re: #178 Aucun pays pour les vieux ennemis

Dude,

People who kill themselves are often in a place where they imagine that everyone is better off without them around…and I’m saying that from direct experience and from being the person addressed by a suicide trying to explain their choice.

You stop thinking in terms of your absence being painful for others and start thinking of it as necessary because you’re going to make things worse if you stay alive. The fear that you’re a detriment to everyone around you is added weight atop the sense that you’re fundamentally not right because you’re in pain, and that you’re further not-right because you have these intense feelings that you know are crazy but feel inescapable.

Hence the number of suicide notes that both apologize for the act, but also try and claim that things will be better after the initial shock passes.

If you’ve never been to that point, fine. But if you have—and I have, and have barely teetered back from the brink—it’s so damn complicated when another suicide happens, and you see it both ways at once.