It is an odd thing knowing that your life is finite.
Our lives are all alike. No matter how long we may live, we all get the same: we all get a lifetime.
Of course we can decide to check out early if we so wish. And sometimes that is the best decision.
No doubt some of you may consider suicide a selfish act. It is. I absolutely agree. But consider this: is it more selfish than forcing someone to endure sixty years of misery just so that you won’t have to be inconvenienced by four or six years of sadness?
An odder thing is knowing that your life is purposeless, that your death would not cause many ripples. It is sad but it is a fact that not all of us have lives which are worth living. Suicide is not the answer but it is AN answer.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone to kill themselves. If you feel suicidal, see someone about it. You never have to face such thoughts alone, there is always hope. That is the best advice I, or anyone else, can give.
I am not good at taking advice. Especially my own.
In many ways, I think that this may be my last year on Earth. I hope it isn’t. I don’t want to die.
Random Shoes 
It better not be your last year on Earth for I will miss your witty tweets, you great misanthrope. Can’t believe I’ve only just discovered your blog. Tis top stuff! (Apart from the bleak prophecies that is, but glad you shared.)
I agree with you. I think the greatest gift is choosing how and when you go, especially if the great unknown is far preferable to a known misery. Very few get to make that choice. That said, in many situations I also think there is an element of cowardice and laziness to checking out early, especially if motivations are entirely to do with escaping mental distress. IMO mental distress has 2 primary causes – something outside to which an emotional response is generated and/or something inside. Apparently if you give life long enough it shows you how to live it, whether that’s changing your circumstances on the outside and/or learning how to work with what’s happening inside. I like to think that if you let it, life wil show you how to live it well more often than not. That is if you’re not committed to self-sabotage.
To learn to live happily is a wonderful lesson and it deserves all the patience in the world. To shirk it is cowardly and lazy. The big challenge comes in that for all the help people might want to give, mental distress is an inherently personal experience. The only person that really has any clue is the one experiencing it. Only they know if they’re being cowardly and lazy, or if they’re giving the fight all it deserves. Any decision to die must be one made of a sound mind – a personal decision but with rationale vetted by those who will be affected (and there always are). It can be difficult to ensure that’s the case though as it’s always a desperate decision.
However, what none of us can accurately know is our life’s full worth or value, and therein lies the difficulty with depression, which invariably stamps a zero, or less than zero value on the sufferer’s life. I think everybody has suicidal thoughts but it’s not accepted to admit it – all that stigma and all. It means that those that have them often and engage with them feel weird about it and only the few really suffering under the weight of it speak out (if they’re brave enough), but it’s still the simple yet complex existential discussion we all have with ourselves at some point or other. Intelligent people are particularly vulnerable to this.
The difference is how frequent those thoughts are and whether there’s significant engagement with them – that’s probably what you’d call depression. The problem with depression is more often than not it’s entirely rational. Engaging with its logic leads to a downward hate spiral that’s very painful and difficult to escape. It turns thinking suicidal (an option to explore, as you say) into feeling suicidal – an attachment to the inevitable end. That’s a tough break, especially for a reasonable and intelligent person; you can’t reason yourself out of it. You can only pursue alternative logics – you have to feel it out instead. In that respect the Universe just isn’t rational. If it was you wouldn’t be feeling shit in the first place.
It takes effort but thoughts can be retrained. After all how many thoughts do you ignore every day? Feelings however, are what they are and need nurturing. I can spot and discredit negative thought on the whole but if I feel crap about myself, I try to imagine how I’d want to feel instead and before I know it I’m making that happier feeling, even if small, and in that place I’m no longer a victim of my own existence/inevitable non-existence or trapped by a logic that doesn’t support my wellbeing (easier said than done, I know).
But then someone else coming in and saying ‘this works for me’ can often be the most angering thing in the world. All too often that’s because it’s bringing up stuff that needs resolving.
Just as a decision to die takes resolve, a decision to live does too, especially when life makes you think it isn’t worth it. It is, even if for one shining moment that may not have happened yet and it won’t if you don’t let it.
Keep writing. I’m being thoroughly inspired by you after failing miserably at making anything of my own blog yet 🙂 And no accidentally falling under buses and suchlike either.
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