When the cup over floweth

To me, one of the most helpful parts of attending, H.U.G.S., a suicide survivor support group was learning about this idea of a cup that runs over.

The cup represents a person and the water represents the stressors, hardships, trauma, whatever crap is going on in the person’s life, triggers, perhaps, their mental state, etc.

Survivors or onlookers, anyone who hasn’t lived that individuals’ life, may look at events around the time of suicide and think—

“What happened?”

“THAT is what pushed them over the edge?”

“But that wasn’t even that big of a deal, certainly not enough to kill yourself over…”

Now, the judgments notwithstanding, this mindset assumes that the person started from a healthy place to begin with, that their cup was fairly low, nearly empty.

But many times, of course, they are not.

Maybe they were already at the brink, the breaking point.

In other words, their cup is already almost full. They are already nearly at the point of overflowing.

So, when they are already at that point, their cup is almost full, and only few drops could result in the cup spilling, or running over.

This analogy is so helpful, so insightful…so humbling, for us all to remember and to a variety of situations, not only suicide.

As I said, this metaphor helps keep us all in check, that we don’t know where that person was, how full their cup is.

I also think that the analogy can be helpful when considering others experiences that may be different from our own, even ones that we can’t relate to.

Maybe the cup for some are microaggressions through racist comments.

Maybe the cup overflows after too much gaslighting or passive aggressiveness from a loved one.

Any individualized comment, on their own, seems insignificant, but all of them build and eventually causes the person to break down or to snap.

And if you can’t relate to those, how about this—

I’m sure many of us have had a really, really shitty day where it all goes to hell and where everything that could go wrong DOES.

You know the ones, the days where we frequently think and make statements like:

“When it rains it pours!”

“And the hits just keep on comin’!”

And by evening or night time, our patience has worn thin. And how we react to events by that time are likely entirely different from how we respond to the crap that happened at the beginning of the day, because by that point, we’re worn down and tired.

This overflowing cup metaphor is helpful. It puts the decision to complete suicide, in a better perspective for those of us who are left, shocked and numbed, completely mystified as to how someone could do that.

I recently re-watched the film, “Girl, Interrupted.” And one of the last lines of the film has always stuck with me:

“Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

Indeed. Anyone. Amplified.

Though some of us are more genetically or physiologically predisposed to depression and suicidal thoughts, we all are capable of falling into major depressive episodes, and reaching darker places in our minds and our lives than we would ever have thought possible. (And if you don’t understand that, it’s foreign and unrelatable to you, maybe that could be a point of gratitude.)

But we can all be amplified to points we never thought possible. Our cups can come dangerously close to overflowing.

So, maybe the next logical question is: How do we stop that from happening?

It’s not an easy question with simple solutions, for sure.

But I think that we all must find ways to deal with, to manage, the junk that fills up our cups.

We need to find our own remedies, learn how to pour out some of the contents of the cup before it overtakes us.

Because this analogy of the cup that runneth over, certainly differs the other one. (Psalm 23:5.)