I Understand Suicide

Growing up I always thought that suicidal men are weak, cowardice, and chose the easy way out.

This was obviously an ongoing philosophy not because I was ignorant of the tribulations that people encounter, hell, I had my fair share of impossible situations to deal with. And no, not the “my girlfriend is mad at me” or “I didn’t make the team” sort of problems… More like I had to watch a fetus swim in a tub and flush it out while I figured out what I’m going to eat in the morning because there’s no food in the house and how will I get to the final exam to pass the module, sort of problems. Or maybe the time when I ingested poison to induce a seizure just to get a bill claimed because I owed a loan shark who just happened to be a doctor too much money. 

You can stop reading at this point if you like because this, this is just the tip of the iceberg. From this point onwards, things may get too graphic.

So I understand the likes of Ricky Rick, a successful individual who abruptly ended his life. I understand the bubbly person, a friend or even a neighbour choosing this path.
I used to think that if “I could survive the impossible things that happened to me, then anyone else should be able to survive theirs.” 
And this was a flawed rationale because surviving something does not give the authority to decide how much suffering another human being should be able to carry.

See, before this epiphany, I always thought that endurance was the determining factor of a man’s strength. And his inspiration, the reflection of his will. 

Today, I not only reject this notion, but hate the association of it. It’s a part of me that I need to learn how to forgive because, well, I didn’t know any better.

I didn’t yet realise that men who are driven to suicide are not necessarily running from anything. They are not being cowards. And they are not weak. They haven’t necessarily “given up.”

Perhaps strength was the wrong measurement altogether.
I had somehow created this equation where a strong man endures, survives, gets through it, keeps going. And a weak man cannot endure, cannot keep going, and eventually gives up.

But that still makes endurance the measurement of a man’s strength.

And perhaps it shouldn’t be.

Because there are men who have fought every single day, every minute of each day and every second to a point where they died long before their bodies stopped swinging. Not because they were weak. Not because they didn’t fight. But because perhaps nobody ever stopped to ask what that level endurance was costing them. 

Infact, still, nobody does, even to the ones next to you. And if you are a man reading this, I bet you don’t even stop to ask yourself.

See I can go on and talk about post-natal depression, a woman, with a beautiful new born, having thoughts of suffocating her baby to death and then hang herself but instead, spares the baby and takes her own life. 

I can identify with a woman in an abusive marriage or relationship; being made to feel worthless, trapped and vulnerable yet still expected to show up and be strong. Bound by the delusion of love and subservience until the only rational escape is suicide instead of moving on without her partner – because she doesn’t know what life looks like on the other side. She has never felt what it’s like to be loved, appreciated and cared for. She has been conditioned to believe that her abusive relationship is all that exists. Of cause this is false. But who am I to judge and who are we to put blame?

Let can back it up with a true story that you can relate to:

So you open your eyes one morning, first thing you see, the sunshine. I mean, the day is beautiful. Almost damn near perfect. A good day to thrive, a good day to succeed, a good day to make some money, a good day to live.

So yes, you wake up. Bath. Get dressed. Smell fresh. Get out the house and take care of business.
The end of the day.
You come home.
You have a nice meal.
You do whatever relaxing thing that you do and go to sleep.
Tomorrow, you wake up again.
Same thing.
Rinse and repeat.

If you are waiting for a plot twist, there isn’t. And that’s the point. This is not a tragic story to make you understand that suicide is a cycle of events that lead to the act.
That’s an unfair assumption. 

Because people who commit suicide do not all suddenly have a shift or change of events that throw their lives towards that trajectory. Sure there are sad moments, kak days and fucked-up situations.
Life is “lifing.”

There are events that happen that can make a person depressed. It’s normal. However, that normality can become a reality where survival replaces the luxury of peace.
Anhedonia becomes a subconscious barrier between existence and experience.

The world can be beautiful while the person is incapable of experiencing its beauty. Nothing necessarily has to become objectively worse for someone’s experience of life to become unbearable. And a person can be extraordinarily good at performing life without necessarily experiencing life itself.

