Suicide is like a ticking bomb.

Suicide is like a ticking bomb. It might be harmless for a while, but eventually it will detonate and take you with it. It’s an insidious disease that sneaks up on you without warning and alters your life trajectory. It’s not always going to happen quickly either – sometimes suicide can creep up on you slowly, weakening your resolve over time. Once the bomb goes off you might be too far gone to escape its blast radius, even if you have some less harmful alternative choices available to you from the start. Sometimes you can see suicide coming for you for days, weeks or even months before it happens. Other times it can just smack you in the face without any prior warning.

I’m not really sure how to start this post, so I guess I’ll just dive into it. When I was living at college the school counsellor called me into her office one day because she wanted to talk with me about my suicidal ideation. That’s a fancy way of saying “thoughts about committing suicide”, which is an even fancier way of saying “there’s a chance that this guy may kill himself someday if he doesn’t change his life soon.” It was the first time I ever got called “in” on anything bad at school, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that I snuck into this counsellor’s office that day.

The last thing I want to do is put words into someone else’s mouth and pretend like the events of that day were their doing. All I can say is that her judgement was very quick and accurate: my thoughts were unhealthy and dangerous, and she wanted to help me. She was the first person to ever think that I needed serious help, and she was sincere in her intentions. She didn’t have any illusions about how dangerous the thought of suicide could be. It’s impossible to overstate the danger of suicidal ideas. The fact that some people aren’t careful with them is just a sign that these people are crazy, not that it isn’t dangerous.

When it comes to suicide, we’re talking about a serious mental disorder that almost always leads to death. It’s hard to understand why anyone would want that outcome for themselves and in many cases people who commit suicide don’t really want it for themselves in any sort of rational sense. They want to end their suffering and they want to end their life. The irrationality is probably part of it, but I don’t think that’s the only thing going on. People who are suicidal often have a lot of self-hatred and low self-esteem. They may have had some bad experiences with other people in the past, whether they were childhood sexual abuse survivors or people with eating disorders or something similar, and they may believe that life will just get worse from here. They may also have no friends or family to support them through a difficult time and there’s a persistent feeling that everyone is out to use them. Suicide is almost always an act of desperation; people rarely commit suicide out of sheer happiness.

Most people who are suicidal don’t want to die. They want to end their suffering and they want to end their pain. Some of them may pretend that they want to die because that sounds more dramatic or because they don’t understand it well enough, but that’s a different subject. The point I’m trying to make is that the suicidal person wants something better for themselves and they know what kind of action would get them there, even if it only seems like a good idea at the time. It’s not like people who commit suicide don’t realize how bad it will be for other people. They understand this just fine, and yet they still do it because they believe that their suffering is too great, and that their family and friends can handle the consequences.

Suicidal ideation has no place in any healthy mind. I went through periods of deep depression, self-loathing and despair while I was at school. Most of my thinking during these times was fairly distorted; it was easy to get caught up in hopelessness and despair over even the smallest things. Suicide seemed like such a good option at times, and yet I never did it because I knew it was bad for me and bad for other people. It might be hard to believe, but I’ve never wanted to commit suicide and I don’t think that my suicidal thoughts were ever really serious. Even in the midst of these dark times I’ve always been completely against the idea of suicide.

Tick, tick, tick. That’s the sound suicide makes in your life. You know it’s coming, you can feel it in your bones, but there is nothing you can do to stop it. The bomb has already gone off and detonated; sometimes years ago, other times just minutes ago. This isn’t a movie or a story; this is true life and death – and it happens all too often.

I don’t write to try and persuade those who are suicidal to reconsider, nor do I write this for those who have nothing to live for. Rather, I write for everyone else – the ones left behind. Suicide is a hell of a thing – it’s a hell of a way to lose someone, and it’s a hell of a thing to experience as the one left behind.

In my own life, suicide has been something that has been with me since I was thirteen years old. The first time I knew someone who had committed suicide was when I was ten-years-old, but at the time it didn’t impact my life enough for me to truly grasp how serious it is. My first personal connection to this kind of death happened when my next door neighbor killed herself. She was forty-six years old, happily married with two children, living what appeared to be a normal life. And then she killed herself. For the longest time I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was young and naive and too stupid to realize that suicide doesn’t just happen out of the blue – there is always a catalyst, always a reason for such a horrible act.

And then it happened again. Six months later, there was another girl my age, also two doors down from me, who killed herself. The second time around I got what suicide is all about. It’s not just some random act, it’s the result of something that has been building for a very long time. A lot of the time it’s because of depression or mental illness which is often undiagnosed or untreated, but more often than not there are signs leading up to the suicide – they are just too subtle to recognize them as such at the time.

Tick, tick, tick.

That experience taught me that suicide can happen at any age – that it affects everyone, not just those who appear to have a perfect life. And I also learned that there is no such thing as a happy ending – there is only an ending.