This is my first post here, and I'm not really sure what I expect to get from posting this publicly.
I've felt like killing myself since I was a child. I've always been 'high-strung.' I was afraid of everything as a child. I'm still a very fretful person. I've always responded to fear or insecurity with outsized emotion and defensiveness. I have, at one time or another, been on escitalopram, lamotrigine, fluoxetine, trazodone, buspirone, venlafaxine, duloxetine, gabapentin, and hydroxyzine. I cut people out and then regret it. I'm constantly afraid of looking hysterical.
But it has been manageable, if depressing, until now.
I have always been afraid of calamity, from tornadoes to economic collapse to nuclear war. Now, that all feels like small potatoes. The situation over the past few years has become unbearable. I'm a gay atheist academic; my friends are academics, labor organizers, LGBT folks, Jews, non-Christians, black and brown people, or some combination thereof. This week it hit me that fascists, in fact, do hold the courts, the legislature, and the military, and will not relinquish it until their 'enemies' have been decimated. Even if we survive this, there's climate change. Even if we manage climate change, there's AI. Even if AI is survivable, there's a small band of tech barons who plan to kill us off and retreat to their bunkers in Hawaii and New Zealand. As the kids say, we're cooked. The Holocaust is here and we still have to go to work (until we're killed and/or AI takes our jobs).
All of the things I used to care about have largely ceased to give me joy: movies, literature, theatre, long walks, my students, my colleagues, my family, my friends, my cats. Nobody dances or fucks anymore in this theocratic post-COVID hellscape. I recovered from alcoholism nine years ago, so I know that drinking will just make it worse. Every day is a punch in the gut now with little relief. There's a scene in the apocalyptic Lars von Trier movie Melancholia (2012) wherein Kirsten Dunst cannot finish dinner because food now "tastes like ashes." Everything tastes like ashes.
When I read about SN, it felt too good to be true. I felt a sense of absolute euphoria and started crying actual tears of joy. And then... It feels like I found this forum JUST at the moment that it became essentially unobtainable in the US.
I want so badly to die.
I care about hurting my mother, who has terminal cancer, and my brother. I have a decent number of friends and acquaintances who would grieve me. And I agonize over leaving my cats.
But the biggest thing is that it seems so hard to ctb.
I'm terrified of hanging, though that seems like it's the way I'm going to have to go. There's no water out here and drowning just seems like a much worse version of hanging, anyway. There are some tall apartment buildings around here and I may be able to get up top. But I also don't want people to be traumatized by my death. Ditto stepping in front of the Amtrak. I don't want to hurt others.
My goal would be to die in my bed or bathroom and leave a note on the door notifying my neighbors that there's a dead body and to call the police. It's their job to deal with this kind of thing, not some poor train driver or passerby on the street. I've seen the gore footage from 9/11 and, although my fall would be at most 1/5th as high as the highest of those falls, I have an idea of what people would see in the aftermath.
I'm on a GLP-1, so if I ingest anything, I need to stop taking injecting a month in advance so that my metabolism won't prolong things. That's a built-in safety valve there.
I've been hospitalized twice for suicidal ideation, once three years ago, and so I am unable legally to purchase a firearm.
So I guess it's hanging. But I really, really don't want to go that way.
I don't currently have rope. I'm not ready yet to obtain it. And then when I do, I'll have to actually figure out how to do it and where.
So there are still several steps before I can even approach c-ing tb. Right now, I'm just sitting with the despair.
I've felt like killing myself since I was a child. I've always been 'high-strung.' I was afraid of everything as a child. I'm still a very fretful person. I've always responded to fear or insecurity with outsized emotion and defensiveness. I have, at one time or another, been on escitalopram, lamotrigine, fluoxetine, trazodone, buspirone, venlafaxine, duloxetine, gabapentin, and hydroxyzine. I cut people out and then regret it. I'm constantly afraid of looking hysterical.
But it has been manageable, if depressing, until now.
I have always been afraid of calamity, from tornadoes to economic collapse to nuclear war. Now, that all feels like small potatoes. The situation over the past few years has become unbearable. I'm a gay atheist academic; my friends are academics, labor organizers, LGBT folks, Jews, non-Christians, black and brown people, or some combination thereof. This week it hit me that fascists, in fact, do hold the courts, the legislature, and the military, and will not relinquish it until their 'enemies' have been decimated. Even if we survive this, there's climate change. Even if we manage climate change, there's AI. Even if AI is survivable, there's a small band of tech barons who plan to kill us off and retreat to their bunkers in Hawaii and New Zealand. As the kids say, we're cooked. The Holocaust is here and we still have to go to work (until we're killed and/or AI takes our jobs).
All of the things I used to care about have largely ceased to give me joy: movies, literature, theatre, long walks, my students, my colleagues, my family, my friends, my cats. Nobody dances or fucks anymore in this theocratic post-COVID hellscape. I recovered from alcoholism nine years ago, so I know that drinking will just make it worse. Every day is a punch in the gut now with little relief. There's a scene in the apocalyptic Lars von Trier movie Melancholia (2012) wherein Kirsten Dunst cannot finish dinner because food now "tastes like ashes." Everything tastes like ashes.
When I read about SN, it felt too good to be true. I felt a sense of absolute euphoria and started crying actual tears of joy. And then... It feels like I found this forum JUST at the moment that it became essentially unobtainable in the US.
I want so badly to die.
I care about hurting my mother, who has terminal cancer, and my brother. I have a decent number of friends and acquaintances who would grieve me. And I agonize over leaving my cats.
But the biggest thing is that it seems so hard to ctb.
I'm terrified of hanging, though that seems like it's the way I'm going to have to go. There's no water out here and drowning just seems like a much worse version of hanging, anyway. There are some tall apartment buildings around here and I may be able to get up top. But I also don't want people to be traumatized by my death. Ditto stepping in front of the Amtrak. I don't want to hurt others.
My goal would be to die in my bed or bathroom and leave a note on the door notifying my neighbors that there's a dead body and to call the police. It's their job to deal with this kind of thing, not some poor train driver or passerby on the street. I've seen the gore footage from 9/11 and, although my fall would be at most 1/5th as high as the highest of those falls, I have an idea of what people would see in the aftermath.
I'm on a GLP-1, so if I ingest anything, I need to stop taking injecting a month in advance so that my metabolism won't prolong things. That's a built-in safety valve there.
I've been hospitalized twice for suicidal ideation, once three years ago, and so I am unable legally to purchase a firearm.
So I guess it's hanging. But I really, really don't want to go that way.
I don't currently have rope. I'm not ready yet to obtain it. And then when I do, I'll have to actually figure out how to do it and where.
So there are still several steps before I can even approach c-ing tb. Right now, I'm just sitting with the despair.
