Tuesday, March 27, 2018

If you murder someone, even yourself, make sure you know what you are doing.

Is suicide just a RESET button? A Facebook friend of mine recently asked me if I had heard of Teal Swan. I had seen a few of her videos but there was something about her presence that was kind of cold and dark, as if she represented a dark energy that I couldn’t really pick up on. She has a huge cult following and says things like “Suicide is a reset button and Death is delicious.” Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I was watching, I read about what she is now known to be about in an article calling her the Gucci Guru. Her words never really captivated me and I found myself distracted with other things while multitasking housework and listening to one of her YouTubes like I usually do many other speakers. I told this friend,”I had never felt really drawn to her. She’s kinda dark. I like her intro cartoon though.” I said, trying to come up with something nice to say. This friend used to come to me during times of suicidal ideations before I drew a boundary and said that I couldn’t hold space for it anymore and that she needed to call a crisis line or seek professional help. I’m sure that she clung to me for a while because I offered a different perspective on suicide that wasn’t usual from a friend in need. I had recently lost a former student of mine to suicide, which was indeed sad because she was so young and surely she was full of light and the furthest thing from seeming suicidal when I knew her. I asked my Facebook then,”Is suicide a conscious choice? Do you support your loved one in making this choice?” and this spurred off a lot of reactions from people, many whom I had never heard from before on my timeline. Some people seemed disturbed that I would even bring up such a topic for discussion. I was really interested in hearing what people thought, especially since Star had just killed herself. Star was a young queer girl in the Gay Straight Alliance club that I started. She was a trailblazer and someone I would describe as truly aware of the choices that she made and a young woman who was fully in her power. For me to see her as some kind of victim just didn’t sit well with me, but the truth was I couldn’t tell with accuracy since I hadn’t actually interacted with her since high school. Suicide most definitely hurts the people around you and creates havoc financially and mentally for your family and everyone else who has to deal with the pieces that you left behind. But such is death. The same pieces are left when someone is shot and killed by a gun wielding teenager in a movie theater or school campus. Because I don’t have a strong conviction AGAINST suicide I imagine people who may be depressed and suicidal feel comfort in that state as they are probably well over tired with hearing the same rhetoric. My advice to my recent friend was similar to a friend getting an abortion. If that is your choice, make sure you understand the choice you are making, and make sure not to fail at it. Nothing worse than these attempted suicides where the person has to be committed and or have permanent scars because a bullet missed or some poison permanently damaged their internal organs. If you are going to murder someone, including yourself, make sure that you have planned it in a way that doesn’t leave a mess for someone else or yourself to deal with. It sounds easy for me to say of course. I can only speak from my biased perspective. When I felt suicidal, I did want things to get better. I was on a slow course of destruction, just putting myself in harm’s way, just begging to be hurt and killed. I took whatever drugs were put in front of me and just swallowed substances without knowing what they were, who was giving them to me and what the consequences might be. I traded sex for a bottle of pills that I hoped was Oxycodone and instead it ended up being Vicodin. I downed about 5 and then ended up throwing them all up for hours over the toilet. It was a weak half assed attempt. Maybe I was saved by a divine force, maybe I was lucky. The plan I had was to overdose on oxycodone, but I only tried that once. I can’t really tell you how I started to slowly move away from the desire to die, but I did. In recent messages, this FB friend tells me she isn’t suicidal anymore and I say,Good. Is it bad to say, that I support people where they are at? Saying suicide is a reset button or that death is delicious is just another radical perspective put out there. It definitely condones it as something “not so bad” which is possibly where Teal and I may be on a similar wave length, although I see my stance as neutral. People we know who are addicted to drugs are seen as slowly killing themselves, so I suppose in all my years of working with drug users is how I arrived where I am. People have their time to die and their time to live. It wasn’t my time to go, else, the pills would have killed me because they would have been the “right” ones. But, turns out the “wrong” ones were the right ones and I can look back at this from a keyboard and sigh, not of relief but just reflection.

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