If you have the courage to end your life, then you have the ability to change your life
Last week, a friend told me to quit writing about suicide. He said I should stop writing about fighting suicide if some days I still got tired of life, and I didn’t know what to say. Get angry? Thank him for sharing his opinion? Explain things to him?
I choose silence instead. And then, I got reflective. Was it hypocritical of me to write about ways to fight suicide if there were still days I wanted nothing more than to just die? Was taking mental health and psychology seriously a dishonest thing to do? Was I honest with myself about how I felt and the struggles I felt each day?
I realized that writing about mental health wasn’t a hypocritical thing to do. For me, it was one way I reminded myself of all the ways I can fight my suicidal thoughts. It was a way of telling myself that “Rachael, you’ve got this. Just do XYZ and you’ll feel ABC.” For me, taking mental health seriously is a selfish thing to do. Because I do it for myself.
Of course, it’s not always that straightforward. There are days you forget to breathe, days you forget to counter your irrational thoughts with rational thoughts. Heck, there are days you forget to practice that coping skill your therapist taught you. Because you’re so overwhelmed with feeling however you’re feeling that you forget there are ways it could get better for you.
So I write to remind myself that it gets better. I write to remind others, too, that it gets better. That there are days you won’t see the sun rise, but that doesn’t mean it won’t stop raining in your mind. I write and talk about psychology and mental health because on days I do not remember, I want one comment, one post that I write, or a message, to remind me of all the ways to live. And all the reasons to live.
I desperately seek to live and thrive.
Reason 2: If you have the courage to end your life, then you have the ability to change your life.
Phil Kaye said it best in his poem, Repetition, when he said: “If you wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up, one day you’ll forget why.”
Being suicidal involves courage. And acting on that thought, requires a grace and strength that is unmatched: I hate my life, so I will take my life. See? Courage. Strength.
There’s no formula for life. No manual that says if you do this, you’ll get this result. Everyone is just winging it, really. And if you see a therapist, they tell you all the things you need to know to manage every outcome life throws at you. They tell you how to manage your mind because it all starts from the mind.
But. If we can channel the courage we use to think of ending it into actually trying to change what we do not like about our lives, will that make our life easier for us? Will we wake up tomorrow, confident that we’ve got that day and that things will be okay? Is it worth trying? Let’s experiment, then.
A friend once told me I need to approach life having one option: thrive. If you approach anything with two options, it ends up not working as best as it should. So when you approach your life with an option: live, then you tell everything that’s standing in your way—suicidal thoughts and whatnot—that you need to live. That you have to live. That you will live.
Channel the courage you have to think of taking your life, into courage that addresses the things you do not like about your life. And what you can’t control, you accept. What you can’t accept that interferes with your life, you see a mental healthcare professional about it.
Life is beautiful. It might not always seem like it, but it is. And you will enjoy life. More than that, you will thrive.
