I used to not understand why people would want to end their lives

[LastDayOnEarth]

I used to think that life was worth living no matter what, but nope, once reality hits you that's when you understand

 

[Ch4in3dcr0w]

I was way too young to understand what suicide even is and when i finally understood what it meant my mind was already made up on how much a life is worth The only thing that changed after understanding suicide is that i can end my own life and i dont need to wait for it to end on its own.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I had the opposite experience really. More or less, as soon as I found out about suicide- probably depicted in a TV series or film, I thought it was an understandable thing to do. Despite being taught it was religiously wrong.

Do you wish you could go back to the time it felt abhorrent? Were you genuinely happier then or, just more willing to comply with the 'rules'? I agree though. Once we'ce gone through the mental gymnastics of accepting suicide as a solution, I think it's hard to go back on that.

 

[LastDayOnEarth]

I had the opposite experience really. More or less, as soon as I found out about suicide- probably depicted in a TV series or film, I thought it was an understandable thing to do. Despite being taught it was religiously wrong.

Do you wish you could go back to the time it felt abhorrent? Were you genuinely happier then or, just more willing to comply with the 'rules'? I agree though. Once we'ce gone through the mental gymnastics of accepting suicide as a solution, I think it's hard to go back on that.

Wish I could go back to when it felt like something I'd never do, but it's true, once you accept it as a legitimate path it's hard to go back

 

[Justme.]

Wish I could go back to when it felt like something I'd never do, but it's true, once you accept it as a legitimate path it's hard to go back

In a hundred years, you and everyone you have ever met will be dead. Death is the only thing inevitable in life, whether you want to die or not.

 

[HopeToStay]

Wish I could go back to when it felt like something I'd never do, but it's true, once you accept it as a legitimate path it's hard to go back

Yeah once you've gone through a period of your life considering it, even if you get through that it can lower your threshold for doing it in the future.

 

[Dejected 55]

I always understood why people killed themselves theoretically. I understood that you could maybe feel so bad or have so many bad things happen to you that you saw no reason to live and felt like death was your only way out. That always felt sad to me, but made a kind of sense. Now, if you ask me about specific people who I knew that killed themselves... In reverse chronological order... I had a friend kill himself many years ago and I didn't know at the time how depressed he was because we had not talked in many years before that. But I knew he was having troubles in life and was drinking a lot and when I found out he killed himself it was sad, but I understood how he must have felt. When I was a teenager, a co-worker of my father's killed himself. He had been at a company partner with his fiancee and drinking too much and caused a car accident afterwards late that night and his fiancee died in that accident. The man was lost after that and I think it was only a week or two later when he killed himself. I understood instinctively how that kind of loss and the associated guilt could make someone do that. Lastly, when I was little, a young man who was a neighbor and had a young wife, he killed himself late one night. He always seemed happy as did his wife. Apparently he was into cocaine and killed himself one night while high. I was too young to really understand that one and never knew what demons he must have been fighting to make him that sad.

Growing up, for me, I had a difficult life. We weren't poor, though we did struggle sometimes month to month. But my struggles were socially with kids at school. Being a young adult it got better in the sense of not being picked on and punched randomly, but I was still just as alone. After that, seeing people around me having romantic partners, families, I never felt I belonged in the room. I started thinking, why don't I want to kill myself? I feel horrible all the time and see no way my life will ever be good... so why didn't I want to kill myself like people I saw who did? Did they feel worse somehow than I did all the time?

So I toyed with ideas on and off for years... but never anything serious... until last year. Last year broke me... and I now understand that for me, I could tolerate a lot of pain... and I did... most of my life. I was able to take a lot of abuse and pain and setbacks and fight through them because a part of me hoped for more and believed somehow I had a chance. But now I don't. I'm broken. There is no going back. I know it only gets worse for me if I go on... and that is my breaking point. That's why I now get it. I couldn't understand why I was different, but now I do. Turns out I wasn't different, I just had a different breaking point than those others I knew. I needed to experience enough pain to go past that point.

 

[starlightstarbright]

I'm sorry that changed and you had to come to understand why people kill themselves. Sometimes, I really envy those people who do see suicide as an overreaction to the struggles of life; it tells me that they've never been in the kind of pain where you feel yourself being driven insane because you can't take another second of it. Those people have things in their life worth living for. Gosh, I envy them (although they could certainly be less dismissive and have some more empathy for people like us). I'm sorry that things changed and you're in this pain now.

Yeah once you've gone through a period of your life considering it, even if you get through that it can lower your threshold for doing it in the future.

Exactly. I think it's something about the taboo of even thinking about it, disappearing after the first time. And if you ever get to a point of thinking about plans, then those plans stick with you in the back of your head forever, even if you decide to recover. And then if life kicks you down again and you go back to thinking about CTB, you're already much further along than the last time. Even if you choose recovery, you never quite get back to where you were before.