Suicide. in 2018

I’m sitting here reading about Anthony Bourdain, how sad, that along with Kate Spade, and of course that does not count all the suicides that don’t make the news because they aren’t celebrities. The only good? Thing about celebrities suicide is that is sheds a light on the fact that suicide is a silent killer that crosses social economic class. The fact you can seem to “have it all” and still be a victim of it. It isn’t just the person who is isolated or someone struggling with finances or a job or a family or a myriad of other concerns. As someone who has struggled with depression and has had 2 failed suicide attempts and am currently what i would consider “passively suicidal” ie. I wouldn’t actively do anything to end my life, but nor would I actively do anything to prolong it either. I feel like I know how people feel when you get to that point…but I think this quote sums up how I felt and maybe how someone else feels… David Foster Wallace (who subsequently died from suicide)

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

― David Foster Wallace