I Thought About Killing Myself Today Again

Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation. But you probably already know trhat, don’t you?

It’s such a weird feeling, wanting to die. I don’t even know why I want to all of the sudden. And I don’t really know why I’m writing this. This isn’t some last will and testiment, this isn’t some cry for help, and this definitely isn’t a suicide note of any kind.

I’m going to live, and I have no intention of taking my life.

But the thought is there. Lingering in the back of my mind again, like a siren on a rocky shore. Isn’t life hard? Isn’t the cold and the dark so inviting? It’s not like anyone will miss you. You talk to less than 10 people regularly, you don’t spend any time with anyone else save for one monday every other week and each tuesday (when other people show up), and even then its only online. Your job is just painful and strenuous. You always look at the clock and dread having to go in anymore, wondering if today is just going to be another day that you deal with physidcal and verbal abuse at the hands on a bunch of children. And you’re being laid off in June anyway, so its not like you have any need to keep going there, aside from continuing to work. And you only need to keep working because that’s how you stay alive. And honestly, How long would it be before anyone even noticed, really?

Two things come to mind right now that spurred this on. The first is that I just finished reading a manga called Our Happy Hours. It opens with a woman failing to commit suicide through an overdose on sleeping pills, and follows her interactions with a man on death row. Its supposed to be about learning to live by coming to understand other people, but for some reason all I could thing while reading it was “doesn’t that sound nice? Wouldn’t dying be so much more comfortable than what you’ve got going on now?” I don’t know why something that’s supposed to be uplifting has me suddenly suicidal, but it is what it is I suppose.

The second thing is somethintg that happened last week. I was making burgers at home (I’ve been trying to eat at home more often to save money), and after cutting some vegetables to put on them, I cleaned the knife. Now, I’m not the cleanest person with my cooking utensils I’m sad to say, so after rinsing the knife off and cleaning it up, I went to wipe the knife off on my pant leg. Two problems:

One, I was in just my boxers at the time, so the material I was wiping them on wasn’t terribly thick or protective in any way.

And Two, I was pretty tired, so I wasn’t paying to closest attention to what I was doing.

The first pass was pretty standard, wiped the flat of one side of the blade on my leg, then flip it to wipe the other side. Except I didn’t flip it all the way. I stopped halfway and mindlessly drew the blade of the knife right across my thigh. sliced right through the boxers and put a big gash in my left leg. Most people, when they slice a gash into their leg, stop what their doing and try to take care of themselves. Stop the bleeding, go to the hospital, check to make sure they don’t need any stitches, bandage the wound…

I was more worried about getting my burgers finished.

So I did the bare minimum I needed to keep the blood off my floor (it was a pretty liberal amount) while trying to finish putting my food together. Oh, and I also called work to let them know that I wouldn’t be able to make it in that night due to a personal injury. I think the thing that most stands out about that incident was that I don’t remember the pain at all. I remember the initial pain of the cut, but even then I reacted mostly out of habit rather than actual pain. Like when you bump your hip into a counter. You shout “Ow!” pretty quickly, but it isn’t because you’re hurt. It’s just out of habit. Similarly, I wasn’t in any particular pain from it, I was mostly just annoyed by the inconvenience. Annoyed that I had to do anything about the blood dripping on my floor, annoyed that I had just ruined a perfectly good pair of boxers, annoyed that I juggle both of those things while I was cooking because god damnit I just wanna have a burger.

I don’t have any first aid stuff in my apartment. You’d think that event would inspire me to order a kit to keep around the house, but it probably won’t. The wound is long since closed, a rough scab formed across it and a slight pain if I apply any pressure to it. No, I’ll probably brush it off in the name of saving as much as I can so that when I’m laid off come June I have enough money to get a new place and hopefully find another job. I don’t have any hope for the job hunt though. I’ve never had any luck with a job hunt unless someone I know flat out points me to a job that they know I can get because it doesn’t require any experience. And of course once someone points me at it, I almost invariably get the job if a want it (I’ve only ever turned one of these down, and that’s mostly just because it was honestly impractical to do, but also because I loathed the idea of working Retail again). And of course, I’m trying to find work in a field I actually want to be in (journalism or publishing) outside of the state I’ve been trapped in for the last few years.

This article might seem rambling and self serving, a cry for attention from someone who admits that they aren’t going to do anything. And I suppose on some level it is. But the thing I want to get across most here is what goes on in the mind of someone who’s thinking about killing themselves. I think I’ve posted something similar in the past, but no two instances of suicidal ideation are ever the same. But I want people who don’t live with this to understand that for people like me, who have attempted once or twice in the past, this isn’t something that we ever walk away from. It comes back, over and over again, and the weirdest times. Times when we’re down, times when we’re perfectly fine, even times when we’re outright happy. And I want them to know what goes on in our heads when it happens. Maybe if more people can know what’s going on they might be able to help. I won’t ask anyone to understand, I don’t really believe anyone outside of us can.

But I at least want you to know so that you can try.