but please know that at no point am I threatening suicide. This is about the act of writing suicide notes (but at no point do I write one), and this post is focusing on this as an act seperate from the act of suicide. I do come to an understanding that is safe at the end, even though during the process of free writing my thoughts may appear alarming to some. If you are feeling suicidal right now, please ignore this post (as I don't want to trigger anyone) and call a helpline, or doctor. Suicide is not the answer, and you can find hope to live again if you give it a chance. I did.
I just watched casualty. It was about a doctor who tried to commit suicide, and her life is left hanging in the balance. The episode was largely about what she had written in her diary and suicide note.
Why does this trigger me? Why does anything involving suicide trigger me to the point that it re-triggers my own suicidal feelings?
I now feel like writing my own suicide note.
Why?
I'm not sure. Because I'm going to kill myself? No. Because I feel like killing myself? Not specifically. Because I think I might want to? I'm not sure. No. Because before, during and after every struggle of every day I feel hopeless. And lost in my neverending thoughts.
I sort of feel a little like a 'fake' suicide note, for my eyes only, has something to offer me.
A little bit like an article I read the other week about the terminally ill. How being terminally ill is not necessarily an emotional horror entirely. How actually, for some, it puts things into perspective... frees a person from all the nonsense in the world. Allows them to really live their last days. Or is that another falacy people keep up with to make the most awful things in the world seem something they are not? I don't know. I sort of see the sense in it. I am not convinced people can feel that way towards being terminally ill, however I had a conversation with someone who works with people facing death and she said that this is the case for some. That in a way, it frees a person to take stock of what's important, and to do and say the things that they have never yet done or said.
I want to be free. But, obviously I wouldn't wish terminal illness on myself or anyone for that matter. Nobody deserves, or can truly thank anything in terminal illness. There's nothing good about that.
I'm just making a point about the processes of thought. The danger is... I know in writing the suicide note, a note that is as if I am living my last hours, I will either find that freedom and make some new realisations about my life... maybe find a hope I don't have right now. Or I will realise that the only freedom I can gain is from life itself.
I guess it is like "Daring to think".
I'm really not sure what has lead me to writing these words, or who I am writing them to.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
After I wrote this, I felt a little bit unsure. Was I really back in that place, contemplating suicide? I didn't really know... I didn't think so. But I still wanted to write a suicide note anyway. I didn't know if I was 'testing' myself out for it...or trying to talk myself into it or something. I asked a close friend to read it and promise not to tell me off.
He said that actually, it was a good letter. "Extreme desperation is about searching & screaming at the same time. Deep innermost thoughts are the stuff of therapy, but rarely expressed. In suicide there is the opportunity to say what could never be easily said (a bit like telling your mean housemates where to get off before you move out). These are the issues of the moment with revealing scary things, 'Dare to think', and 'Dont walk away' [words from a nightmare I had recently]".
That makes sense now.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Being suicidal, in a funny way, was both the most trapping and freeing time of my life. My constant thoughts of suicide drove me mad. But I always distinguished a difference between thinking about suicide, and feeling suicidal. Feeling suicidal was the worst, most desperate, existance... hence why I was suicidal (duh!). It was, over and above anything ever in my life, the most painful feeling in the world. That feeling has traumatised me in itself, I believe. I live in fear of that feeling. Though that is a good thing, because I protect myself from that place now.
But thinking about suicide... taking aside the obsessive aspect of it that I once had... well, that was a little different. Miserable, depressed, and awful, yes. But at times, it was the only time my mind and emotions could be free. It was the only time, to me, that it was okay to think the things I was thinking, and okay to feel the things I was feeling... because as far as I was concerned I had convinced myself that one day I would commit suicide. "It is only a matter of time" forever stayed in my mind. I always recognised that this was, in part at least, a safety blanket for me. "If today is that awful, I can commit suicide". You'd be surprised how much hope and strength that thought gave me. I always recognised that this was my control mechanism to pull me through... suicide is the ultimate control a person can have over their lives. Ending your life is ultimately the most permanent, absolute, control over your own life you can have. I'd talk about it to a counsellor I had at the time, and she'd say "but suicide is permanent", and I'd reply "well, yeah... isn't that the point?" (They should stop advising counsellors to say that by the way, someone feeling suicidal is only going to see that as a GOOD thing!). I never really understood what I really meant when I said "Isn't that the point?" even myself, until tonight.
