What if I don't think suicide is selfish?

What I think is selfish,

Is to expect someone to stay on a planet,

They obviously do not want to live on,

Just for you.

What I think is selfish,

Is to want somebody to continue on through a life they don't want anymore,

Just for you.

What I think is selfish,

Is to not have compassion for others' feelings.

No, you don't have to walk on eggshells,

But some people are born as minefields

(I know I am)

And most the time, it's not their fault when they get set off.

Life is a war,

Someone wins, someone loses,

And we're all just weapons in the game.

You’re drunk.

Your words are cyclical. You keep tripping over your tongue and yourself. I can hear the slurs and the grunting. Your teeth are chattering and you keep telling me how cold you are.

“You shouldn’t be outside, bud. It’s freezing out there.”

I want to be relieved you picked up the phone. I tell myself I should be, that any sister would be. I keep distracting you with words, meaningless babble you won’t remember past the booze.

“I…I don’t even kn-know what to say t-to you. I haven’t kn-known what to say to you for a l-long time.”

More words. I don’t remember what they are the moment they leave my lips. I’m hurling them through the receiver, using hints and clues to tell the cops where you are. Downtown, somewhere. You’re not wearing gloves. You could get frostbite in this weather.

“I n-need to hang up and c-call my f-friends.”

What friends, I want to ask. The ones that feed your addiction? The ones that got you the weed you smoked? All those chemicals volleying around in your brain are about to pitch you over a bridge, boy. Or maybe they’ve just loosened your long-bitten tongue to honesty.

“Y-you’ve always been the responsible one. Y-you were right. I sh-should just d-drown.”

And that’s it, isn’t it? I can’t say I’m surprised, really. You’re standing on the precipice and now you’re cutting the belay line. You want to make me bleed before you go. Drive the dagger in, up, and out. Eviscerate me and leave me cut wide with my guts on the ground.

After all these years of pushing me away, you’ve come to blame me for the distance. All the lying to get what you want, all the scheming and charming your way out of consequences.

There’s no one to scheme now. No more people to lie to.

Standing in that place, you want to leave me with the guilt so you can go free. You’ll let me be your scapegoat. Your ghost will grin as your family is ripped apart with finger-pointing.

“I-I’ve gotta go n-now.”

I will not bear your cross for you.

I will not.

“Stay on the line, bud. Don’t hang up. I love you.”

Fuck you for that.

W e  can be selfish together, no rue.

You want to die, and I want'cha to.

This isn't a lie, "do what you wanna do."

We'll sing a suicide serenade, just for y o u.

Too motivated

to fuck the world

and end their life,

determined

to even the score

with selfish strife,

infatuated

with the blame game

by way of knife,

and that's

why they wasted away

without a fife.

Wife,

husband,

son and daughter,

remnants

of

self-sacrificing

slaughter,

a bullet

to the head

never made 'em hotter,

yet washing blood

takes more than w a t e r.

Squatter damned

for being unhomely,

living the days

soul-suckingly lonely,

so they poured gasoline around

slowly,

to be cleansed

by the fire

like the holy.

W e can be selfish together, no rue.

You want to die, and I want'cha to.

This isn't a lie, "do what you wanna do."

We'll sing a suicide serenade, just for y o u.

Brewed a batch

that amounts to overdose,

the vomit

on the floor

their adios,

body positioned

a bit bellicose,

good thing

they weren't aiming

for comatose.

Cellulose

built by

binges at the fridge,

made 'em feel

as insignificant

as a midge,

and sent them crying

along the ridge,

until they hurled their body

off a b r i d g e.

Smidges of truth

in the lies over tea,

making

the depression

a bit weighty,

compressing

the care

to even sight-see,

so they hanged themselves

from an oak tree.

W e  can be selfish together, no rue.

you want to die, and I want'cha to.

This isn't a lie, "do what you wanna do."

