The Suicide Journal

The Suicide Journal

One year ago today, I began to write in what I called my suicide journal. I thought that writing down my thoughts about wishing I was dead would help me make sense of them. I also thought that once I was gone, it would explain to the people left behind why I’d done it. I wasn’t planning out steps. Not at that point. But it had begun to feel like it was the only conclusion to the path that I was on.

Some of the things I wrote that day include the following:

Everything is my fault.

And so the solution is obvious: I must be dead. I must disappear.

When you get desperate enough about your suicidal thoughts, you begin to talk to people about them. Gently, carefully. Not using words that might trigger a call to the police, of course. You downplay things. If they ask you if you have a plan, you say no. And maybe that’s partly true. You are building a plan, so it’s not quite there yet. You have a date. You have certain conditions.

You don’t want to kill yourself, though.

In fact, you’re kind of scared of your own thoughts. These are the thoughts of a crazy person. Some part of your brain knows this.

But also, you can’t imagine having to stay alive, like this, every day for—who knows how many years? It’s too awful. One day is too awful.

Your brain has stopped having the capacity to imagine good things in the future. The future will only be more of exactly the same as today.

No, actually, your brain can imagine a bad future. Worse than this one. It does this kind of imagining very well.

They say that people who are depressed actually have a more accurate picture of what the future will bring. It’s not going to be all the good things you want to believe you have control over. You like to gloss over those. The truth is that the past has had way more bad things that have happened.

Yes, you know that it’s all a matter of mindset. Maybe if you did more thought work, you could learn to see your life as good. Wonderful, in fact. It will make a great novel of adversity.

But no, that requires too much work.

So you try your best friends. You suss out whether or not they are going to freak out if you tell them you want to be dead.

Some of your best friends call you immediately. It is, frankly, embarrassing. They yell at you (a little) and tell you that you’d better not kill yourself. You’d better not because that’s taking the easy way out. Just get your head on straight. Call your therapist. Change your meds if necessary. This is the only life you’ve got, so you’d better start appreciating it. Don’t you know about so-and-so who died at a young age of cancer, or such-and-such who was killed in a car accident? Don’t you realize how many people die of incurable diseases in pain far worse than yours? How dare you complain and talk about suicide?

So you try a few other friends. They might not yell at you. They are very sad. They want you to stay alive because you matter to them. They try to explain to you how much you staying alive would mean to them. They want to have conversations like you had last year. Maybe we could plan a trip to Italy? Or to Thailand? Wherever you want to go. Someplace fun. Exciting. New. That will shake you out of your depression. You can look forward to that.

And you make agreeing noises, but all  you can think is that they can’t possibly understand depression because then they’d understand that the idea of planning something for a future that isn’t going to exist is a lot of work. Wasted work. Because you aren’t going to exist then and it will just make them sadder when they realize they have tickets they can’t get refunded and you aren’t going to be there with them.

The next friend tells you that you’ve been hurt, even abused, and this is the result of trauma. It’s not your fault that you wish you were dead. It’s not your fault that life is too hard. Other people are at fault.

And if you could just feel a little anger, maybe this would work. But anger requires too much energy. And people hurt each other. That’s basically all they do. There aren’t any people who don’t traumatize others unless they die before they’re old enough to do so. You’ve traumatized plenty of people. Your children. Other family members. You’re as shitty as anyone. So really this isn’t a game you’re going to win at if there’s an actual counting of trauma tokens taken versus handed out.

Then you stop calling friends. Because you love your friends. And it’s clear they can’t help you. You’re just making their lives worse. They’re going to worry about you. And if you really go ahead with it, they will feel guilty. Because they didn’t do enough. Better not to tell anyone you actually care about.

That leaves people you don’t know very well. So you start contacting some of them. Not randomly, but you post a little about depression online and a few acquaintances announce they can talk to you about that. You start small. Then someone asks you what you said to your own kid when they were suicidal.

I love you. I believe you. I don’t want you to go.

Those are the only things you could think to say. They made you cry when you said them on the other side. And now, they barely stir up a flicker of old, dead emotion.

The problem is that even if you love other people, even if you remember that things used to be good, even if some part of your brain is capable of understanding that this probably won’t go on forever—it doesn’t seem to matter.

Because right now you still hate being alive. It is excruciating. Breathing makes you angry. It is too much work. Your toes hurt. Not in pain hurting. Not the kind of hurting you could go to a doctor and get fixed. Just the hurting of being alive. That’s it. That’s all there is. The pain of being alive.

Yes, your brain is foggy. It isn’t working right. It’s broken right now.

You know this, and it’s hard to see why it matters.

Yes, you understand that this will probably get better. But then it will come back again. It always does. That has been the pattern of your life. And eventually, you’re going to succumb. It’s just too strong, the urge to be dead. It’s so much effort to fight it, day after day.

Are you getting exercise? Are you eating healthy? Are you taking your meds? Are you seeing your therapist?

Check, check, check, check.

If you think it was that easy to solve this problem, you imagine I wouldn’t have figured it out yet? And people tell you how awesome you are, how you’ve made the world a better place, and how much everyone who knows you will miss you.

This is probably supposed to make you feel better. And if you were at a slightly lower level of depression, maybe it would do that. But since you haven’t explained to anyone how deep the level of depression is, of course they don’t realize that they’re making you feel guilty about wanting to be dead, but they’re not doing anything to change the actual misery you feel that makes the reality continue to be true.

This may be the worst part of suicidal depression of all, the sense that you aren’t you. You are stuck inside a meat sack that isn’t working right, including the software in the squishy wet section of the brain. You hate it here. You know it’s wrong. You wish it would just get fixed. You want to wake up in the morning and—yes, here I am again.

But what if you don’t ever come back to you? What if that is gone forever? What if the you that comes back isn’t familiar or valuable or even good? What if you become a grumpy person? Or a serial killer? How do they know what might come out of the mental hospital they want you to go in? It’s not a nice place. People in prison don’t come out fixed, either.

You reach for that person you used to be, but they seem to be gone. And there is a terrible indignity of shouting to other people that you were a really good, really smart, happy person. They don’t believe you and why should they? You hate that you’ve become this version of yourself. This isn’t the right version. But there’s no way to make a trade. Somehow your past choices have brought you here. Which must mean that your past choices were bad. Which must mean you weren’t as good a person as you thought you were.

I don’t particularly recommend writing in a journal to preserve suicidal thoughts. I think that the act of writing these thoughts down may have made my brain inclined to circle back to them more. But also? I think that these words are beautiful and heart-breakingly real. This is some of my best, most real and most raw writing. So I’m sharing it today in hopes that it might help someone else feel more seen and more human.