World Mental Health Awareness: Suicide.

This post may be triggering for some.  

The first time I wanted to die I was a child.  I ate nearly a whole tube of Bonjela because it said to not exceed stated dose.   I thought it would kill me.  I loved the taste and figured that would be a nice way to die.  I didn't even puke.  I was disappointed.

I once took a lot of painkillers.  I didn't die.  I didn't pass out.  I didn't vomit.  I didn't go to hospital.  I just slept, longer than usual.  I couldn't understand it.

I never wrote a note.  I never told anyone before of after.

Suicide. We've all heard of it, perhaps our lives have been forever changed because of it.  I'm not going to talk about the people who commit suicide nor the whys.  I'm going to talk about the not so often spoke about people, the forever suicidal.  To feel like you want to die yet to not act upon it.  Not because you're weaker then those who do or even braver.  They're entirely different.  One is fatally suicidal and the other is terminally suicidal.  To be terminally suicidal is to not want to die necessarily but a desire to not exist or to even stop existing.  Essentially you don't want to 'be' any more.  Death seems the only logical path to this.  Sometimes you're terrified of death, other times the fear disappears and you flirt with death.  You envisage ways of dying.  Ways of making sure you die. You fantasise about doing it.  You want it. Yet, you do nothing.

You close your eyes in the bath and imagine drowning,  you may even go under the water and hold your breath.  You look at the bathroom tiles and wonder what pattern your blood would make if you smashed your head into them hard enough.  You image falling down the stairs and the strange lifeless angle you create at the bottom.  You stare across the motorway bridge for just a few seconds longer than necessary as you wonder what it would feel like to jump off it.  You're waiting for the traffic to stop and for just a second or two you imagine yourself walking out into it.  You're taking your medication and you imagine taking them all.  You accidentally cut your finger when cooking and briefly consider running it quick, hard and deep up your wrist.

Yet you do nothing.

In some perverse way not doing anything becomes your punishment.  To disallow yourself the exit you desire.  You imagine the ones you'd love would be better off without you because you're bad, at everything.  You can't change.  You're broken to the core.  Things will never get better. They deserve better, so much better.  You don't want to leave them.  You realise that no matter how much better of they'd be, it would break them.  They're too young to hate you and you don't want to be the reason for their despair.  So you forbid yourself to go.  You don't deserve to make it stop.  You might be empty yet they love you, and you want to stay with them more then you want to leave them.  It's not them you want to leave.  It's you that you want to leave.  There lies the crux of it.

You don't want to die.  You just want to make it all stop. To make it stop.  To make it stop.

You can't be someone different or someone new so you'd rather be nothing at all.

So rather than living to die, you remain dying to live.  Holding on instead of holding in.

It's hard to describe how you can be suicidal yet categorically state you won't kill yourself.

My children saved my life.  The only reason I'm here is because whether they want me or not, I refuse to leave them.  They will do beautiful things that I can't and never will.  I want to watch them be beautiful.