Taking one’s own life is the ultimate oxymoron of taking control over a life they once felt they had no control over.
This is my very personal and not professional nor universal experience and angle of suicide.
Suicide hit me in a time period before I understood what depression really felt like
It hit me when I thought I could save the world
It hit me when I thought everyone opened up about their struggles
It hit me when I was 4 classes fresh into a psychology certification
One foot in the door, my first stepping stone to a phd
Suddenly everything I thought I knew, I didn’t
Suddenly feminism and freudian theories didn’t seem so important
Suddenly all I could wonder was, why didn’t I know, why didn’t I help and how on earth does it get so bad that such a permanent solution was decided upon.
All of this before.. before I fully understood.
My stance on suicide eventually went from shock and grief
To Understanding and relief
You see this world gets hard
And it isn’t always the saddest people who take their lives
Sometimes it’s the smartest ones
Sometimes it’s the loneliest ones,
Lonely doesn’t always mean sad
Sometimes it’s the most misunderstood
Sometimes it’s the ones who are unheard.
This world is LOUD
And suffering has become so silent
Suicide and depression are to our society
What the caves and caverns are of this world
Dark, and deep, claustrophobic and only the bravest venture into them
But not everyone comes out the same, or at all
It’s okay to talk about a bad day, traffic hold ups, angry bosses, annoying employees, misbehaving kids and broken down cars
But its not acceptable to talk about days when you’d rather drive off a bridge or jump through a window than spend another moment inside your own head.
No one openly admits how many times they’ve contemplated the details of their demise
The how, the when, the where and the aftermath.
Struggling with a brain that wont stop
Its like going a million miles an hour
On a runaway train
All the coping mechanisms,
All the mindset techniques
All of the positive vibes and happy memories
Nothing can stop this train from going off the tracks
It’s going to take the most skilled engineer to steer this baby back
This life has it’s fucking hard moments
I teach every day about living in the moment
About being positive
About just LIVING your life
I talk about overcoming anxiety, and depression
And I mean it. I mean all of it.
But it’s not glamorous to talk about the muddy stuff
Even though it’s helpful
More of us than not have or have had dreadful feelings
Some more often than others
But people are afraid to talk about them
There are stigmas
and the worst of all
Shame
The paralyzing fear of being cast out of your tribe
I remember the first time the thought ever crossed my mind.
It startled me.
Tears brimmed my tired eyes, white knuckled grip on the steering wheel- just another metaphor for holding on too tightly to a life that was slipping trough my fingers.
Traveling the max speed limit in the middle lane on a highway I knew like the back of my hand.
A highway I saw one too many lives taken on.
A highway I ultimately imagined letting take my own life.
‘If I just let go of the wheel, and keep my foot on the gas then perhaps I can just make it look like an accident, none would be the wiser’.
Up until the few months leading up to that day, suicide was taboo to me.
But there I was, a few short years after my first experience losing someone to suicide, driving in my car, imagining the once unimaginable.
Glancing in the rear view mirror I’m snapped out of my morbid thoughts by the trusting face of my soul saviour- my dog. I remember the promise I made, I remember she needs me and I know she doesn’t deserve any part of this.. and I carry on.
These thoughts felt shameful, awful, scary and unacceptable. But that didn’t make them any less prominent. That didn’t make them disappear. It just suppressed them.. until the next time and each time that face in the rear view would snap me out of my daze.
I visited a doctor. They asked if I had thoughts of harming myself “not really”. Because the truth is, they weren’t the typical thoughts that show up on those questionnaires about the signs of serious depression.
My problem was not that I was sad, although I was.
It was that I felt trapped. I felt powerless.
Living in a basement apartment that felt like a dungeon, sleeping beside someone every night who I felt completely alone next to. My anxiety ran rampant. I could barely make it out of bed to go to school and when I did all I wanted was to leave. Until I eventually I did and became a college drop out.
Everything was falling apart.
My relationship. My finances. My education. I had a great job but even that was sucking the life out of me. I called in sick so often it’s a wonder they kept me for another 6 years.
I had no plan. I had no structure. I had no clue where I was going what I was doing or who I even was.
I was so lost in trying to figure it all out that it was driving me insane.
It started to become a pattern.
I would make changes, or have them made for me.
I would break down, fall apart and then rise again, stronger even, and the cycle would continue.
The moment I had no plan, the moment someone did something that hurt me, the moment I could not make someone listen to me or love me or trust me, I fell apart.
