The Big Sad

TW: suicidal ideation, mental health, loneliness, depression, anxiety

I wanted to kill myself for a long time, even until last year. I don’t anymore. What helped me get around it was the things I loved (and also sertraline, which I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with because it has lowered my alcohol tolerance level way too much). But experiencing depression and wanting to kill myself helped me understand that people are incredibly kind and empathetic, and I want everything I believe in to recognize this innate goodness that people have. I don’t ever want to stop believing in this goodness because it makes life so much more worth living.

Prologue

I felt the need to write this during a socio-politicaldebate with some of my friends at around 7 AM in the morning one day during summer while I was arguing about something like why the justice system needs to focus on rehabilitation more than retribution, why we desperately need socialism (immediately in the form of a welfare state) and why cancel culture is toxic. I might argue all of that in other posts, I have strong feelings about them. Anyways, it ended with some of my friends calling me incredibly idealistic and something along the lines of how I’m very detached from reality, and how life doesn’t that work that way. Real life is hard, and people are selfish. I do agree with them quite a bit in the first part, I do want to work towards a world that is quite extremely idealistic and sometimes reality doesn’t always work that way. But reality can work that way because I disagree on the second bit completely. People are kind and care about others. And I have been lucky enough to experience that.

I really don’t want to write about depression or suicidal ideation because its sad or pitiful or something. I don’t want to be brave or spread awareness about it. Its not to blame anyone for anything, including myself for thinking the things I did in the past (although I realize how wrong I was), or to give anyone advice on how to get around it. That’s been done quite a bit, by people far more experienced and knowledgeable about it than me. I don’t even know if I’m around it completely if I am being honest (definitely around the suicidal ideation though), this might just be a long rant fuelled by sertraline and optimism. Instead, I want to write about it to celebrate how kind and amazing people are, because that’s what helped me feel better, and still continues to help me everyday. But first I should probably elaborate on why I wanted to kill myself.

Backstory

The first time I fantasized about killing myself was when I was 7 or 8. It wasn’t anything serious, just a fantasy. I don’t even remember what I was so sad or upset about but I just remember thinking that dying was so final and permanent that it could always help if things didn’t get better. It could always be a way out of sadness, THE way out of feeling sad. But I never seriously contemplated suicide until I was 15 when I started thinking about it daily. It felt like there was nothing to live for, when you rationally thought about life. There was a very specific path (and that is if you were lucky and privileged) prescribed to everyone: go to university, get a job, work 9 - 5 at a place which was probably not very fulfilling, wishing you could be literally anywhere else, maybe get a couple of hours to yourselves at the end of the day, go on vacation once a year if you were lucky enough and then, ultimately, die anyways. I didn’t know how everyone was content with it? At one point, I remember telling my therapist “Life is mostly bad, theres some good, but not enough to make the bad worth it. If you’re lucky and healthy, it's just 80 years of feeling hurt and at the end of it you die anyways.” Very r/im14andthisisdeep-esque, I know. To add on this, there was a constant feeling of loneliness, not belonging anywhere and feeling isolated. I felt like people were indifferent to my existence at best, but probably, annoyed by it. I couldn’t ever see this mindset changing either. Hope is a really powerful thing, but hopelessness can feel even stronger, and not in a good way. There never felt like there was something in the world worth sticking around for in the long term, just phases of life I would probably enjoy: a movie, a video game, going out sometimes with my friends and hoping they didn’t secretly hate me. These things would probably make me happy, but I didn’t even know whether that feeling was real or if I was just lying to myself to make myself feel happy.

Things didn’t seem like they would get better in the future either. Days seemed like they were always going to stay the same. The things I did might have been different, but the feelings felt the same, fake after a certain point. People were only in it for themselves, people only did stuff to benefit themselves, and if I killed myself, it wouldn’t change anything at all. I’m not even worth caring about and for some reason if I have people that care about me, I am hurting them by continuing to exist because I am inconvenient. And I am also inconveniencing myself by forcing myself to pretend to be happy. I should probably just kill myself.  I won’t feel hurt anymore. There might be a few sad people at a funeral but obviously they’ll move on, and obviously I wanted them to, they’re strong, and there’ll probably be people that would be happier that I had killed myself. I wasn’t (and still stand by this) special at all, you could easily replace me with someone kinder, funnier, smarter, and with every other desirable quality. Why would anyone even begin to miss me? Why did anyone even like me or want to talk with me? Why wouldn’t everyone just be happier if I killed myself?

