Suicide is painless
While cycling home past Daglish station, I saw a stopped train, a pack of police, some shocked passengers waiting outside the station, and a completely wrecked looking train driver. Someone had killed themselves on the train line - again. It saddens me, but not just for the reasons you might think at face value.
Now, you're no doubt familiar with the M.A.S.H. theme - "Suicide is painless". Well, it's a great piece of music, but the title is a damn lie. Consider the poor train driver, for one thing - with the method this person selected, they've given some random person they never met a huge burden of underserved but unavoidable helpless guilt to deal with. Yay. Then there's their friends and family's pain to consider - not only have they lost someone they cared about, but they feel like they did something wrong, weren't good enough, should've known, should've done more or done something different, and that it's their fault.
That's if someone succeeds in killing themselves. All too often, they don't, but may as well have, leaving themselves in permanent pain, crippled, sick for life, etc - and inevitably much worse off than before, putting the lie to "it can't get any worse". Just imagine how awful it'd be to try to off yourself and instead land up paralyzed from the neck down. Yay. Then you suddenly meet someone wonderful, life starts to look like there might be something worthwhile to it after all ... and you're still fucked.
It really is a colossal loss of perspective more than anything else. If you can do something as extreme as killing yourself, you can probably manage to do similarly extreme things to transform your life and see what happens. Starting, of course, with acting on or properly escaping what you think is wrong in the first place ... but also just random total change things. Up and go, start backpacking and hitch-hiking randomly around until you land up somewhere that catches your eye. Flee to some random country in the ass-end of the world and join a mine-clearing detail. Or many options closer to home.
Let's just say that, at points in my past, such thoughts were deeply personally relevant. I'm not just talking out my ass - I used to follow this thought process many times on dark lonely evenings. Those times are long past, but the memories stick around, and I know how attractive the idea can be.
Not worth it.
Now, you're no doubt familiar with the M.A.S.H. theme - "Suicide is painless". Well, it's a great piece of music, but the title is a damn lie. Consider the poor train driver, for one thing - with the method this person selected, they've given some random person they never met a huge burden of underserved but unavoidable helpless guilt to deal with. Yay. Then there's their friends and family's pain to consider - not only have they lost someone they cared about, but they feel like they did something wrong, weren't good enough, should've known, should've done more or done something different, and that it's their fault.
That's if someone succeeds in killing themselves. All too often, they don't, but may as well have, leaving themselves in permanent pain, crippled, sick for life, etc - and inevitably much worse off than before, putting the lie to "it can't get any worse". Just imagine how awful it'd be to try to off yourself and instead land up paralyzed from the neck down. Yay. Then you suddenly meet someone wonderful, life starts to look like there might be something worthwhile to it after all ... and you're still fucked.
It really is a colossal loss of perspective more than anything else. If you can do something as extreme as killing yourself, you can probably manage to do similarly extreme things to transform your life and see what happens. Starting, of course, with acting on or properly escaping what you think is wrong in the first place ... but also just random total change things. Up and go, start backpacking and hitch-hiking randomly around until you land up somewhere that catches your eye. Flee to some random country in the ass-end of the world and join a mine-clearing detail. Or many options closer to home.
Let's just say that, at points in my past, such thoughts were deeply personally relevant. I'm not just talking out my ass - I used to follow this thought process many times on dark lonely evenings. Those times are long past, but the memories stick around, and I know how attractive the idea can be.
Not worth it.