We'll sing a suicide serenade, just for y o u.

|| another_proser ||

{ Comments, feedback, concerns, opinions all welcome.

* midge = small fly, smaller than a mosquito.}

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.”

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. “Beyond Good and Evil.”

Suicide, by many, is named the ultimate act of selfishness. But what about the other side of the coin?

Imagine living in a world of constant pain. Imagine living, for years, inside a tiny little box with no light. Imagine that, every morning, you awake inside this darkness, your body throbbing, your bones painful, your muscles weak. Imagine then the feeling that you cannot breathe, that you are drowning inside of the darkness.

Then, I want you to imagine a sudden, booming voice bellowing all around you, “Disgusting. Ugly. Stupid. Fat. Weird. Worthless, worthless, worthless. You will never be loved.″ The voice pauses. Sometimes for moments. Sometimes for days. Then it begins again, “You hurt them, you hurt them. All you do is hurt the ones you love.”

Imagine living every day inside this painfull little box of black. Imagine hating yourself, hating the people around you. Longing for love, yet sabotaging every chance at it that you receive. So encased in pain that you can hardly move, or breath, or think.

Then imagine that the pain has grown so large, that you overcome our most fundamental, animal instinct -- to live.

It is easy to color someone dealing with pain and depression as selfish. It is easy to label them as someone who doesn’t care for anyone but themselves, but this is often the very opposite of those dealing with depression.

To kill ourselves is against every single instint in our basic nature. When everything is boiled down, we are nothing more than animals, with the instincts to breed and survive whatever the costs. Being able to bring yourself, by your own hand, to end your life is the greatest demonstation of the absolute pain and hoplessness that can possibly be imagined. In that way, it can be viewed as an act of courage -- a triumph over our animal nature.

I have often asked, is it not more selfish to demand that someone in this amount of pain stay on? Is it not more selfish to ask this person, who is drowning in a wash of pain and misery every single day, to stay on to simply ease the emotions of another?

Do you ask that person to stay because you see hope for them? Or do you want that person to stay to ease your own guilt, your own sorrow? Is it not just as selfish to demand someone suffer on, silently in pain, so that you can live a life of greater mental ease and emotional happiness?

We should not paint those who take their lives as selfish. To label them selfish passes judgement on a personal pain that we cannot hope to imagine -- as none of us can ever truly hope to know the extent of the pain, guilt and suffering each person might endure. To paint a victim of suicide as selfish is to cheapen and undercut the darkness they were unable to overcome.

Help them. Love them. But do not judge them or their actions, because we can never truly know what they suffer.

(First, thank you for the wording of this challenge. I have always thought of suicide as the ultimate act of selfishness. I wouldn’t have written about it, except you challenged me. <3)

There’s no poetry in suicide, just the empty holes it leaves behind. I know, because I’ve thought about it myself, taking my own life, but I’ve also survived the suicide of family and friends. It’s in my history, it’s all around me, and I’m left doing a lot of feeling and deep thinking. I’m a survivor; of rape, emotional abuse, and psychological torture. I know what it’s like to be done, to feel like you can’t take ”life″ anymore.

 It’s a surprisingly heavy feeling, and the alluring thing about suicide, is how physically uplifting it seems to consider. To be gone. Nothing. Nothing is a very light feeling, if you’re not already too numb to feel anything at all.

But I also know about science, the body’s chemistry, and the real and very physical things happening inside me when I feel that way.  My brain is literally flooding my system with specific little peptides (emotion-chemicals) that the rest of my body is parking into receptors I can feel. Every time those cells regenerate, they regenerate with the most-used receptors. The more I allow myself to sink into despair, the more I’m flooding my system with sad-chemicals, the more by body produces cells to receive them, and soon, I bodily crave the feeling without realizing it because the majority of my receptors are for receiving those chemicals. 

I feel like I found a home in that sadness. I forget what it’s like to live without it. 

