I feel suicidal

Sometimes I feel genuinely suicidal. At those times I really do wish I wasn't here any more. It feels as though everyone would be better off. I want desperately not to have to manage my life for another day. There is no energy left, and I cannot see how the next day, or week, or year, can be struggled through. It doesn't feel worth it, and it doesn't feel as though it will ever get easier, because even on the okay days my life is hard to manage.

When being alive is unbearable — and sometimes it just is — I can see how people reach the point of being suicidal, and I can see how the next steps happen. However.

I can tell you that I have never actually been suicidal. I have come as close as you can, I think, but I have never made a plan. I have thought about what would happen afterwards, and that has usually been enough to pull me back, though on really bad days it nearly isn't. I have never chosen to act on the feelings and the thoughts. There have been times when I truly believed the people in my life would be better off without me. You could assure me they wouldn't, and I wouldn't believe you. But I have never made a plan, or taken action. My children play a large part in keeping me here.

Disability, not reaction…

I know there are millions of people living harder lives than mine, many of them by an enormous margin. I am not an idiot, but knowing that doesn't help. Knowing that I probably don't have “reasonable tangible cause” for this exhaustion and hopelessness only makes me ashamed that I cannot manage even the privileged life I have been handed. It adds to the crushing certainty that I am a failure. Feeling that shame, and knowing objectively that my life is good, changes nothing.

The thing is, I have different neurology. I am neurodivergent, which means my responses to living in this world are often more extreme than other people's. That neurology, and the work of managing it in this society, has led — and commonly leads — to mental health difficulties like recurrent depression and anxiety. Mental health difficulties do not only occur due to crap circumstances. Sometimes they are rooted in how a brain functions. Difficult moments, trauma, stress, rejection and physical illness can all make them worse, but you can feel this way with no obvious source at all. Some people have no idea why they feel like this, and I would wager a good number of them have an unavoidable difference in neurology. It is not something they control.

Losing the battle

Two years ago my cousin died of depression. I think about her a lot, and about the choice she made. I will never make that same choice, but I have become deeply irritated by the language people use around it. I don't believe she was selfish, or that she cared less about the people she loved than I do. I believe that some people die from depression and some don't, in the way some people die of cancer. She did not commit a crime and she did not give up. She did not want to punish anybody. She did care what happened once her pain stopped. She lost her battle with an evil illness that is inherently harder to recover from than any other. She fought, she loved, and she lost. And we lost her.

I read her letter. I won't discuss what was in it, because that is private to the family, but I will say that reading it I was overwhelmed by understanding her completely for the first time. She had some shit circumstances around her physical health, and it was that, coupled with the way her brain worked, that made her struggle so much.

We don't want to talk about it until it's too late

What I need to say is that people who look fine can be depressed. People who look fine can have a neurology that flips them from actually fine to feeling suicidal inside a day. Lots of people feel it but no one talks about feeling suicidal. There are people everywhere wondering, almost daily, whether it would be better if they simply stopped existing. It feels horrendous, and it feels real. When your neurology means the feeling arrives quickly, switching like that is humiliating. And nobody talks about it. Why? Because nobody listens. They react.

I never told my cousin that I often felt this way. She never told me. I would not have reacted badly, but she had no way of knowing that. By the time we did speak, not long before she died, it was too late. She had made a plan.

Responding rather than reacting

Someone who feels suicidal needs another person to hear that they are in very great distress. They need you to understand that they are struggling to an extreme degree in that moment, even if the moment passes quickly. What I need is for that feeling to be treated as real and worth attention. Not dismissed as silly, or passing, or an overreaction, or — worse — as an excuse. The feeling is real, and it needs real support. That under-reaction is one of the two ways people respond. The other, which is just as unhelpful, is to react out of fear. A lot of people stay quiet about how they feel, when it is only a feeling, because they are frightened of setting off a panic. If I say to my family that I feel suicidal, that is pretty scary for them.

So what can we do?

We need to talk about feeling suicidal without being suicidal. We need to talk to people who have never felt this way and tell them what we need in those moments, on those days. We need to feel loved without being pushed into taking action. We need a calm, meaningful and significant response to what we need, with no guilt, no shame, no fear and no drama.

We need quiet presence.

What could I have done?

When someone takes their own life, the people around them are left with if only. They are left with what could I have said, or done, more or differently. I know. I have been there too. Perhaps I could have helped. Probably not, unless we had been able to talk openly about this, because then it might have been possible for one or both of us to see that our brains work differently from other people's, and that this might be okay.

Part of the difficulty is that I have also been there for people who felt suicidal, and for people who were suicidal and did not die — either because someone intervened or because they arranged it that way. Either way, what they felt was extremely serious and needed support. Sometimes a little medical support follows. What I have seen far more often is judgement. If not the first time, then certainly the second. Recover from mental illness and relapse, and the judgement is enormous. You are expected to stay “fixed”. So once you have been supported, the likelihood of speaking up when you are struggling again is low. Those of us who struggle all know that most people don't want to hear it and don't know what to say, and yet when someone dies, everybody wants to know what they could have done.

I am tired of pretending to be okay

I am tired.

Right now I have close friends, and family, who genuinely know how to respond. They are amazing. They listen, however many times. They take it seriously and they don't freak out unnecessarily. I am beyond lucky, and I am grateful.

In the past I have had wonderful friends — kind, usually compassionate — who eventually just didn't get it. They didn't know how to answer the same thing time and again. First they stopped listening once. When I said something that showed I was struggling again, I was met with silence. After that it was judgement, or irritation. I would hear “I just cannot see that you are trying to manage your issues”, or something close to it. They believed I needed to try harder. When I did try to understand myself better, whatever I discovered was treated as me trying to excuse my issues. Then they began talking among themselves: “if she isn't helping herself, I'm not sure what we can really do.” Lately, because of that, I have gone quiet. I have been tempted not to admit I am struggling even to the friends and family who do know how to respond. I am afraid this will be the time they go silent. The “oh, we've had enough now” moment, because I can see it coming. My brain is very good at ringing warning bells.

I get it. Being in my life can be a rollercoaster, for me and for everyone around me. I don't blame anyone. It still hurts.

I am tired. Tired of feeling like this. Tired of driving people away. Tired of being judged. Tired of being told I make excuses. Tired of being quiet. Tired of being tired.

Being tired leads me to hopelessness. Hopelessness leads me to not knowing how I will manage tomorrow. That is how we end up here.

How do we learn to make it okay to talk about this? How do we teach people how to respond?