I was thinking yesterday about suicide. No, not suicidal thoughts, but the idea behind committing suicide. I forget what prompted it. It might have been a story about "The Office" in which Steve Carrell's character puts his head in a noose and told young kids that "Suicide is not the answer." The suicide prevention groups cried foul because they felt that depiction of suicide by Hollywood on such terms not only causes pain to those family members who've had loved ones kill themselves, but causes those who would kill themselves to become more emboldened to do it. It's safe to say this is a sensitive subject.
On my own thoughts of suicide: I have thought them. Not recently, but when I was an adolescent, and a suffering adolescent as most are, I thought them. And probably other times when I have been heartbroken, the thought has flitted through my mind. When I told a friend in college that I had considered it, he looked at me like I was crazy. The thought had never crossed his mind. "Lucky him," I thought. "His life must be perfect." Years later, when I played a game of "I Never" with a friend and said "I've never thought of killing myself" and we both drank, I felt a sort of validation. I wasn't the only one who felt my life was crummy at some point. That was nice.
But the actual thought I had of suicide the other day, was that it is all about control. The person feels helpless and that there is nothing they can do to change their life, that things will only get worse, and that the only thing they can do to alleviate the pain is to end everything. Then the pain will go too. But if death is what they want, why not do something heroic, something people are afraid to do because they fear dying, and save someone or something, do something good? You might die, but you want to die anyway, right? -- Seriously, I was so taken with this line of thinking in high school that I actually told my Harvard interviewer about my idea to write a story about it. As I didn't get into Harvard, I guess he didn't buy it. -- But no one does that. Maybe because killing oneself is a selfish act felt at the point when you care the least about helping anyone else, only in allaying your own suffering.
It also occurred to me - Why not leave it up to fate or to God? Put that bullet in the chamber and spin it. Like Russian Roulette, I know. And if you die, then it was because you were meant to, and if not - maybe you weren't meant to either. But people don't do that either. Or maybe they do. I don't know. But I could see why they wouldn't. Because that would mean that their life wasn't in their own hands. They would be leaving it up to somebody else, and that would mean they had no control. And that is the one thing they want - control. The reason you want to kill yourself is because you feel you have no control. (If you felt you had control, you would feel you could do something about your crummy life, right?) Suicide is the ultimate form of taking control over your own life. You kill yourself. You did it. No one else. You decided when to end it.
Now that I think about it, I guess I've been touched by suicide more than I realized. Indirectly. In high school, one of my classmates had a mom, whom she was really close to, who was killed in a car accident by a woman bent on killing herself. Her father, who was also in the car, survived, and went to help the woman who tried to kill herself, who also survived. It was a tragedy that changed my classmate in a dramatic way. And then the year after I graduated high school, we heard that one of our art teachers - who I had but brief encounters with, and who had transferred to another school - had killed herself. And she had just had a baby, and already had another child. But for whatever reason people said she killed herself - the principal of the new school gave her a scathing review, or she was distraught she never accomplished her dreams - she had taken her life. My former history teacher told us that she had been cowardly to kill herself when she had kids, and at the time, I thought it was cold for him to say that. I could sympathize with a woman who was so sad, she felt she had no other choice but to end it all. But now, I understand better why my history teacher said that. It is because it was a selfish act. She only thought about herself in killing herself. She didn't think about her two kids who would be left without a mother to love them, or her husband who would be left taking care of two kids on his own. She only thought of her own pain. True, she might have thought they would be better off without her. But it's selfish to think that other people would move on so easily and not suffer as greatly as you. Because the truth of the matter is, you don't just live for yourself. You live for other people too.
That is not to say that I am against suicide. I'm not. It's your life. It's your choice. Even though you also live for others, you can't live only for them.
This brings me to the topic of mass killings. There have been so many recently - two in the last two days - that it got me to thinking about it. I was actually going to discuss the Fort Hood and Orlando massacres when I started this post, but then I realized how close it was to the concept of suicide that I decided to intertwine the two. Like suicide, killing others because you are desperate and depressed is a selfish act and an act of taking control. But whereas people who kill themselves blame themselves and want to end their pain, people who kill others blame others and want to inflict their pain onto them. Everyone should feel how they feel. It is the ultimate in selfishness. And when they see others do it on the news, they realize they can be just as selfish. And that for one moment in time, people will care about them. It may be just so that they can hate them, but for some people, they would rather have hate than nothing.
I could say how this proves my theory that men are just as, if not more, emotional than women to my male friend. Or that this society we've created in which we make everyone else responsible for our happiness or frustration instead of looking at ourselves is a factor. Or that what these people really lacked was the education and imagination to realize that they could find a way to change things, instead of believing there was no way out, no other way. But those are ideas for another time. Because fear and sadness and anger, they stop you sometimes. They cloud your mind from finding solutions. And the result is even more fear and sadness and anger for everyone around you. And then it's not till it's too late, or never, that you may realize that all the terrible things you imagined were all in your head until you made them come true.
God bless the victims and their families.
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