Dark Thoughts in Daylight
“It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
You can’t romanticise suicide and if you could it would be the deepest insult to the bereaved and to those in pain from their own minds. Art has tried. Poems and paintings and stories and dark of night and moon moments of beautiful women by lakes and faces at windows and eyes blank against canvas…
It doesn’t happen that way.
The thoughts creep; they don’t wait for moments in which they can insinuate themselves into a sort of dark beauty. That’s what scary about them. If you could predict, if you could know, then it would just be a case of avoiding the dark.
It happens in daylight. It happens in sunny moments and while dashing out of the rain. It happens while driving. It happens while wandering through the supermarket trying to keep in mind why you are there or while chatting cheerfully about something you don’t remember because your head was drowning you out.
It happens when you try and show empathy to horrific news stories and in your head you’re wishing it was you. Sudden, untimely…make it look like an accident…it really doesn’t take much to set them in motion.
It happens at 4am and 4pm. When it happens, there really isn’t any difference even though your doctor always treats the sleeping issues very seriously.
Sometimes, it’s not really about being dead. It’s more like picturing your life without you in it. That of course, translates into the “you” that you have become. The medicated, desperate, lonely “you” who can’t remember ever being or feeling anything else.
This “you” has learned to answer the question without flinching, when posed by various members of the medical profession.
“Do you feel like you want to harm or kill yourself? Do you wish you were dead?”
“No.”
If there’s any hint of that full stop not being quite present, they will label it as a “passive death wish”.
If the no becomes drawn out or in any way ambiguous, your medication will be upped pretty swiftly.
Hopelessness. They don’t much like the sound of that either. But really…what point are holidays or fresh air or friends or just about anything when you’re still going to feel like this? Sun kissed beaches, blue skies, sunsets…from where I’m standing, a grey Mayo sky will do just as nicely, thank you.
Yes, I know that is the depression talking.
I don’t have many words of my own anymore.