From the outside: functioning.
Internally: nothing.
And this description doesn’t even touch the surface of what can lead to a suicidal act.

We always defer to an existential crisis to justify the act.
Perhaps sometimes nothing terrible happens at all.
The sun still comes up.
The bills still need to be paid.
People still need you.
You still go to work.
You still answer your phone.
You still laugh at something somebody says.
You still eat.
You still shower.
You still make plans.
You still exist.
The tickets still sell like normal.

And yet, somewhere underneath all of that, something is happening that nobody else can see. And this is where I think we have misunderstood suicide.
We look for the event.
We look for the breakup.
The job loss.
The financial problem.
The death.
The rejection.
The bad day.

The thing that finally pushed someone over the edge.

But what if there is no “finally”?
What if there is no single moment?
What if what we are witnessing at the end is not the beginning of the problem, but simply the point at which a person’s capacity to continue carrying what they have been carrying has been exhausted?

And even that needs to be said carefully, because suicide isn’t one single experience. The objective world and a person’s subjective experience of that world can be radically different yet, just like pleasure and pain, both can be real and exist at the same time.

Some people experience hopelessness.
Some experience resignation.
Some desperately want to live but cannot see a way forward.
Some experience an overwhelming desire to escape.
Some are ambivalent right up until the end.
And some are experiencing psychological pain so severe that their perception of what choices are available to them becomes completely distorted.

So I don’t want to replace one unfair idea with another. I don’t want to say that every person who dies by suicide was some heroic warrior who simply fought until they couldn’t fight anymore. Because that would be romanticising something that is far more complicated.

What I want to reject is the idea that suicide is proof of weakness.
That the person was lazy.
That they were cowardly.
That they didn’t want to fight.
That they simply chose the easy way out.
Because sometimes the person everyone called strong was never strong because he could endure anything.

And perhaps that also contributes to the way we talk about men.
We teach them to endure.
We praise them for being strong.
We tell them to keep going.
We tell them that other people have it worse.
We tell them to man up.
We tell them that tomorrow will be better.
And sometimes tomorrow is better.
Sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes the man says he’s fine.
And everybody believes him.
Sometimes he believes himself.
Sometimes he doesn’t.
We tend to forget that a man was at some stage a young boy.
A young boy who needed nurturing so that he would be able to identify and nurture his own.
A young boy that needed genuine love, compassion, character and financial guidance/development and principles so that he could be able to express those to other people and pass these teachings down to younger boys once he has become a man.

Instead, we get abandoned young boys who are expected to figure it out.
They grow into men with no compass because they were never shown how to navigate.
We get men who are sexual predators, sex addicts and womanisers, now judged and hated by a society that forgets that he was once a young boy that was sexually groomed by older girls and women since he was 8 years old.

Instead of protecting that young boy, he was given a pat on the back by his peers, uncles, older brothers and the like for losing his virginity. This, rejected by other women who refused to believe the possibility.
So he buried his trauma in silence.
And sometimes what is buried doesn’t stay buried. It can affect the way a person understands sex, intimacy, rejection, power and relationships later in life.
An act that he was made to believe is acceptable.

Some men are physically abusive to their partners. I can never justify nor condone what they are. There is not enough rage, jealousy or egotism that can ever compel a man to raise a hand to a woman. It doesn’t exist. However I do sympathise for the young boy who had to grow up in such a household and received no corrective guidance.

Understanding where destructive behaviour comes from does not mean excusing it. It means understanding that prevention sometimes has to begin much earlier than adulthood. In the end, many men are never taught how to deal with rejection, prolonged pain, shame, grief or emotional vulnerability.

And perhaps we first need to become better at understanding that before we can understand why some men eventually reach a point where they no longer see a way forward.
Because perhaps there was a cry for help.
Perhaps it was simply a cry that we did not recognise.
Because suicide is not a movie.
There isn’t always a soundtrack.
There isn’t always a dramatic final conversation.
There isn’t always a warning that makes sense afterwards.

There isn’t always a plot twist.