Love

Love is a bit weird. I’m not just talking about romantic love here, I am very single and have always been (I’m 6’2” btw), but I’m referring to the empathy and care we feel for others in general. Everyone knows loving someone else might hurt them for many reasons and we’ve probably been hurt in many ways by other people. But we never give up on loving each other and continue to look for love (again, not just the romantic kind) at every chance. We want to make friends even though they might lie to us, we want romance even though we break up, we even help strangers regardless of whether they are able to help us back. People don’t even need to have a specific altruistic motivation to help others, sometimes we just smile at others while walking down a road and that might help someone who feels alone. We might think the world is sad, cruel or unfair, but we still try to be happy, kind and fair. Even though people might have hurt us in the past, we often are kind to others or sometimes even to the people that hurt us. We sometimes forgive the people that have hurt us in the hope that we can move on from the hurt and they can as well.

We all get what its like to be human. Everyone’s unique and goes through life differently but we all feel emotions that unite us. So when we see someone else in pain, we are generally inclined to help them feel better. We love to bring happiness to others and we feel happy when we are able to make someone else’s day better. This feeling is only more intense when its someone we know and are emotionally connected to.  We relate to each other because we are human. And we want to make everyone happy because we want to be happy. One of the hardest things to understand when you are depressed is that people care about you being able to feel happy too. Despite how many people assure you they care about you, the worry they express, the help they offer, I just never could believe the fact that I was worth caring about. I always felt like an inconvenience that didn’t belong anywhere where people cared about me. That’s how I actually ended up doing what I didn’t want to: hurt the people love. And that’s the weirdest and best thing about love. The fact that we are able to do it even when it hurts us.

I think it’s the same part of us that loves watching TV shows or video games which we know are depressing. We know Game of Thrones will destroy us (not just the controversial ending), but we love it all the same. And that’s the same reason why the people who care about us continue to do so even when we hurt them. And the people that cared about me were probably the most important thing that helped me stay alive. And its where Im coming from when I assert that people are wildly inherently kind. Everyone is trying to be a good person at the end of day and trying to help. Sometimes we check on our friends, sometimes we pay for strangers’ drinks when they can’t find their wallet, sometimes we run into burning buildings to save someone we care about. The point is we all care about others, and this inherent goodness is what is always worth reaching out to.  We fail sometimes like we do in everything else but that doesn’t stop us from trying again eventually. Sometimes this failure ends up hurting the people we care about. I know I did when I kept telling my friends how much I wanted to die and how there was nothing worth living for. But the cycle of love means they go on caring for us.

And if people can love us even when we hurt them, we can also love when we are hurting.

Hurt

The world is unfair, and people will hurt you. Things won’t go to plan, plans will fall apart, and that’ll hurt you. You’ll make mistakes and those mistakes will hurt people. They might hurt you back, but they might also forgive. Sometimes, you’ll even do things you know will hurt the people you care about, but you can’t help not doing them, no matter how much you want to avoid it. The point is that there’s a lot of hurt to go around in this world. But this possibility of getting hurt is something we have in common with everyone else because they’ve been hurt before in some way. And because everyone knows what its like to hurt, people generally really hate to see another person going through hurt. No one wants to see another human, someone they connect with on several levels, go through something that has hurt themselves in the past. Especially if there is some way to directly help.

