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4.30am Thoughts

Yttrium

Learned on Facebook today that someone I was at school with had committed suicide. He was a couple of years younger than me. We never spoke to each other. I was nearly a foot taller than him and whenever he saw me he would wave to a non existent friend off in the distance. This was how he protected himself from the bigger boys. It only occurred to me today that he would've been having an even worse time at school than I did. I at least learned to blend into the background a bit and not  draw attention to myself. At one very memorable school assembly, at the point where a pupil would normally recite some poetry, this boy stood up and announced that he would give us a pop song. He then started shrieking "honey baby, honey baby, come on and be my honey baby" until a very embarrassed class tutor took his arm and escorted him back to his seat. His life at school must've gotten pretty bad after that. I'm sorry that I never spoke to him or did anything to help make his life easier. I hope there was some happiness in his life. R.I.P.

  • I apologise for sharing my melancholy early-hours thoughts with you all. Thank you NAS36609, Trogluddite and StephenHarris for your thoughtful replies. 

  • One of my former teachers killed himself recently. I couldn't bring myself to go to the funeral - it would have been packed and I didn't want to have a lot of awkward conversations with former teachers and classmates over my lack of work.

  • It is always heartbreaking to hear that someone has taken their own life.

    The last funeral I went to was for an old friend who had killed himself. Few of us had spoken to him for a very long time. I didn't know him particularly well, but back in the day, we did find a connection through our shared experience of depression, speaking about our treatments etc. He ended up moving away, to live with various relatives, cutting himself off from our circle of friends until only a select few even knew where he was. When we heard about his funeral, we were even more saddened to learn that his daughter had not long previously had his first grand-child, and it appeared that his feelings of inadequacy as a father and grandfather had contributed to his decline.

    Without meaning to trivialise the pain of people closer to him, the funeral was an uncomfortable experience for someone as closely acquainted with suicidal thoughts as I am. People's comments were surely motivated by compassion, but only heightened my awareness of how poorly people understand suicide. Resolutions to "keep an eye on each other more" are all well and good, but don't reflect the reality that we often feel pressured not to admit to our negative feelings; to just maintain the mask that makes everything look alright from the outside (and something which many autistic people are extremely well practised at). Resolutions to "keep in touch more" do little good when a depressed person can so easily disregard attempts to communicate because they feel they have nothing positive to say, don't want to feel that they are a burden, or feel that it is something done out of a sense of duty rather than genuine empathy.

    When one has suicidal thoughts often, it is easy to become somewhat flippant about them, as I often have. I've had those thoughts on and off for over thirty years, and my only genuine attempts are now decades behind me. I'm still here; so those are pretty good odds, right? But the common idea of suicide as being something long-planned and procrastinated about are not correct, and the ease with which we might chant our little mantras to get us through until the thoughts subside can lead to a false sense of security. In reality, it is often a very short-lived, very particular combination of circumstances that turn the thoughts into action, a point supported by much research into suicide. A more realistic, society-wide shift in attitude to negative feelings, depression, and all manner of unusual social behaviours, is the only real solution, IMHO.

    RIP.

  • RIP indeed, I hope they have found the peace they were seeking with such an act. I know far too much about how it feels to want to do that... If only people could be a lot nicer to one another, many would be spared the suffering that pushes them to this action.

    I hope you yourself got some peace and sleep last night/this morning (it must have been a night for poor sleep, as I myself only got off at about 4am).