I have a friend whose daughter committed suicide by walking in front of a train. In her daughter’s case, it was an actual train, but in many lives, the trains are metaphorical. Some ‘trains’ are PTSD, alcohol, drugs, depression, anxiety, guilt, and an assortment of mental illnesses.
Have you ever contemplated suicide and changed your mind, deciding to not go through with it? Have you helped someone else not go with committing suicide? If so, how did that happen? What saved you or someone else?
In my case, most of my life I’ve felt like quitting, but here I am. I think it’s harder to not commit suicide than it is to stay here on Earth School. Living through despair, disappointments, guilt, and knowing the intense gravity of one’s personal Black Hole is often beyond description. Poetry comes close to painting the Black Hole because poetry requires one to GO THROUGH the Black Hole in so writing about it. It takes courage to face and embrace the abyss when it stares back at you. Loving every part of our journey is imperative to survive and thrive.
When the ‘chips were down’ in my time of decision, the darkest hours of my life, I had to choose whether to live or cross the rubicon to die. I choose life for mainly two reasons:
1) On 8/19/1990 at 3:30 a.m., I turned my “will” and my “life” over to the care of God as I understand God; so “my” life was not mine to take anymore. My life belonged to my Higher Power God. If my Creator wanted me gone, then fine, and if not, that’s fine too. Mind you, I begged God to kill me more times than I could count, sobbing for mercy from this painfully cruel world. For 2 1/2 years, I wanted to kill myself every day, all day. Then it got better. I only wanted to kill myself a few times a day for the following year. LOL! But then I exited the Dark Night of the Soul.
2) There’s layers to this one: I also knew that if I gave up, the cost could be that when someone else was going through what I was going through, I couldn’t be there for them in their hour of need. Many years before the Dark Night of the Soul ensued, I decided I didn’t want to be here anymore. My body died in prison; my spirit left my body. I died and saw my lifeless body lying on that cement slab where mattresses were laid at night. I decided to not die and my spirit returned to my body. Afterward, when I realized I ‘gave up the ghost’ through grief (a choice to leave this world) and that I didn’t need to sever wrist veins or employ some other means to kill myself, I came to believe that we are all here by CHOICE. Suicide is not necessary. All a person has to do is not want to be here enough and they’re gone! So I believed the mere fact that I am still alive means I still had a purpose for my life (God has a purpose for my life). My purpose is to help others and if I’m dead, I can’t do that. LOL! This time I laugh not for irony like earlier, but rather I recall Cypher saying to Trinity about Neo, “He can’t be The One if he’s dead!”
Since my Dark Night of the Soul, I’ve had many people say my speeches helped save their lives, so had I given up, they might have given up too.
So, weigh-in on this question. Why are you still here if you survived the desire to commit suicide, or how did you help someone else not commit suicide?