I am told to distract myself from my desire to hurt and kill myself by everyone I share my thoughts with. Either that or thinking of people that love me and who will be hurt by my absence.
But I'm not convinced by this. I have been distracting myself for my whole life, and every distraction is transient. Music, food, drugs, sex, exercise - everything only lasts for a short amount of time before I'm dropped back into the life circumstances that made me suicidal in the first place. Some of these are obviously healthier than others, but even those don't feel like enough. As I've gotten older I've become more conscious that these are just distractions. Some say that all of life is a series of distractions, but I think this misses a crucial aspect of living, which is just the passive experience of pain or peace that one feels in the absence of any conscious stimulus. That ratio of pain to peace feels horribly skewed toward suffering for me; I've been thinking about how the average moment of my life is one of sadness and emotional and physical pain. There are moments of joy but those are fleeting and far outweighed.
I don't think life is supposed to be lived by just jumping from one distraction to the next. In many psychiatric patients, this inability to relax or focus would be considered a symptom of a mental disorder, but it's the advice that I'm given every time. I can't even get therapy more than once a month without spending my life savings on it, and most therapists are fundamentally unhelpful and become hostile if you know too much about their methods because you've been through the process so many times. I've also come to learn that most therapists are not as smart as I am (I'm not saying this to sound arrogant, to be clear, this is something that it's taken me years of misunderstanding and negative treatment to finally admit because I've been so wary of coming off that way), and so they really don't have anything helpful or new to say to me that I haven't heard many times before. This makes them hate me and I've been dropped a few times after becoming suicidal because I wasn't convinced by the empty platitudes that they threw at me because I knew my life was more complicated than that and that words would not take away the pain of my chronic illness.
Does anyone else get exhausted from the fact that this is the only solution that people offer in addition to guilt-tripping? It really makes me feel like suicide is the only way this pain will stop and that I was just not built, physically or mentally, to enjoy the experience of living.
But I'm not convinced by this. I have been distracting myself for my whole life, and every distraction is transient. Music, food, drugs, sex, exercise - everything only lasts for a short amount of time before I'm dropped back into the life circumstances that made me suicidal in the first place. Some of these are obviously healthier than others, but even those don't feel like enough. As I've gotten older I've become more conscious that these are just distractions. Some say that all of life is a series of distractions, but I think this misses a crucial aspect of living, which is just the passive experience of pain or peace that one feels in the absence of any conscious stimulus. That ratio of pain to peace feels horribly skewed toward suffering for me; I've been thinking about how the average moment of my life is one of sadness and emotional and physical pain. There are moments of joy but those are fleeting and far outweighed.
I don't think life is supposed to be lived by just jumping from one distraction to the next. In many psychiatric patients, this inability to relax or focus would be considered a symptom of a mental disorder, but it's the advice that I'm given every time. I can't even get therapy more than once a month without spending my life savings on it, and most therapists are fundamentally unhelpful and become hostile if you know too much about their methods because you've been through the process so many times. I've also come to learn that most therapists are not as smart as I am (I'm not saying this to sound arrogant, to be clear, this is something that it's taken me years of misunderstanding and negative treatment to finally admit because I've been so wary of coming off that way), and so they really don't have anything helpful or new to say to me that I haven't heard many times before. This makes them hate me and I've been dropped a few times after becoming suicidal because I wasn't convinced by the empty platitudes that they threw at me because I knew my life was more complicated than that and that words would not take away the pain of my chronic illness.
Does anyone else get exhausted from the fact that this is the only solution that people offer in addition to guilt-tripping? It really makes me feel like suicide is the only way this pain will stop and that I was just not built, physically or mentally, to enjoy the experience of living.
