At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.
How do you explain that?
I’ve had this since my teens. Some days, weeks, even months are harder than others, but no matter what I always feel like an attention-seeking fraud for not being “serious” about suicide, like others who actually try it
I cope through humour, mostly. I affectionately refer to the train station near me as my “get out of jail free card”, for when things get too much and I eventually succumb. It’ somehow helps to know I’m kidding, but also not kidding. Though I’ve thought and planned enough to know if I did ever really do it, that’s probably not what I’d do.
But yeah. I find all I can do is take each day as it comes.
Please don’t kill yourself by train, for the sake of the driver, and onlookers. I saw someone behead themselves by train when I was 17 and I’m still mad at them for it. How dare they put that shit on everyone in the area
People choose suicide methods that are consistent with previous life trauma. People who choose to be hit by a train in particular are correlated with physical punishments, either from parents and caregivers, or from others. I read of a case study where a man who was captured in war was tortured by being beaten by a group of soldiers, and he chose to end his life by train. So it’s not always childhood trauma that does it.
It makes sense, because our brains categorize memories by emotion (much like how a library sorts books by author). Being suicidal is a highly distressed state, especially directly beforehand. A lot of times people cannot access happier or more emotionally distant memories when in an emotional state. So if you are extremely distressed, you’ll be remembering your worst moments. When planning your own suicide, you’ll be remembering all the worst moments while trying to plan. Those memories leak into the present and affect present day decisions.