My thoughts returned to ending my life. It became ritual.
There is a saying “the lesson won’t go away until it teaches us what we need to know”.
What I knew for certain is that I had purpose here, I wanted more for my life. The issue was not that I wanted to die, it was that I had no idea how to live. I felt out of control, too many options and yet none at all and so the only thing that often felt feasible was to take matters into my own hands, not by rising, but in initiating my permanent demise.
I started to get sick of myself. Sick of this pattern. Sick of thinking and never doing. Sick of knowing I didn’t have it in me to commit such an act and yet it was all I could think about. I had enough of myself.
So I started to read some self help books. I started to do things that felt good to me.
It would take me many years to break the cycle, to realize the one thing that I had been craving and always missing was my power.
So this is my lesson, my a-ha moment and my dose of inspiration.
Never were my suicidal thoughts something that appeared in depths of great sadness. They appeared when my life felt powerless. When I would go through a break up, when money was low, when I hated my job and felt there was no way out.
In wanting to take my own life I learned that all I truly wanted was some sort of control. In knowing this I had to learn the only control I truly had was of my own thoughts and my own choices.
I stopped letting other people hurt me
It’s not that I never got hurt, it’s that I stopped blaming other people when I did. Because I was responsible for how I felt, no one else.
I stopped letting my job define me.
I saw it as a way to make money until I could find and step into what truly lit my soul up.
I stopped thinking the world owed me something because of what happened in my past and started to acknowledge what happened, feel what I had once refused to feel and committed to healing it.
I started to make choices that felt right for me and not for anyone else.
I started to follow my heart and doing what I truly loved instead of what I thought I should do.
I can say without a doubt that the cycle has been broken, but it does not mean that every once in awhile I am not reminded of it.
Scars don’t heal. Scars remain.
We are human and we are spirit and we are magical beings with so much potential and so much capabilities.
We have purpose and passion and so so much power.
But we have these minds that are so complex
Minds that can literally drive us insane. Sometimes by our own doing and sometimes by a chemical concoction that fucks us up from the start.
So what I am saying is not that I feel it is okay to want to, and ultimately take our own lives.
I wish that no one ever even had the thought cross their mind
But I know how heavy it can get. I know how convoluted the mind can be.
I can’t promise you its all going to be better one day.
I can only promise you that it can feel better, day by day.
I can promise you that you can feel better than you feel right now, without the pressure of reaching for a destination of healing.
Maybe for you right now all that matters is learning to live in and enjoy the moments that you have breath in our lungs and a beat in your heart.
Maybe right now you just focus less on where you want to be a year from now if tomorrow itself looks bleak.
Maybe right now you just admit that this is all really fucking messy and scary and being brave is a really fun concept but its really effing exhausting, and you take a little break.
Even the people who advocate for healing.
Who advocate for empowerment and who share their truth so daringly,
They are not immune to the mindfuck that this life can be
They are not immune to the scars that get buried so deep
I don’t want to pretend life is lollipops and butterflies, rainbows and bright skies.
We’re always searching for and striving for the next better day that it feels so wrong and awful and scary to just sit in the bad ones
I am strong because I let my self visit the dark corners of my mind
The places people don’t want to go, because its not holy or socially acceptable or because it’s really scary
We have to visit our darkness
Its in the moment that we ignore it, resist it, fight it, that we ultimately succumb to it
I lovingly challenge you, if your thoughts have ever ventured to the realm of ending your own life, to question this. To ask yourself by taking control this way, where do you feel you are lacking control in other areas of your life.
Each one of us has an equal amount of divine power in the core of our beings. Knowing this and owning it can sometimes mean the difference between life and death.
You have the power to choose the life you desire, I promise.
If you are feeling powerless to your circumstances. If you feel there are no options for you and you’re feeling out of control then I invite you to have a call with me, on me, to chat about how to take the power back over your own life, and how I can help you do that:
https://www.janineaf.com/talktome/
<3
[Disclaimer: this is a personal and experiential opinion and is not meant to downplay the serious side effects of clinical depression and mental illness. If you are having suicidal or self-harming thoughts I encourage you to reach out to your family doctor or national crisis centre. There is help on many levels for anyone who feels this life is too overwhelming to keep living in. I am aware that hormonal and chemical imbalances can play a part in depression and suicide and that medication may be necessary for survival.I love you and I want you to live]
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