[Thread TW: Suicide] This week I will turn 28. A lot things happened this year, some good, some bad but I think my biggest achievement is not joining infamous Club 27. And let me tell you something - it wasn't easy.
I've been struggling with my mental health for a while now, but it took me a really long time to realize what was going on. As long as I can remember I had a feeling of low self-esteem and being an overall waste of everybody's time and energy.
Those last few years hit me especially hard, through my actions I badly hurt some people and while achieving plenty of success in my professional career and surrounding areas, I still felt like I'm not the person I should be.
Instead of focusing on the happy things that happened, I spent countless hours revisiting every mistake I made, every attempt at making things better and failing to do so. I could come to only one conclusion: I'm the problem. All I do is hurt others and I can't change that.
And how do you get rid of an unfixable part? Well, you throw it away and get a better one. So the "obvious" choice was for me to die. Because that's how broken brains work apparently.
I never had a plan on actual "suicide" part though and even though that there were plenty of situations where I was standing on my balcony or a subway platform and I was calculating in my head what would happen if I just jumped, I always came to the same conclusion.
Ending it this way would be even a bigger problem for everyone around me. And since feeling like a a burden to others was the thing pushing me into this dark place, I couldn't rationalize bringing people around me more pain and trouble just so I have an easy way out.
So I kept wishing to die. Every plane I took I sincerely hoped it would crash. Plausible deniability. I stopped caring about my health, started hoping my cancer returns and takes me to the grave. Every day, I wished that "sweet embrace of death" would come.
This became part of my lingo. I would often say "i wish to die", "i'm garbage", "can't wait for the garbage truck to pick me up". People around me considered it a grim joke. After a while it became so normal I'd start conversations by writing "please kill me" instead of hello.
I remember looking up a life insurance at some point. If shit were to hit the fan, I wanted my family to have at least something to help them out dealing with me being dead abroad. I've chosen a policy, filled all the paperwork and had a phone conversation with insurance agent.
They were trying to sell me a more expensive insurance, citing "it even comes with a suicide clause". I replied "Oh, the other one doesn't? I guess I will take the more expensive one.". There was a long pause on the other side.
Later they sent me a letter saying I'd have to go through a special medical examination procedure with a psychological evaluation. I never replied. I didn't want to waste their time because I knew they would never approve my application.
I kept it all for myself. I never talked to anyone about it, never sought professional help, again, for the same reasons - I was causing enough problems to people around me, how can I ask them for even more. I just lived my life, wishing to die, totally normal thing to do.
I was so focused on believing I'm worthless I wanted others to believe that too. After all if they saw that, they would leave me and I wouldn't be able to hurt them. And I'd get to fulfill my desire of dying as a homeless person somewhere in a ditch. Win for all parties involved.
This normalization of this obviously self-destructing behavior is what in the end actually "saved me". A friend that I met as things were getting really bad quickly picked up on those not-so-subtle cues of mine and realized that something is wrong.
They had no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes, but since the damage on my mental health was already so big, it looked serious enough for them to bring that up. I firstly dismissed their concerns. "It's not just in my head, I really am worthless.". I really believed that.
It had to be true, otherwise all of that time and energy spent thinking about my so needed death was pointless. And I think that's when the whole thing started to crack apart. I believed I was stupid. So if someone points out that a thing I'm doing is stupid, I had to agree.
So to prove them right and wrong at the same time, I started paying more attention to the way I presented myself and more importantly, how I referred to myself in my own thoughts. And I finally noticed what they were talking about.
Somehow the "i'm stupid/worthless" became the default answer to every problem, and when I started digging deeper I noticed that there were no rational grounds for such conclusion. I wasn't stupid because I was stupid. I wasn't stupid at all. I just didn't know the answer.
And I didn't know the answer because I never seen such problem before. Not knowing the answer didn't make me worthless, and if I made a mistake it didn't mean I had to die. It meant that I learned a lesson. Nobody's perfect, and yet I was aspiring to be.
I realized that the person I was aspiring to be doesn't exist. No-one ever had all the right answers on their first try. They learned them either by failing themselves or hearing a story of how someone else figured that out. Probably by failing too.
I'm far from overcoming this, I'm just making first steps in what I'm sure will be a long journey to reclaim my own brain. But I'm hopeful, the hardest part is acknowledging that there's a problem, and that's what I'm doing now.
And yes, I'm seeking medical help. I might not be stupid, but I'm also not a trained professional, I can't figure this on my own, and trust me, I tried. It only made things worse. And obviously I treated this as another failure, so feedback loop only got stronger.
And even though a part of me still thinks like posting all of that is a terrible idea and a waste of everybody's time, and I'm literally killing the planet by wasting electricity, I can't let that part of my brain control who I am. Today I make a stand.
