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October 30 - November 24, 2023
It’s often the very thought that there’s something wrong with us that threatens to push us off the edge.
believe that the drive to self-annihilation is one that we all share.
You can have a thought and chase it away; you can have a thought and simply watch it come and go; you can have a thought and cling to it and encourage related thoughts.
Still others, like me, believe that a predisposition to certain thoughts combined with free will tie us into the knots of addiction, and the free cultivation of new ways of thinking may help us untangle ourselves, or even to cut the knot entirely.
it ever gets so bad that I simply can’t take it anymore, I can always just kill myself tomorrow.
It was her pessimism that kept her in that situation. She felt sure things could get even worse.
As Schopenhauer wrote, “As soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.”
We often leap out of the frying pan into the fire just because we can’t take the frying pan any longer.
So if I’m depressed, I could try telling myself, All you have to do—your entire task—is not to do anything. Be depressed. It hurts. And that’s okay.
In some ways, the wish to kill yourself is an expression of self-cherishing, because you don’t want to have to suffer.
Slightly more than fifty percent of people who die by suicide in the United States kill themselves with a gun,
The states that have the lowest percentage of gun ownership and strictest gun laws, like California and New York, also have the lowest rates of death by suicide. By contrast, in states with high gun ownership rates, like Utah, 85 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides.
And many of us do engage in bouts of self-destructive behavior during which, if our attention were called to the fact, we might recognize some secret longing for self-annihilation.
“Maybe consider the possibility that you can improve without hurting yourself.”
Generally speaking in the United States, according to recent comprehensive data from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, those at the highest risk for death by suicide are white middle-aged men.
“Who are you, to think that you could stop another from suicide?
As a suicidal person, I am in a struggle with myself. It is me that I want to eliminate.
The Sorrows of Young Werther, “It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being, in vain he counsels him. He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instill his strength into the invalid, by whose bedside he is seated.”
But asking “Why did she do it?” about a person who died of suicide is quite different from asking “Why do you want to do it?” of someone who is suicidal.
“There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away: this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.”
A statistic that always startles me is that about 25 percent of all chronic alcohol and drug users kill themselves.
Alcohol is involved in about a third of the suicides in the United States, and more than half of all suicides are committed by people with substance abuse problems.
My father used to complain that AA was an addiction like every other addiction, and part of what he meant was that we still live in the bottle, still secretly drink, still lurk in the shadows, until we can integrate the honesty, care, and compassion that we find and develop in meetings into our ordinary lives.
As those doors open, new choices, new freedoms, and perhaps even opportunities for happiness may appear.
If you can erode your willpower through drinking too much, you can also rebuild your willpower by recognizing that you can choose whether to drink at all or how much.
My own view-in-progress is that alcoholism is not a disease or an allergy or a condition; rather, it is a very effective and potentially addictive medication for a whole host of psychological and neurobiological problems.
We are seriously and chronically dissatisfied with our ordinary brain chemistry.
When you hear your own story repeated back at you, you understand that Hey, I can forgive her for what she did, I can see that she’s still a person worth knowing, a valuable person, and then you might realize Maybe I’m not as bad as I thought. Maybe others can also forgive me and still want me around.
Also, in telling a story, or in listening to someone else tell a story, you have the opportunity to uncover more and more of the painful truth, things you didn’t want to think about, fears you didn’t want to admit, and again, watching someone else do this, you see their bravery and their merit.
Stories break through loneliness and self-loathing.
The idea is that as long as we recognize that we are always free to kill ourselves, as long as we are alive, our freedom can never be compromised.
Killing oneself could be the most fundamental rejection of freedom
And suppose there is no afterlife: does it make sense to say that a basic exercise of one’s freedom is the relinquishing of that freedom?
In other words, taking my life is a way of establishing control over my own particular world—it’s my world because I can discard it; but how much more so do I make my world my own by choosing to live?
freedom to live means something much more than freedom to die.
Certainly, other philosophers and writers who argue in defense of suicide frequently mention the feeling of not belonging anywhere.
“Imagine what your life would be like if you had the same contempt for others that you have for yourself.”
Am I so vain that I imagine I am the only person in the world vile enough to truly deserve to die by his own hand?
can be an ordinary depressed person, who just has to survive, so that I can try to do a little bit to make things slightly better rather than, in killing myself, worse.
just as you need others, those others need you.
When death comes, I don’t want to be there.
But now I think of relapse as the opportunity to revise my thinking about alcohol entirely and accepting that I can’t will myself to change.
Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality.
But if you can expand your attention away from the pain, the pain already seems—and is—less important, less compelling.
what kind of life would I have to have in order to have a good death?
The French saying “It’s the fate of glass to break”
How can we be creative in becoming resilient, when you face the challenge of loneliness, paranoia, anxiety?
