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"Why can't suicide be glamorous?"

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"Why can't suicide be glamorous?"

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 35

Hi all, it's been awhile. Everything takes a long time for me to absorb, learn, and use, I suppose. My take on this topic is such:

My "fight or flight" instinct switch seems to get stuck in the "on" position. When I'm more mentally stable I am able to reason through an unsetteling situation (using the techniques I've learned here.

When I'm not doing so mentally well I'm either going to be stubborn, insist things are as bad as my mind makes it, or I'm going to run away from the situation.

Suicide can't be glamorous because in the end, it's running away. Permanantly. The thought of not having to deal with the messes I've made or imagined is a day-dream.

It takes such a tiny amount of time to end it all, but after that initial thought of escape, the the thoughts of family and friends left behind and the pain they would be left with snaps me back.

After dealing with all of this depression, anxiety, etc. for this long, I know I can make it through dark days again. Suicide is for cowards.

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1890

Hi Vloren,

You know, I think that that phrase "checking out" is apt.

We "check out" of places we don't like or are finished with.

But what if we see life as a motel and instead of checking out

we have to accept the way the place looks and smells and feels like

because there's no other accomodation elsewhere if we do

leave right away - before the night is over??

I'm less impulsive than I was 20 years ago or 40 yrs ago but I know

that set of parameters in the mindset which makes it simple to slam

the door and get into my car and just drive out of a bad situation.

It took a while but I had to find the peace and acceptance in a meditative state.

It comes with a Japanese phrase "Shigata ga nai" which is hard to translate accurately

but which means " Shame. Nothing to be done about it" . The message is the same as that of the AA prayer.

-The wisdom to accept the things I can't change- After a while I found that it became easier to lay back and let the

water flow off my back, to be like the willow rather than the oak in a high wind...

Dumpling has it right too... you have to be a fighter to get the little moments of joy out of this Ball in Space.

Patrick

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 101

Humour helps. As a (not right now) suicidal person and a suicide victim (It is the ones we leave behind who are the true victims.) that macabre statement appeals to me. I think, that if you said that to me in a severely depressed state, with the tone I hear between the lines, it might help. Laughing at yourself is good. If suicide were pretty and melodramatically glamorous, why would anyone ever bear the pain of depression? It's not. It is a grieving father washing blood and brains from the ceiling while a nine year old peaks in the door. It is the destruction of everyone you love and everyone who loves you. So when it is hard to hang on, This is how I hang in there.

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 2

Thank you all for your responses. First off sorry for posting in the wrong forum. I've read some of the posts and I think this site is a great avenue for people to connect to others who can relate or at least sympathize. I suppose that a lot of my humor comes from a detachement from emotion and also a yearning to vocalize my pain without bringing other people down. I've never really had any friends not much family. What little family I had threw me in and out of psych wards the rest disowned me for being gay. My mother was an abstract artist and my father was a proctologist, thats how I view the world. Old movies and theatre was really my only outlet and escape as a kid. I originally said "Why can't suicide be glamorous?" as a joke to someone whom I was speaking with about my first serious suicide attempt. I was explainging to him that at the time of my attempt I really thought that it was going to be simple, painless and perhaps a little pretentiously poetic. The phyisical pain and ultimate grotesque results of what I did turned out to be quite the opposite of the "glamorous" vignette I was expecting. As naive as it sounds I thought suicide was going to be like some Anne Welles moment stumbling across Malibu beach and passing out on the shore from too many dolls (ten points to whoever can name that movie!). So the dark joke in the above topic title really meant that I would be dead already if it really was (glamorous). I'm proud that I made it through all that crap in my childhood and teen years but the allure of just checking out still crosses my mind quite often. In some ways I've convinced myself that suicide is the ultimate form of self love - keep submitting yourself to a world that offers little but daily pain and suffering or just end it. I'm still not sure how to feel or think about it. So anyway, thanks again you guys for listening.

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 3043

hi vloren. i usually have that darker sense of humor and can see the literary use of the images you present. but the audience is very important. this forum is about moving past all the pain and suffering. not giving into it. maybe it is why all the responses are very negative to suicide. I posted some bipolar jokes that seem to have been accepted... because they poke fun at the illness and can apply to a part of the population that is excentric. i see the creativity that creates your images and some of the pain. this is what makes suicide such an attractive mortal enemy. when every thing looks like an iron maiden for the living suicide is that glamour and escape, the next and best adventure. i have looked at that horizon many times. i still do not know why i stay but i am here for the long haul now. Vloren, can you go deeper that the humour and the smiling mask and tell me about your pain and hurts. we are all hear to learn about out illness by listening. we are here to help because when we need it someone will be there for us. we are a community, and we know a lot of what what makes you want to brush off the nastiness and hide it (from yourself) with a joke and change if conversation. maybe you need to go to the next step and tell us why suicide is glamorous for you?

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1890

Yeah, Vloren, I could see the subject as funny in the same way I'd find a Noel Coward wordy-farce, set in the twenties with flappers mooning about in a glib way, funny - but Coward's little plays were meant by him as clever, money-making affairs with just enough social criticism to have himself taken seriously as an artist. However, the vapid mores of the "rich" he needed to amuse, but which he held in couched contempt, went beyond his audience's middle-class amusement at the drawing-room sentiments of the stupidly rich . But then I always felt as I got older that Coward was more of a dilettante than a convincing social commentator... I'm sure he never compared himself with, say, Shaw or even Maugham ... he was, as he so aptly called his un-hero, a "Champagne Charlie" - an under-educated poseur... In the end there's nothing funny about a suicide neither for Ophelia nor for the thousands who kill themselves every year. Read A. Alvarez's book The Savage God (1972) and Emile Durkheim's works on Suicide... Patrick

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 8760

Vloren, Different people have different ways of adapting & coping with depression. Using humor is acceptable so long as it is done in the right context and the audience is considered. As it's been said many individuals do not take the matter lightly. Danielle, Bilingual Health Educator

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 172

Hi, You can tell by your post that you are new to the site and welcome but have you read through any posts? Of course we all laugh at ourselves on occasion, that is when we are able to laugh at anything at all. The one thing that is NEVER mentioned in jest is suicide. I hate coming onto the site and not seeing someone familiar posting when they have been having difficulties because we would never know if they are in hospital, just taking a break or worse. The people here become our friends. We get to care about each other but ususally have no other way of keeping in touch other than this site. Sorry, its just not funny. For some people its very real.

16 years ago 0 +0 / -0 2

I'm new to this site and I just recently started going to a psychologist for my on going issues with suicide and depression since I was 9 years old. My problem with therapy is that every therapist I've ever gone to has absolutely no sense of humor. I asked the above topic title to my therapist in slight jest to feel him out but received a cold as ice glare. To add I meant not to offend anyone by the topic title but I feel my way of coping with my constant state of depression is to poke fun at it and sort of add a sense of melodrama to the point of campiness. Everytime I talk about my "depression" I can't help but laugh at myself sometimes and think how utterly silly I sound, like some bad Joan Crawford or Greta Garbo flick. Is it wrong to not take yourself and your situation so seriously? Is it possible to cope with sadness without talking like its a terminal illness? I don't know, maybe I'm way off base but I'd like to think that depression can be some fabulous madame butterfly moment. Who wouldn't want to check out with a silk kimono and great music.

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"Why can't suicide be glamorous?"