Why I don't like talking about suicide

If you want to see people get all awkward quickly, few topics work as well as that of suicide. For those who have not had to deal with it in any way, it's a topic which they'll either avoid at all cost, or they'll readily insist that 'talking about it' or medication are somehow solutions.

For those who have lost someone because that person committed suicide, they can feel anger at that person, some level of understanding or just plain sadness. Depending on the circumstances, one may feel anger at those who have driven the person to take their own life. Yet it's not something anyone wants to dwell on.

Unless one is among those who attempted to end their own existence, but didn't succeed. To say that it is an experience which changes a person is an understatement. You do not just embrace the thought of your own existence ending right then and there, and then wake up again in the hospital like you just had a bit of a fainting spell or something.


I can still remember much of the years that led up to my suicide attempt. Looking back now, I can also see the threads of previous trauma interwoven in those fresh traumas. My childhood abuse, the years of getting bullied and physically assaulted during primary and high school. The loss of my childhood home and safe environment after my parents divorced. The mounting uncertainty about myself. About my own body.

Then finding out about being intersex. Getting raped. Being rejected by doctors and psychologists as they lie about me being transsexual. Struggling to get my body acknowledged. Losing another home. Trying to move countries and failing. Finding myself falling back into an endless cycle of psychological torture by medical professionals and kin. Ending up in an abusive relationship and suddenly facing homelessness.

No hope. No expectation of improvement. No control over my life. No help.


Of course I tried the 'talking' thing during the last months before my suicide attempt. I talked to my GP, to various mental health professionals, etc. I got offered anti-depressants. Therapy sessions.

Therapy sessions and drugs don't fix homelessness. They don't fix an existence that is devoid of hope and colour. They don't give answers. The SSRI anti-depressants I tried just made me feel even more depressed and filled with despair. And talk about what exactly? How there's no point to my existence because I am not even allowed to exist courtesy of the medical system? How the healthcare system just wants me to go away, intersex organisations don't give a damn, the media just lap up the controversy and to everybody else I might as well not exist, or if they do care, they're as helpless as I am to fix anything?


...


At the end of all that anger, all the frustration, all of the helplessness and feelings of just being a toy to others to with as they please, at the end of all that there is just this complete sense of calm and that of absolute control which comes with the knowledge that no one can stop one from ending all of the pain and suffering. To someone who has never been there, it's impossible to describe the feeling of complete bliss and relaxation when one has made that final decision, prepared all that needs to be prepared and just has to do it.

It's the end of madness and insanity, and the return of sanity and one's humanity.


...


How many will truly grasp the words that I have just written down? What it feels like it? How empty it makes one feel after one wakes up in the hospital after one's preparations just weren't good enough? That sometimes ending one's own existence is the only choice that society has left open?

Of course I do not wish to insinuate that suicide is somehow a positive thing. Nobody should ever find themselves in such a situation. Yet at the same time it is, tragically, sometimes the best way forward. Sometimes it's the only way one can preserve one's dignity. And that just shows how horrific things have to get before one reaches that point of no return. I can only hope and pray that I'll never find myself in that moment of bliss again.

And yet, it's something that's so incredibly hard to talk about. You can talk about people getting killed, about murder and people being tortured to death. But do not talk about suicide. Killing yourself condemns your immortal soul to burn in Hell forever, after all.

I do not wish to talk about suicide, because of all the unpleasant responses it gets. Of people who cut off contact after you have tried to take your own life. Because it offended them. Of the countless 'why didn't you just...' responses. Talking about suicide just reveals why suicides happen.


Yet, much like how one can somehow find oneself at the end of one's existence in that one last moment of defiance, so too is it sometimes inevitable that one feels that one has to address a topic that is so readily ignored, even if it is this very act which perpetuates the tragedy.


Maya