suicide

Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.

People try to say suicide is the most cowardly act a man could ever commit. I don't think that's true at all. What's cowardly is treating a man so badly that he wants to commit suicide.

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self _ a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama _ a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.

Everyone's a liar. Everyone I've ever known.

When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself from going downstairs to get it.

I'm trying to let him know what I'm about to do.I'm hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can't.

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing.

(...) Since I was a kid.""Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'""Right.

I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine - I'm here.""Is there something wrong with that?""Absolutely.

I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.

Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.

The so-called __sychotically depressed_ person who tries to kill herself doesn__ do so out of quote __opelessness_ or any abstract conviction that life__ assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire__ flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It__ not desiring the fall; it__ terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling __on__!_ and __ang on!_, can understand the jump. Not really. You__ have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.

I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?

I don__ know: perhaps it__ a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I__l wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don__ know, that__ all words), never wake (all words, there__ nothing else).You must go on, that__ all I know.They__e going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They__e going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn__ last, that still lasts? It will be I?You must go on.I can__ go on.You must go on.I__l go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it__ done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don__ know, I__l never know: in the silence you don__ know.You must go on.I can__ go on.I__l go on.

Kipster is a perfectly valid word,_ Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. __kay, so what does it mean?_ Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it_ it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her.__ell Sarah__ on drugs again and that__ why she did it in Mario__ backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid__ been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there__ a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won__ go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and_.__andy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she__ learned it from Jud__ death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days.

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.