People fear death so much... they fear getting ill, hit by a bus, people, the 'outside' of their homes, the inside of their homes, spiders, heights, enclosed spaces, spiders, rape, murderers, dirt, germs, their loved ones dying, the next time their husband/father/mother/brother/sister/friend abuses them, spoons - whatever!...so many people are living in fear of their own lives and minds - rationally or not. Imagine taking all of that way in one big sweeping thought. I can end it myself. ****ing brilliant!
What is sad, and not good, is that I felt I had to think like that in order to gain any sense of control, safety, and freedom to feel and think as I felt and thought.
But I recognise the freeing nature of thinking like this at these times... when I rebelled; locked my teacher out of his own classroom; when I was fighting; suspended; when I was drinking so much on a near-daily basis that I was always throwing up; being thrown out of pubs and clubs; when I was stealing; scarring my own body; trying my hardest to self-destruct; spending all my money; ditching my studies; taking drugs; walking dangerous streets at 3am... I always thought 'It doesn't matter what happens. I am going to kill myself soon anyway." I wonder now if I was just practicing the only freedom I could have, by thinking that - and simply expressing my feelings - rather than 'self-destructing' as I was constantly being told off for whenever I admitted to anyone what I was up to.
I remember when I was about 9/10, and me and a childhood friend were riding our bikes down the back alley. We were meant to be home half hour ago. I can't remember now exactly what she said... but I remember saying "you can do that if you want to". She started arguing with me that she couldn't. I said "Yes you can... you could KILL someone if you wanted to." She argued back that of course she couldn't kill someone, she would get put in prison. I vividly remember telling her that she COULD kill someone. Yes, she'd go to prison... but she could do it if she really wanted to. I guess my point was that nobody has to obide by rules. I wasn't saying go kill someone that's for sure!
When we got home, we both got told off for being late. I was always such a ****ing good kid, that was the only time I was ever late so my mum was going out of her mind with worry. I was always a deep thinker. It's obvious that recognising the point I made, that this is where rebellion comes from.
But no wonder I got so pissed off when another therapist kept having those 'choice' conversations... I knew about choice! It wasn't the point of the discussion for me! And God! Did he drone on about that... he used the 'choice' discussions as the absolute answer to everything. It was why patients annoyed him, why he refused to see particular patients... 'they are choosing to be like that'. Except this time, I was deeply offended by that, and knew that this 'choice' thing he had was really a total cop-out, and missing the point entirely. I remember very clearly the day that someone said to me "Some choices are do-able emotionally, and some aren't." Well, thank **** for that, I thought! Finally! Words that fitted my thoughts! That ended choice discussions for good, and I was bloody relieved to hear the end of it. From that moment on, when a therapist brought up choice in discussions, I bit their head off with those words, adding: 'So don't give me that shit!'. I was pretty pissed off with people for a while.
But back to the "you can do anything if you really want to", It's the same (sad & desperate) freedom I'm talking about, when I talk about thinking about suicide. I realise now, when I was always thinking about suicide... it wasn't about suicide. When I was feeling suicidal... well that was a different matter entirely.
I used to write a lot of suicide notes when I was a teenager. Some of them were really a vent to myself about what I really felt. Some were genuine, but by the end of writing I was worn out and slept instead. Interestingly, the times I actually took overdoses, and the times I made the noose and put it around my neck, suicide notes were not written. Those pills and nooses were never thought out decisions.. I wanted to count the pills or feel the noose around my neck, and see if I then really felt like doing it right then.
But I think there can be something to be said about practicing the act of writing suicide notes... not for the purposes to end a person's life. But for the purposes of freeing the mind from all constraints so that a person can really get down to the truth of things. It's the one guranteed scenario you can say and tell what the **** you like. Because when imagining yourself not around to face the reactions, or your own turmoil, you can say everything you never could. You can even think about things you could never think about before, and face everything that terrifies you to your core. Because then once it's said (or written rather), and life is over, it doesn't matter anyway. That's why just 'writing to yourself' is never good enough. There's got to be the imagining of not existing after to really say what you're frightened of saying, even to your own existance of yourself.
