eventually you realize you don’t want to die. you just don’t want to live the life you’re living. and slowly you try to create a life you want to live. just gotta start there.
no one needs to add “sounds fake but ok”, “no”, “well, not me”, “impossible”, etc. to this post. and i’d rather you not.
one day you think: I want to die.
and then you think, very quietly: actually. actually. I think I want a coffee. a nap. a sandwich. a book.
and I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friend, I want to sit in the sun
I want a cleaner kitchen
I want a better job
I want to live somewhere else
I want to live
The thing to understand is that Depression
Even When It Is Trying to Kill You!
Is Defensive.
Your brain exists to preserve you; it’s just Dumb, and how it goes about “preserving” is determined by evolution’s ‘Good Enough’ meat-and-chemistry mechanisms rather than a firm grasp of biology.
You know how, stuck atop a burning building, ppl will sometimes throw themselves off in a vain hope of surviving? That’s what depression-driven suicide is. You are under THAT amount of stress, often sustained for a FAR longer time. Your brain only understands “Stress”: it doesn’t know causes, it doesn’t know Events, and it only has the one set of instinctive ‘extreme measures’ to fall back on. I made things SO hard on myself for SO Long conceiving of Depression as a Fight I had to Win, rather than a chronic illness in need of my understanding and careful management.
Help your brain. Nurse it. Ask yourself where it hurts and why. Recognize that the desire to die is a symptom, an injury, and not your ‘Truth’. Try to calm it, Try to endure: It WILL Pass. As perverse as it sounds, your desire to die is an expression of how PASSIONATELY you want to get away from the pain tormenting you; of how MUCH you want to LIVE. PLEASE Live!
