Content: suicide, though I hope with a faint light in the darkness.
I have been chronically suicidal since the 1990s. I want to die- not all the time, but the idea of “blessed release” appeals. Life is painful. I have argued myself out of it. For example, I thought, I must not hurt anyone- so to avoid hurting relatives it must appear like an accident, but I could not just crash a car into someone coming the other way, as that might be murder. I want it quick, efficient and relatively painless, and I can’t think of a method that meets all these criteria.
But now, I don’t want to argue myself out of the desire and the feeling, but to accept them. On Sunday morning I woke wanting to die. The pain is too great. Very well, I want to die. I have not actually acted on it so far. The criteria still apply. I want to sit with the desire.
I wanted to talk this through, and had my opening line to the Samaritans ready.
-I want to tell someone I want to die, who won’t tell me that’s a bad thing, try to persuade me against it, or work out techniques to stop me.
-OK, he says. Why do you want to die?
-This isn’t a prank call, but I don’t want to talk to you.
I always prefer to talk to a woman. The second time, I say something like “I want to talk about what that feels like and accept the feeling”. I want to accept my desire, which may not be for death itself but for release from something. I want to accept my feelings of pain rather than seek to deny or suppress them. Maureen tells me if ever I am frightened of the supermarket I could phone the Samaritans and chat to them as I walk round it. I don’t need that service but am glad it could be available. In the call, I affirm myself: I don’t feel I have reached my potential but do feel I am progressing as best I can.
I want to face the darkness.
On Friday a book in Magazine Heaven so moved me I was nearly crying, and thought, I can’t get emotional in public like that. The Monster will get me. And it won’t, because the Monster no longer exists. I can get emotional like that, even when people can see me. The world does not end.
The hiding increases the hurt and the hiding is all I can do and in the hiding I began to heal by facing and acknowledging the hurt I could not acknowledge when out in the world. I want to die, and hold some slight hope that sometime in the future I might no longer want to die.
I want to die.
Facing, recognising, accepting that I might pass through it.
I want to die, and that is OK because I am not going to kill myself. I also want to live.