I've been at the precipice of suicide. I truly wanted to die and I went the whole nine yards in my planning to make sure it'd happen. I won't go into gratuitous detail about my plans and how they went awry. Suffice to say that due to a fluke chance I'm still here to type this message. I never tried again after my one, secret failure. If I had tried again, I would have most certainly succeeded.
Most people probably do not want to die. They might say they do, they might make half-assed attempts--but if you really want to die, you do it, you don't talk about it. If you talk about it, then it means you're not sure, and that means you don't want to die.
Speaking personally--I knew it was a last resort option and probably not a great one. In my head it was just a logical choice. A solution to a problem. This is even how I described the choice in my last letters.
But just because I wanted out this way, it's wasn't something I wished on anyone else. It was a hard decision for me and I spent a long time thinking about it. It warred with every natural instinct.
I would not have told someone else suicide is
not the answer, because obviously I didn't think that was true. But I would have tried my best to dissuade them form that choice. Just like I'd tell you not to smoke cigarettes, or to always drive with your seatbelt on. It is just what you do--you give people you love the best advice and support you can. What is right for me is not right for you. Just because suicide was my choice, doesn't mean it's a good choice for you. Just because I happen to have made that choice myself, doesn't magically make me incapable of advising against it for you. It didn't suddenly make me a suicide advocate.
If a friend cares about your life, they would care enough not to take theirs because whats what point of saving your life if they go and kill themselves anyway thus hurting you.
Again, only speaking personally here, but what you ('you' as in my friends, not you 'Nack' specifically) felt was secondary to how I felt. Replace the emotional torture with physical torture. Pretend I'm a character in 24 and Jack Bauer is going to work on me. Do you still expect me to endure--what do I owe you that I would endure such pain for you?
Suicide is a selfish choice--but so is everything we all do all the time. Humans are selfish creatures when you get down to it; we have to do what's best for us. We obviously have obligations to other people and some ties are much stronger than others. A mother committing suicide is decidedly more selfish than a vagabond doing the same. Those ties make all the difference. We constantly balance our innate selfishness, that instinct to better our own selves, against the stronger ties of love and friendship.
So I think there is a threshold. For me, the threshold was low. I had little obligations. I wasn't a father, I wasn't taking care of a sick parent, I didn't even have a loving partner who might be crushed at my sudden disappearance. My only purpose was basically to be alive for the comfort of others. That is to say, the only barrier that existed was the desire not to hurt or let down my friends and family. In the end, I concluded this was not a good enough reason. It was like an equation: My own emotional torture on one side, and the pain my death might cause on the other. (You can begin to see the twisted logic that ultimately led my depressed mind to the choice of suicide!).
Anyway, I'm not saying this is how everyone thinks (it probably isn't!), but this was what what I was thinking about.
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