Of course, most would say "but what if I wrote something my family read, and I really hurt them... or they thought badly of me". Desperation and despair is the only time in a person's life that you can be 'selfish', because it's for reasons and it's the very nature of such desperation and despair. I don't think it makes it wrong. Because I could say people are selfish for thinking of their own feelings and needs instead. I think that word 'selfish' should be banned from being used in the context of suicide, it is entirely pointless and damaging to both parties...to the person who is thinking of, or does, commit suicide (the word 'selfish' might even contribute to their death); and the family who have to live without that person. I think it's criminal to the memory of their loved ones to be encouraged to think of them as 'selfish' for what is simply their desperation and despair. I know people who have committed suicide. I hate really dislike it when I hear people referring to them as 'selfish'. Though I do believe 'choice' discussions here are important... people choose to commit suicide. Damn, that's the whole point of it! That, and despair anyway. So nobody should take on the guilt for another making that choice.
And in any case... my point is not necessarily about the outside world and what they think ('what if I wrote something my family read, and I really hurt them...' etc.). There are things people can't allow themselves to acknowledge and think, and I think those things can **** people up truly. And it's acknowledging and facing these things that I am saying suicide notes maybe can enable some to do. The danger is, though...enable that - and can you deal with it after? Or does enabling something you can't deal with to come to the surface just risk your own life?
So I am left thinking....Misery must have a purpose. Everyone must be miserable before overcoming it, right? Everyone is miserable for a reason. I don't think it's actually feasible to have one problem or issue or another, and jump straight from that to solution and resolution. Misery has it's own purpose. Otherwise nobody would ever feel unhappy ever. Nor would they feel happy either... you only appreciate and acknowledge happiness when you have something to compare it to. So....there must be some process involved in all of this...
For those who say 'don't worry about it', 'so change it', or 'so you can't change it, deal with it' and expect you to be a ray of sunshine... they can go shove their words up their ignorant arse. Newsflash - if it was that simple, you wouldn't recognise your own happiness, nor would you really think.. nor would you be human. People really need to learn these things about life before they open up their mouths with all their 'answers'.
I guess what I am saying is really nothing new... just that I am really grasping it, bit by bit. What started off as confusion over whether I felt suicidal or not... turned into a whole new understanding of myself, and the process of healing.
Do I now say I am advocating suicide notes (but NOT the act)... Actually, no. Having thought through writing this... I realise that 'freeing' your mind from all constraints your own mind gives you, may not be a good thing. Facing things you're not ready to face, through the act of writing something as if you are about to die, may not help a person, actually. It may open things up they are not ready to deal with. Becuase I guess those constraints the mind has put there, are there for a reason.
But it was interesting to think about all of this and work through my thoughts around it all the same....
I just watched casualty. It was about a doctor who tried to commit suicide, and her life is left hanging in the balance. The episode was largely about what she had written in her diary and suicide note.
Why does this trigger me? Why does anything involving suicide trigger me to the point that it re-triggers my own suicidal feelings?
I now feel like writing my own suicide note.
Why?
I'm not sure. Because I'm going to kill myself? No. Because I feel like killing myself? Not specifically. Because I think I might want to? I'm not sure. No. Because before, during and after every struggle of every day I feel hopeless. And lost in my neverending thoughts.
I sort of feel a little like a 'fake' suicide note, for my eyes only, has something to offer me.
A little bit like an article I read the other week about the terminally ill. How being terminally ill is not necessarily an emotional horror entirely. How actually, for some, it puts things into perspective... frees a person from all the nonsense in the world. Allows them to really live their last days. Or is that another falacy people keep up with to make the most awful things in the world seem something they are not? I don't know. I sort of see the sense in it. I am not convinced people can feel that way towards being terminally ill, however I had a conversation with someone who works with people facing death and she said that this is the case for some. That in a way, it frees a person to take stock of what's important, and to do and say the things that they have never yet done or said.
I want to be free. But, obviously I wouldn't wish terminal illness on myself or anyone for that matter. Nobody deserves, or can truly thank anything in terminal illness. There's nothing good about that.
I'm just making a point about the processes of thought. The danger is... I know in writing the suicide note, a note that is as if I am living my last hours, I will either find that freedom and make some new realisations about my life... maybe find a hope I don't have right now. Or I will realise that the only freedom I can gain is from life itself.
I guess it is like "Daring to think".
I'm really not sure what has lead me to writing these words, or who I am writing them to.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
After I wrote this, I felt a little bit unsure. Was I really back in that place, contemplating suicide? I didn't really know... I didn't think so. But I still wanted to write a suicide note anyway. I didn't know if I was 'testing' myself out for it...or trying to talk myself into it or something. I asked a close friend to read it and promise not to tell me off.