That’s not imaginary, it’s a real, physical reaction to having more sad-chemical receptors.

I know that is why the anti-depressant pharmaceutical companies are making so much money. Why I wont go through a laundry list of side-effects to feel better. It’s why those dorky phrases about ”change your mind, change your body″ or ”mind over matter,” ”where there’s a will there’s a way,” ”if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter“, or ”whether you believe you can do a thing, or believe you can’t, you’re right″ etc.,  are actually true. 

So, in those moments when I’m so low I’ve forgotten how to feel anything but despair and wanting to end it, how can I justify taking my life? End of cycle.

 I literally have two options in that moment:

1) change my mind to find a way to better my “life” so I enjoy it rather than want to escape it, or 

2) I take my life and stop my mind all together. 

Option 1 will ultimately involve finding what I love, because that’s the only way to be happy. My only chance to repair my body to have more happy-chemical receptors, and have less chance of feeling despair in the first place. I may not succeed, but I will be alive to see the lives I impact with the effort, and buy myself more time to learn my own potential. Life goes on with or without us, but if I choose option 1, I’m apart of it, and it could be good...

Option 2 will ultimately involve losing everything I love, have loved, or would love, and depending on my religious/after-death beliefs, either return to repeat the cycle, exist oblivious to the world I left behind, cease to exist,  or be left to watch helplessly, the very same world  I couldn’t take to live in anymore. All of which amounts to... me deciding to take that option over seeing what I could do here, on Earth, with the folk who are sharing this life with me. 

Selfish, both of them, but in Option 1 I have the potential to help others, inspire others, and really make a difference in my little string of existence within this huge web of a seriously messed-up society. In Option 2, I leave everyone behind. I don’t consult them, the ones that matter, they don’t matter to me, because not being matter anymore is the only thing that matters. It’s the kind of selfishness that surmounts any other selfishness because it’s finite, definite, ultimate, complete, the end... for me. The dead.

In option 2, I’m not around to help with the physical clean-up of my remains, nor the condition I’ve left them in; and let me tell you, you’re never as neat as you think you are- death is messy. Period. I’m not around to sort out my affairs, and if I was thoughtful enough to leave them in order, I’m not around to see it done right. I’m not around to share the good memories, or help those left behind in the sad ones. Even if I left a note to explain any of my parting thoughts, no one really knows what I felt, or why I would decide death over possibilities. I wont be around when they wonder what I could have been, or when there is no one to comfort the one I never knew I impacted- who now feels like their spark is gone and there is nothing left to live for.

That thing I could have discovered I loved, I could have been happy in perusing with a passion, it goes undone and those I could I have inspired must find other inspirations. 

It’s like hacking the limb off the tree of life:

Nope. Sorry. You cannot travel this limb anymore, and it will grow no more branches, the leaves will never turn again, nor fall, nor grow that vibrant green you only get in spring- it’ll never bloom again, nor share it’s pollen and beauty with the world, nor offer any more seeds of anything.

Selfish. 

What sense does it make for any of us to deny the rest of the world, or ourselves, those positive possibilities because we fear or dread, or can’t take the bad ones anymore? 

Do branches get broken? 

Yes. But when the tree lives, the branch grows again in a new way.

Do branches have to fight to survive?

Hell yes, every branch must navigate the others to find it’s own ray of light!

Is it difficult?

You bet, every branch is living in the same sea of life that helps it survive, threatens it’s well-being or life, or is indifferent all together but using the same resources. 

Is the branch a victim of circumstance?

No branch decides where it grows from the tree, or how high it gets to the sky; but a victim waits for rescue and circumstance happens without them, while a survivor finds a way through circumstance because the other option takes them out of the equation.

My point is, when we live, possibilities are endless and we have a chance to guide them. When we commit suicide, we end that, and those left behind have to keep going in our wake, without our positive touch, or the growth of their own from helping us through our negative. Ultimately, those who commit suicide feel alone, like there is no other option, and the reality always is that there are, they just might not have realized or found them yet. The information is out there, the people are out there, the only thing needed to put them together is us. Suicide isn’t just selfish, it’s a literal no-option for everyone.

