Beyond Good and Evil

“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.