He said that actually, it was a good letter. "Extreme desperation is about searching & screaming at the same time. Deep innermost thoughts are the stuff of therapy, but rarely expressed. In suicide there is the opportunity to say what could never be easily said (a bit like telling your mean housemates where to get off before you move out). These are the issues of the moment with revealing scary things, 'Dare to think', and 'Dont walk away' [words from a nightmare I had recently]".
That makes sense now.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Being suicidal, in a funny way, was both the most trapping and freeing time of my life. My constant thoughts of suicide drove me mad. But I always distinguished a difference between thinking about suicide, and feeling suicidal. Feeling suicidal was the worst, most desperate, existance... hence why I was suicidal (duh!). It was, over and above anything ever in my life, the most painful feeling in the world. That feeling has traumatised me in itself, I believe. I live in fear of that feeling. Though that is a good thing, because I protect myself from that place now.
But thinking about suicide... taking aside the obsessive aspect of it that I once had... well, that was a little different. Miserable, depressed, and awful, yes. But at times, it was the only time my mind and emotions could be free. It was the only time, to me, that it was okay to think the things I was thinking, and okay to feel the things I was feeling... because as far as I was concerned I had convinced myself that one day I would commit suicide. "It is only a matter of time" forever stayed in my mind. I always recognised that this was, in part at least, a safety blanket for me. "If today is that awful, I can commit suicide". You'd be surprised how much hope and strength that thought gave me. I always recognised that this was my control mechanism to pull me through... suicide is the ultimate control a person can have over their lives. Ending your life is ultimately the most permanent, absolute, control over your own life you can have. I'd talk about it to a counsellor I had at the time, and she'd say "but suicide is permanent", and I'd reply "well, yeah... isn't that the point?" (They should stop advising counsellors to say that by the way, someone feeling suicidal is only going to see that as a GOOD thing!). I never really understood what I really meant when I said "Isn't that the point?" even myself, until tonight.
People fear death so much... they fear getting ill, hit by a bus, people, the 'outside' of their homes, the inside of their homes, spiders, heights, enclosed spaces, spiders, rape, murderers, dirt, germs, their loved ones dying, the next time their husband/father/mother/brother/sister/friend abuses them, spoons - whatever!...so many people are living in fear of their own lives and minds - rationally or not. Imagine taking all of that way in one big sweeping thought. I can end it myself. ****ing brilliant!
What is sad, and not good, is that I felt I had to think like that in order to gain any sense of control, safety, and freedom to feel and think as I felt and thought.
But I recognise the freeing nature of thinking like this at these times... when I rebelled; locked my teacher out of his own classroom; when I was fighting; suspended; when I was drinking so much on a near-daily basis that I was always throwing up; being thrown out of pubs and clubs; when I was stealing; scarring my own body; trying my hardest to self-destruct; spending all my money; ditching my studies; taking drugs; walking dangerous streets at 3am... I always thought 'It doesn't matter what happens. I am going to kill myself soon anyway." I wonder now if I was just practicing the only freedom I could have, by thinking that - and simply expressing my feelings - rather than 'self-destructing' as I was constantly being told off for whenever I admitted to anyone what I was up to.
I remember when I was about 9/10, and me and a childhood friend were riding our bikes down the back alley. We were meant to be home half hour ago. I can't remember now exactly what she said... but I remember saying "you can do that if you want to". She started arguing with me that she couldn't. I said "Yes you can... you could KILL someone if you wanted to." She argued back that of course she couldn't kill someone, she would get put in prison. I vividly remember telling her that she COULD kill someone. Yes, she'd go to prison... but she could do it if she really wanted to. I guess my point was that nobody has to obide by rules. I wasn't saying go kill someone that's for sure!
When we got home, we both got told off for being late. I was always such a ****ing good kid, that was the only time I was ever late so my mum was going out of her mind with worry. I was always a deep thinker. It's obvious that recognising the point I made, that this is where rebellion comes from.
But no wonder I got so pissed off when another therapist kept having those 'choice' conversations... I knew about choice! It wasn't the point of the discussion for me! And God! Did he drone on about that... he used the 'choice' discussions as the absolute answer to everything. It was why patients annoyed him, why he refused to see particular patients... 'they are choosing to be like that'. Except this time, I was deeply offended by that, and knew that this 'choice' thing he had was really a total cop-out, and missing the point entirely. I remember very clearly the day that someone said to me "Some choices are do-able emotionally, and some aren't." Well, thank **** for that, I thought! Finally! Words that fitted my thoughts! That ended choice discussions for good, and I was bloody relieved to hear the end of it. From that moment on, when a therapist brought up choice in discussions, I bit their head off with those words, adding: 'So don't give me that shit!'. I was pretty pissed off with people for a while.
