(Content Warning – this discusses my personal history of suicide ideation – I am frank about being suicidal as a teenager. Don’t worry I am not actively suicidal right now)
I have been suicidal for the vast majority of my life. Most of my adult life has been about managing that desire/urge/background assumption. I don’t really remember it not being a background thought that I could just make everything stop.
My teens was about trying to not kill myself, again the evidence that I need to externalise motivations would be the fact that I didn’t kill myself over and over again because I told The Princess that I wouldn’t. My relationship with self-harm is a strange one or perhaps not, it’s about mitigating the suicidal urge, about punishing myself for oh a whole variety of things somewhere amongst of which is punishing myself for not killing my self. My twenties I guess was similarly about managing those urges and my thirties the same but with a chronically ill twist on top.
Christ this app though, I’ve talked about WeCroak before but deliberately thinking about death five times a day, the fact that it might just happen at any point, oh that really does help manage the suicide ideation.
Then, last year, feeling suddenly like myself again and feeling loved in a way that I felt as if I didn’t need to translate I was suddenly the least suicidal I have ever been. The negative in me is cynically saying that apparently I only need four people to love me to feel secure enough to not be suicidal but that’s not it. In anycase, why I wasn’t suicidal isn’t really the point, the point is that I don’t think I’ve ever questioned that I want to kill myself, it’s just seemingly always been a part of me.
Then you feel secure and yourself and are confronted with the fact that the suicidal ideation came from somewhere. And that in and of itself kinda knocks your feet out from underneath you.