At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.
How do you explain that?
My take, informed from decades of personal experience, is the most effective form of suicide prevention is to create an environment (world), in which one can legitimately and actively, choose to participate in when we’re at our most vulnerable.
For me, my depression and suicidality spawns from my inability and unwillingness to develop my sociopathy to a level required to be mistaken for an acceptable participant in the world today.