But back to the "you can do anything if you really want to", It's the same (sad & desperate) freedom I'm talking about, when I talk about thinking about suicide. I realise now, when I was always thinking about suicide... it wasn't about suicide. When I was feeling suicidal... well that was a different matter entirely.
I used to write a lot of suicide notes when I was a teenager. Some of them were really a vent to myself about what I really felt. Some were genuine, but by the end of writing I was worn out and slept instead. Interestingly, the times I actually took overdoses, and the times I made the noose and put it around my neck, suicide notes were not written. Those pills and nooses were never thought out decisions.. I wanted to count the pills or feel the noose around my neck, and see if I then really felt like doing it right then.
But I think there can be something to be said about practicing the act of writing suicide notes... not for the purposes to end a person's life. But for the purposes of freeing the mind from all constraints so that a person can really get down to the truth of things. It's the one guranteed scenario you can say and tell what the **** you like. Because when imagining yourself not around to face the reactions, or your own turmoil, you can say everything you never could. You can even think about things you could never think about before, and face everything that terrifies you to your core. Because then once it's said (or written rather), and life is over, it doesn't matter anyway. That's why just 'writing to yourself' is never good enough. There's got to be the imagining of not existing after to really say what you're frightened of saying, even to your own existance of yourself.
Of course, most would say "but what if I wrote something my family read, and I really hurt them... or they thought badly of me". Desperation and despair is the only time in a person's life that you can be 'selfish', because it's for reasons and it's the very nature of such desperation and despair. I don't think it makes it wrong. Because I could say people are selfish for thinking of their own feelings and needs instead. I think that word 'selfish' should be banned from being used in the context of suicide, it is entirely pointless and damaging to both parties...to the person who is thinking of, or does, commit suicide (the word 'selfish' might even contribute to their death); and the family who have to live without that person. I think it's criminal to the memory of their loved ones to be encouraged to think of them as 'selfish' for what is simply their desperation and despair. I know people who have committed suicide. I hate really dislike it when I hear people referring to them as 'selfish'. Though I do believe 'choice' discussions here are important... people choose to commit suicide. Damn, that's the whole point of it! That, and despair anyway. So nobody should take on the guilt for another making that choice.
And in any case... my point is not necessarily about the outside world and what they think ('what if I wrote something my family read, and I really hurt them...' etc.). There are things people can't allow themselves to acknowledge and think, and I think those things can **** people up truly. And it's acknowledging and facing these things that I am saying suicide notes maybe can enable some to do. The danger is, though...enable that - and can you deal with it after? Or does enabling something you can't deal with to come to the surface just risk your own life?
So I am left thinking....Misery must have a purpose. Everyone must be miserable before overcoming it, right? Everyone is miserable for a reason. I don't think it's actually feasible to have one problem or issue or another, and jump straight from that to solution and resolution. Misery has it's own purpose. Otherwise nobody would ever feel unhappy ever. Nor would they feel happy either... you only appreciate and acknowledge happiness when you have something to compare it to. So....there must be some process involved in all of this...
For those who say 'don't worry about it', 'so change it', or 'so you can't change it, deal with it' and expect you to be a ray of sunshine... they can go shove their words up their ignorant arse. Newsflash - if it was that simple, you wouldn't recognise your own happiness, nor would you really think.. nor would you be human. People really need to learn these things about life before they open up their mouths with all their 'answers'.
I guess what I am saying is really nothing new... just that I am really grasping it, bit by bit. What started off as confusion over whether I felt suicidal or not... turned into a whole new understanding of myself, and the process of healing.
Do I now say I am advocating suicide notes (but NOT the act)... Actually, no. Having thought through writing this... I realise that 'freeing' your mind from all constraints your own mind gives you, may not be a good thing. Facing things you're not ready to face, through the act of writing something as if you are about to die, may not help a person, actually. It may open things up they are not ready to deal with. Becuase I guess those constraints the mind has put there, are there for a reason.
But it was interesting to think about all of this and work through my thoughts around it all the same....