We don’t even need to consciously need to be aware that someone else is in need of our help to be able to help them. Sometimes just being ourselves and expressing our feelings is enough to help, to let someone know they aren’t alone. We see this everyday with the movies we watch, the stories we read, the songs we listen to. Even when the themes in media revolve around hate, pain, loss, it’s us connecting with the artist about the feelings and experiences we have in common. And when I wanted to kill myself, having art to always relate and connect to, meant a lot in terms of feeling less alone. It didn’t cure me, I don’t think there’s anything that cured me except when I was able to look at everything with a new perspective, but it helped me feel a lot less alone. The reason why I love the art I do is that it really expresses what the narrator is feeling. When I listen to Custer (which is my favourite song at the minute) I can relate to the feeling of anger, hurt, disenchantment, loss, etc. that the band was going through when the song was written. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who wants to listen to a really heavy song with 64 variations of the word “fuck” within the space of 4 minutes and 14 seconds. Even if we are cynical and say that media isn’t created with a direct intention to help someone, its created for profit, putting a piece out that’s as vulnerable as most of the stories I read can’t be for any purpose other than connecting with others who share similar experiences and feelings.

There will always be people out there that will hurt others, even intentionally. A lot of people. I am fully aware that blindly trusting people to be kind just means there’s more chances of getting hurt. When I wanted to kill myself, I couldn’t see past the world being unfair and people hurting others, never acting beyond their self-interest. There were always stories about  people being brave and selfless, wholesome memes on Instagram about dogs and cats that I’ve sent to several friends and captioned them with “Us” but these (not the cat and dog memes, that’s literally my entire For You page) moments where I felt like maybe everything wasn’t terrible were too few and far between. There’s a really popular fable we have probably all heard of already, about the frog and the scorpion trying to cross a river. The scorpion asks the frog to carry it across the river and the frog reluctantly agrees. The frog is aware that the scorpion might sting it and kill it, but the scorpion promises that it won’t because stinging the frog would kill them both as they would drown. Once the frog takes the scorpion halfway across the river, the scorpion does sting the frog and as they are both drowning, the frog asks the scorpion why it stung the frog and the scorpion goes “Because its in my nature”. I hate this story. Very often I hear something like this about the world, in the context that the world is unfair, and people cannot help but give in to their nature, even when it goes against their self-interest. But we go against our self-nature everyday, that’s what living means. If we gave in to our nature, we wouldn’t have art, we wouldn’t have video games, we wouldn't have cute memes of cats and dogs that I could send to my friends and say “Us”. We’d descend into a Panem-esque dystopia from The Hunger Games where we hunt each other to survive. We wouldn’t have a society that’s built on lifting each other up, we wouldn’t have laws, we wouldn’t have healthcare and doctors. Yes, there are a lot of people out there who will hurt us but there are more people out there that want to stop them and lift us up when we are hurt. My favourite spin on the frog and scorpion story is from a YouTube video by a youtuber called exurb1a (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Q3crLWQY8). Theres a quote from the video I need to end this piece with a quote from the video, “We’re all selfish sometimes but most of us are ashamed of it. We don’t make selfishness a virtue …. just so we can take a few more spoils from the world for ourselves.”

Where I Am Now

The saddest thing about this piece is that I don’t know if it will help anyone, even myself. I really hope it does, in some way. But I really don’t know what the future holds or how I’ll feel tomorrow. I don’t know if I will hurt anyone again in the future in some massive way and hate myself. I don’t know if I will be able to express the fact that I love someone who is hurting. I don’t know if the big sad will ever come back. It is affected by so many things that are completely out of our control (while our mindsets and actions can certainly help). Things might get better tomorrow, or they might get worse (or stay the same) and eventually there is always a possibility that I might come to a point where I feel like I am hurting people merely by existing again. And nothing I wrote in this article will rationally convince me that I am wrong. But today, I know that I fucking love being alive. I think we are surrounded by amazing people everywhere, people that might hurt us, but I need to have faith that they won’t. Because I wouldn’t be here if they weren’t kind. I want to spend this time where I am lucky enough to have faith in people to know and connect with as many people as possible. There might be a million rational reasons about how the world sucks, but our feelings and emotions aren’t really rational. When I connect to someone and get to know them, when I relate to them, when I feel ecstatic about something they are enjoying, that’s not a feeling that any rational argument might encapsulate. I might not be special, and I might end up hurting a lot of people, but I need to irrationally have faith in myself to be able to love. Believing that people are kind and empathetic is why I have the beliefs that I do. It lets me be optimistic about everyone I meet and everyday I go through.