Wanting to die -
profound despair and waiting desperately, constantly, for opportunities to release it
I just finished reading a memoir by Arianna Rebolini about wanting to die. She chronicles her own struggles with depression and suicidal inclinations.
But she also takes a look at a few scholars’ perceptions of suicidology, and also looks at Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, immensely talented women writers who both ended their own lives.
In it, Rebolini wrote —
“Suicide is not beholden to our best intentions; it has the ability to undermine, overwhelm, outwit, devastate and destroy.” (p. 200)
She has a point there.
I have promised to myself and to others not to take my own life - I do it in my memoir - only promising I’ll still be here, bumbling along.
And yet, I guarantee it certainly wasn’t in the cards for my brother, especially 9 years ago when his daughter was born - that less than 4 years later he would be taking his own life, as our dad had done.
He had been so angry at dad. So defiant. Then he did the same.
In the book, Rebolini also details how we never really know the extent of another’s pain. We just don’t. We can’t.
She wrote, “Countless people are living with a silent but profound despair and waiting desperately, constantly, for an opportunity to release it.”
It’s depressing, and yet, isn’t it so true?
For many it’s not suicide, but ideation of wanting to die, to escape, to release.
Some choose oblivion or escapism, self-medication or avoidance.
I do appreciate that she noted that we lose many people to suicide due to reasons of financial insecurity and also loneliness—
While I hadn’t quite thought about the latter—since it’s outward, and so much of our individualistic culture tends to hyperfocus on the individual, inward, the pathologizing with depression and suicide—
It is true that people are lonely. We are growing ever lonelier still —as we create faux communities and spend so much of our time staring at our little screens of our phones.
This is also likely why she quotes Donald Antrim, who stated that—
“Suicide is like a social disease, “birthed by “trauma and isolation…violence and neglect…and the loss of home and belonging.”
Suicide can and should be thought of—and is more so in collectivist cultures—as a societal failure. We failed those people.
Because they were lonely, depressed, hurting, in isolation, without the proper resources—
Now, maybe not all of them—that’s their reason for suicide—
But I do think that it is for many.
She also weighed the question - Is a person justified in killing themselves?
Is “suicide a sensibility—a debilitating emotional rawness which leaves a person especially vulnerable to manmade cruelties?”
I consider this—
Because I certainly feel often like—I don’t want to be here. I don’t like the world that we’ve made, the scariness, the war, the late stage capitalism, the culture—I didn’t want to raise children in this land and world.
It does feel cruel and vulnerable—and that’s not even considering the family trauma and mental illness of my own family.
I am no stranger to suicidal ideation. Or perhaps more so, for desire for having never been born - as Rebolini also tosses out. A desire for nothingness, a void. To have avoided all of this pain in this world.
At many points in my life, those sentiments were even stronger—that desperate heaviness, than they are now.
I wouldn’t act on them - but the ideation was there, almost like a comfort—a release, a possible escape—even though I knew I would not take it.
I have long grappled with—why Jeremie and not me?
After all, he has a child he ought to have been able to see grow up, to raise, to be there for.
Why am I still here? And he is not?
I think my gender and birth order has much to do with it —and, of course, that I got sober. And became an alcoholic in recovery, unlike so many of those who came before me, my family members.
But, we can never know the depths of another’s pain. It’s rather overwhelming to imagine, but it is true.
I have been at the lowest point, where I wanted to die, where I wished I could take my own life, where I was in such excruciating pain and loneliness, feeling abandoned by my family, by myself, so mentally unstable -
And yet - I’m still here.
And even though I’ve been there, at that point, I often times forget what it was like.
I would still offer hope or a reassurance that someone won’t feel this bad always and to just hang on for the help that could be there—I wrote that in my book.
But this is also why people who have absolutely no experience with wanting to die, severe depression, have absolutely no idea what these people face—and again, I don’t even count myself in there, because I never had a plan or an attempt.
We never really know what others face. What they feel. What excruciating anguish and mental distress they carry.
We lack empathy, imagination. To hell with walking in another’s shoes—
We don’t know what another’s body and mind feels like.
And I can’t help but always imagine—wouldn’t the world be a much better place if we did? If we could—glimpse that, even for a second?
<3