It's hard to say. (I guess there are no simple answers with me). I remember at a very young age, maybe three or four, feeling frustrated with life and fantasizing about killing myself by bashing my head against the concrete driveway. Clearly I didn't do it, but the thought was there. I was raised religious, and around that same age I asked my mom why, if heaven is so much better than earth, don't we all just kill ourselves? My poor mom.
All through my teenage years I wasn't really actively suicidal, but I lived as if I wasn't going to make it long term. In fact, I frequently told people I didn't plan to live past 25. Like, when they asked why I wasn't worried about doing so poorly in school (I basically didn't do any homework at all from seventh grade through the end of high school—technically I never graduated) I would tell them. Why bother with grades? It's not that I was actively planning to die. I just wasn't planning to be alive.
In my late teens and early twenties things turned around a little bit. I got into college and started to think more about the future. Then at 26 I had a crisis that shattered my reality. I think that was the first time I seriously considered killing myself. I didn't want to die, but existence was unbearable and death seemed like the only way out.
Things simce then have been kind of a haze. It hasn't all been bad. In fact, I had the best experience of my life when I was 29. It's all been steadily unraveling from that time on, though. Late 2022 or early 2023 was when I first started to seriously consider killing myself. I guess that was the point when I realized I had missed all my chances and there was no going back.
Who knows how long this will go on for.
Sorry, that was a long and meandering answer to a simple question.
I believe that once a person becomes suicidal, their mind will always wander back to that place whenever life gets too hard, just like with addictions, it haunts you for the rest of your life.
I agree. Once you acknowledge suicide as a legitimate option, it's hard to go back to life's bullshit. Like, why keep grinding away at a miserable, meaningless job? Why slog through the endless labyrinth of dehumanizing bureaucracy? Why stick around while the self-assured masses destroy everything you find beautiful and turn the world into a homogenous pool of toxic sludge? And people say yeah, it sucks, but you just have to deal with it. But in your mind you know you
don't just have to deal with it.
They have to deal with it because they don't see any other options, but you do...
