Litigators of Others' Pain
“Who are we to litigate the severity of someone else’s pain?”
~Sloane Crosby
“To be gobsmacked by suicide, to consider it in need of forgiveness, is a marker of solipsism, is it not? It’s to deny what the world is like for others, to decide that darkness exists in service to light, that darkness is the glitch and lightness is the control. Because that’s how it is for you.”
~Sloane Crosby
I continue to be amazed by the ways in which people cast all sorts of judgments on the type of people who would complete suicide. The truth is that we cannot know another’s pain.
We can never know what it is like to live in their body, have their experiences, tried to operate with their neurological function or dysfunction, have their dysregulated nervous system, etc.
We would be so much kinder of a species if we remembered that and were able to keep it at the forefront of our minds.
Too many of us self-appoint ourselves judges for how others ought to tolerate living in extreme [mental] anguish. We perhaps feel more justified in our pain if we have the stamp of some physical condition, seen as having more merit to suffering in our society, still so heavily stigmatized when it comes to mental illness.
I too have gotten angry at my father and brother’s exit from this life and their manner of going. It was part of my process in validating my own feelings and leaving some space to feel them and process them.
However, I never judge the pain they were in to lead them to that point of their own execution.
They are not selfish. They are not lazy. They are not looking for the easy way out. They are not faithless or Godless or God-foresaken.
They were in agonizing pain.
Let us not continue to litigate.