-M.E.

201601160039

(o.o sorry for over 1200 words, been building up I guess.)

You selfish bastard.

I went to your funeral

I met your grieving family

I fed them, I comforted them,

I humored them, I lied to them,

I followed them to the cemetary,

and I stood by as they buried you.

You don't even care, do you?

You only left suffering...

and yet, they still love you.

they still miss you.

You selfish bastard.

If it was your life, it was

Your life to give, not to take.

The white casket shook Rob's faith. It cemented the death of his niece. He wished that he knew she was suffering. He had prayed for her, but if she'd only told someone, then he could have acted as well. The pastor always told his congregation that prayers should be a request for help, not a request for God to do it for you.

Brenda was always so quiet. During family get-togethers, she crept out of the room and played with the cats. She kept away from the other knots of children at her high school when he picked her up on the way to get Suzan. Rob never questioned it - she always gave monosyllabic answers about how school was. He should have seen it. He shouldn't have dismissed her teen angst as if it were nothing to worry about. Guilt twisted his gut, and he hoped he wouldn't vomit during the ceremony.

Had Facebook and smartphones existed when they were kids, the smiling girl in the selfie flashing by on his laptop screen could have been his sister. That smile looked hollow now, and he noticed that Brenda was alone in all of her photos. He'd talked people out of suicide before. It was part of his job. Why hadn't he seen the signs? Rob scrolled past the images, triple-checking that the PowerPoint was still in order, praying that his next service would be a stranger's.

"What kind of loving god would let this happen?" the voice of doubt whispered.

Suzan wondered why she bothered with makeup today. At least she thought to skip the mascara. Through her tears, she watched her father scroll past all the photos of Brenda and felt a lump form in her throat. Why hadn't her cousin spoken to her about this? She would have transferred schools, stayed up all night texting, done anything to ease her cousin's suffering. They shared a car ride every day, and yet she just texted her own friends, never wondering why Brenda's phone only ever played Aunt Noreen's ringtone.

"Promise me you'll call or come over if you ever feel suicidal." She sent the text to everyone in her contacts.

Noreen was convinced that it was her fault. Her husband had left two years earlier. That was when Brenda started to change. Her daughter threw out her dolls and started writing things in files she kept password-protected, then hidden on the hard drive in some way that Noreen couldn't understand. The sleepovers and shopping trips stopped - grey sweatshirts and ragged jeans replaced a former fashionista's wardrobe. The expensive clothes from the mall still sat in a dusty box labelled "DONATE" - Noreen had hoped that Brenda would come out of her funk and change her mind. It was only after they found Brenda washed up on the riverbank, having jumped off of a bridge, that Rob managed to excavate Brenda's hidden files - dark poetry, gory artwork, and myriad drafts of suicide notes detailing the bullying that started as soon as Brenda showed signs of depression.

She wished fervently that this was all a nightmare as she waited outside. The world went on, sunny and warm, ignoring her pain. She wanted to cut the bright yellow tulips down and shoot anyone who smiled at her as they walked by. Suzan offered a hand and led her into the sanctuary when the service began. Noreen barely heard the words her brother spoke for the next half hour. Rob had to nudge her elbow when it was her turn to throw a handful of dirt into the pit outside the church.

Instead of returning to an empty house, she drove to the hospital after the service. She asked to be put on suicide watch. She wouldn't make her family go through this again.

The selfishness of suicide?

Feeling lost inside,

Hatred from others.

Wanting to end this aching anger!

If I jump,

I leave my loved ones behind.

If I stay,

I'd still be hurting everyday.

So who's to say,

Who's selfish?

Me, for wanting peace and leaving them with grief.

Or them?

For keeping me on this earth with all regrets.