Making the decision to kill yourself, is a reaction to overwhelming pain, where a person has no idea how to overcome the pain. People who decide to kill themselves, perceive suicide as a relief from pain, and they get tunnel vision where they are unable to use their creativity or skills for problem solving.
Please understand that, in what I’m about to say, I don’t mean to disrespect suicide hotlines and mental health care and all those very valuable things. I’ve been down that path before, and I’m sure that without that help, I would already be dead. So all that stuff is incredibly valuable and important.
All I want to say is, once you make the decision to kill yourself for real… If you manage to survive that somehow, either through friends or dumb luck, you gain a sort of freedom from your previous cares.
So much of everyday life, for most people, is spent on immediate personal concerns. Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to have enough to eat? Will I be taken care of, when I am helpless? How can I keep my job? How can I keep from getting bullied or killed?
Once you actually decide to kill yourself, issues of self-preservation seem small somehow. The implicit threats in life — that the bad man will come and kill you, that you will be fired, that you won’t be liked or loved anymore — seem petty and irrelevant.
In a really important way, deciding to kill yourself by your own hand, makes you bulletproof. What’s the worst that you can do to me? Kill me? Fire me? Beat me up? LOL, I was going to die anyway; you’ll just save me the inconvenience of doing it myself.
More critically: when you finally make this decision, if you survive making this decision, then you truly gain superpowers to do good. Or, technically, evil, if that is your sort of thing. But, once you realize you can do good without reference to society’s implicit judgement or limitations, you start truly thinking about how to use your remaining time to improve the lives of others.
Particularly, you start realizing that you can tell the Truth. That includes telling the Truth to power; it also includes telling the truth to bullies, and evil people, and narcissistic people. The Truth does as much damage to evil people as does hitting them with your fists — even more so, in some cases.
I don’t intend to paint myself as a good or great man. The nonexistent God knows that I have made many terrible mistakes in my life. But, for the first time in my life, I feel free to be honest about myself and my identity in the world; I feel free to say literally anything I believe, to anyone in the entire universe; and I feel free to do good, without worrying about trivial consequences about whether I am “popular” or “normal” or “going along with everyone else”. I don’t have to fit in anymore.
I don’t just have to make good trouble, in the words of John Lewis; I can be the good trouble. I have become the most terrifying thing in the world. I am accountable to no one. I can just live my life, with all my experience and all my skills, in what I personally consider to be the most moral way possible.
I don’t have to wear any more masks. I can try to be good, finally, without fear.
And either the narcissists, or abandonment, or my own arrogance, or evil, or my own health, will get to me someday, and take me out.
But not today, dammit!
