sonneillonv:

Suicide isn’t “giving up” or “giving in.” Suicide is a terrible decision made by someone whose pain is so great that they can no longer hold it, and feel they have no other option in life but to end it. It’s a decision you can’t t…

When people describe a suicide as a ‘waste’ IDK it pushes buttons inside me.  When I was younger, and when I was so depressed I was considering suicide, my primary reason was feeling like I was already a waste – a waste on peoples’ time, a waste on their resources, a waste of their affection.  I’d been convinced that I was completely selfish, that I took and took without giving back, and that I only caused misery to others by being alive because I was so thoughtless.  I was convinced that, after a brief mourning period, their lives would be better if I wasn’t around to ruin them anymore.

Now I’m an adult and I understand that when a thirteen-year-old feels that way, it’s because the adults in their life have failed them.  Kids, as we say in the SPN fandom, are supposed to eat your food and break your heart.  A teenager being self-absorbed is developmentally normal, especially when that teenager is being relentlessly bullied, is friendless, is struggling with school, and otherwise has plenty of misery going on in their own lives that prevents them from being terribly interested in other peoples’.  I stopped being suicidal when someone told me it was okay to care about myself first.  I had literally never heard that before.  I thought I had to justify my own existence.  I thought if I wasn’t satisfying other people, if I wasn’t making other people happy, then I didn’t deserve to live.

When people talk about ‘waste’, what are we wasting?  Are we wasting their time by forcing them to grieve?  Are we wasting their resources by demanding their attention?  ”You’re wasting the rest of your lives”.  Okay, fine, but they’re OUR lives.  They aren’t yours.  You aren’t entitled to them.  You don’t get to obligate us to continue in misery because our deaths would affect YOU.  People who say suicide is selfish, or a pointless waste, make me furious because they want us to just continue living on in abject misery, the kind of misery that makes us literally want to die… why?  Because they’re entitled to us?  Because we owe it to them?  Because their discomfort is worth more than our agony?

I don’t support suicide.  I don’t want anyone to commit suicide.  But I understand why.  And I understand that half the time, the people who claim people who kill themselves are wasting their lives, or being selfish, don’t actually have any interest in fixing the real problems, because that’s too much work; it costs too much; it requires too much time and too much care.  If you actually cared about helping people who are in agony, you wouldn’t call them selfish for wanting to escape it, and you wouldn’t call that escape a ‘waste’.  You’d call it a tragedy, because whatever could have been done to make life bearable HERE was not done.  A solution was not found.  The pain was not eased.  And only one escape was left.

I’m still depressed, but I’m better now.  I haven’t been in a suicidal state for more than ten years.  I was able to change my circumstances enough that the people who had instilled those toxic beliefs in me no longer had control over me, and I had a daemon at my side reminding me that it is okay, that it is healthy, to care about my own self-interest.  Now my husband is in the hospital because, like Robin, he is bipolar.  He’s been depressed, without a manic swing, for three months, and it’s only getting worse.  He’s hurting himself, and he’s looking for a way out.  But he has a way out that isn’t killing himself – there is a good hospital close to us where he knows the doctors and feels comfortable, where they will listen to him and adjust his medication.  He has a wife and a son who understand his illness, who support him and NEVER blame him, and who will gladly take on the challenge of handling his affairs in his absence because we are his team, and we are on his side.

Despite all this, I honestly believe I’ll lose him one day.  It gets worse, it doesn’t get better.  The progression of his condition has been so severe over the course of six years that I’m scared to contemplate where we’ll be in ten.  And I’m resigned to that.  I accept it.  I love him for the time he’s here, and I want to ease as much of his pain as it’s in my power to do.  I’m furious that I’m so impotent and I can’t do more because when you love someone you don’t want them to suffer.

Robin Williams was in pain.  Now he isn’t anymore.  I’m grieved for the suffering he endured, and for his family and friends who are suffering now.  Losing a battle like this is terrible and tragic and heartbreaking.  We all wish we could have done better by him.  And if you want others to avoid following his example, we need to do better by them.  We have to ease the pain HERE.  We have to make good care accessible to them HERE.  We have to fight stigma and support members of our community HERE.  It may not always end up being enough, because most of the time it gets worse, not better.  But we should do it because people are suffering, and they need help, and they don’t have to earn the right to their own existence.  They don’t owe us their suffering.  We owe them relief.

Don’t Call Robin Williams’ Death a Waste