Please Stay, We Need You
By: Mattia Maurée
Tags: Depression, You Are Not Alone, Suicide Prevention, Suicide

This pandemic year has shown how interconnected we are, how indispensable to one another. How losing people even at the periphery of our life can have a huge impact. How we can never know the impact someone has until they’re gone.

Please, please don’t kill yourself. We need you.

This isn’t about morality or your individual rights, but how deeply we need each other. You may never know how much choosing to wait will mean to those around you.

I’m only alive due to external circumstances and very persistent friends. Depressed people can’t see outside the current feelings, and at its worst it felt like I’d always been depressed and would never get better.

This year I finally threw away a small notebook-sized “suicide note” I wrote over ten years ago. It has been moving with me that whole time. This is also the first year that I feel really, completely certain that I will never take my own life. I’m committed to being alive, no matter what happens. Until this year, I didn’t know if that certainty would ever be possible, even though I hadn’t been depressed in a few years.

Most of the “note” was about not wanting to burden anyone anymore. I felt like the heavy, impossible weight on me had the same impact on those around me. But really, they just wanted me to get the help I needed.

You are not a burden. Your death would be an incalculably greater one than anything you feel embarrassed about asking for help with now.

You won’t feel this way forever. Even in the deepest depression, suicidal ideation comes and goes. We just have to wait out the worst part. In On Being’s 907th podcast episode, Jennifer Michael Hecht points out that when suicide fences are up at popular jumping bridges, people turn around and go home. They don’t go find another bridge, because it’s an impulse. She also says:

And when you look at yourself and realize that you’ve fallen in and out of love with the same person, you have fought with friends thinking you’ll never speak to them again and then you love them again — we have different moods that profoundly change our outlook, and it’s not right to let the worst one murder all the others.

People want to help. If you ask, you’ll be shocked at how many people, even a step or two removed from you, want to help. Please let them.

You are worthy of living, of receiving, of just being. You deserve rest and support.

If you’re at immediate risk, please use one of the following resources for free, 24/7 help with distress and crisis resources. National Suicide Prevention Hotline at (800) 273–8255. For the Crisis Text Line, text CONNECT (266–6328). The Trans Lifeline providing trans peer support is at (877) 565–8860.

If you’re not at risk right now, but like my recent self are not yet 100% committed to living, please write yourself a note to read while you’re depressed. Hecht suggests “I am happy right now, despite previous depressions, please do not do anything to inhibit this from happening again.”

I’m grateful to you for reading this, for waiting, for staying for now. Stay for today. Commit to the next five minutes. For many people right now who are at physical and financial risk due to coronavirus, all we have is each other. Thank you for staying for the rest of us.

If you’re not in crisis but are having strong feelings, this post may be helpful: How to Feel Better Right Now. Also I wrote a song for a suicide prevention fundraiser called Stronger Than I Knew.

More Hecht quotes from the podcast episode:

If you can’t think of a way out of it, that doesn’t mean there’s not a way out of it. Look how involved we all are just under the surface, and let’s try to help each other. No such thing as wasted contributions. Sometimes when you can’t see what’s important about you, other people can. We are indebted to one another, and the debt is a kind of faith. A beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being. [Camus] says life is absurd, there’s no outer reason that you have to, but that suicide is the wrong step, that life is worth living — this absurd, strange thing should be witnessed, and it’s vital that you essentially have some respect for your future self, who’s going to know things that you don’t know.