I’ve been dealing with suicidal feelings since my teens. After a particularly awful round last week, I was able to sit down and make a list of the persistent thoughts occurring to me around why I should kill myself. This was not an easy process, and when I’m not very close to these things I can’t readily access them and mostly don’t want to go there.
The list had themes, and I only saw them because I’d written them down. A few of them were about pain – physical and emotional and not being able to take any more. I’m fine with that. On its own, I can deal with pain and I also feel that wanting to die in face of a pain overload is a perfectly reasonable response. The thing to work on, if I can, is the pain. Most of the reasons were about utility – that I am not good or useful enough to be entitled to live. Some of them were stacked on that as issues of how I fail as a human being.
I note that every time I’ve kept going in the past I have done so on the basis of not hurting or letting down anyone else. It works in the short term but feeds the narrative that the worth in my life is my utility for other people. I need to stop doing that.
Philosophically, this outlook is bullshit. It’s not what I believe, it’s not my value system and I wouldn’t apply it to anyone else. It isn’t me – and I’d never really seen that before. It represents a way of thinking about people, worth, and life that I do not believe. It is not something of my making. It is, I realise, a consequence of what’s been done to me. After more than twenty years of living with these thoughts, this is a significant breakthrough. It changes who I think I am, and it changes what I think is happening when I fall into these patterns of thinking.
To be worthless as a person depends on having a way of measuring a person’s worth that isn’t simply that they exist. It raises questions about who is supposed to benefit from my life and what I am supposed to be for. Narratives that make a person all about their utility are intensely de-personning. We live in a culture that does a lot of this, especially to the poor and disabled and to anyone disadvantaged.
I’ve also realised that these thoughts come up as panic responses, not as depression issues. Depression is just a miserable grind, but it’s not the thing trying to kill me. The dangerous stuff is what gets set off by high levels of panic.
I think it probably isn’t just me. I wonder how many people who end up wanting to die do so because their sense of self has been cripplingly injured. How many people feel there is no point in living because they’ve been taught to measure their own worth in terms of utility to others? It’s also really hard to ask for help when you feel that you are suffering because you are worthless and useless. It’s hard to believe you deserve help, or that you are entitled not to feel awful, when the thoughts driving the experience are all about what a waste of space you are.
No one gets here on their own.