14/06/2020
*SU***DE IS NOT A SOLUTION, NEITHER IS LIFE WORTH IT*
BY: Sahal Yawar
_âSushant Singh Rajput, a 34 year old Indian actor committed su***de today.â_
Itâs all over the news right now and itâs making peopleâs hearts ache.
BUT WHY? There are people out there who having been spending their entire lives below the poverty line, having no fresh food to eat most of the time, they keep living until they die of hunger, but they donât commit su***de. Why did Sushant commit su***de? Why did the famous the famous Robin Williams or Lucy Gordon commit su***de? Why did the author and journalist Ernest Hemingway commit su***de? Why do people take their own lives and why is it not worth it?
Every su***de has a component of tragedy and mystery attached to it. Here is something I want to tell to those people who thing people commit su***de because they were not simply brave enough. I wouldnât be able to put it in my own ways as successfully and clearly as Sally Brampton did in âShoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depressionâ:
âKilling oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a su***de, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.â
Taking oneâs own life is unimaginably difficult. It takes a lot to think that âitâs time to take your life. Lifeâs not bearable anymoreâ. David Foster Wallace, an American essayist and novelist, who took his own life in September 2008, wrote in his novel âThe Final Jestâ:
âThe so-called âpsychotically depressedâ person who tries to kill herself doesnât do so out of quote âhopelessnessâ or any abstract conviction that lifeâs assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fireâs flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. Itâs not desiring the fall; itâs terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling âDonât!â and âHang on!â, can understand the jump. Not really. Youâd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.â
David Foster is not entirely right about it, but he does give us a clear picture of what goes on inside the mind of a su***de. Every suicidal tendency stems from extreme hopelessness. Mark Manson puts it this way: âHopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.â Once the idea that âlife is not going to get any betterâ takes hold of the brain, itâs almost impossible to let it go. But thatâs not true, the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn. Life is not always happy, itâs not always painless, there come dark hours and long unbearable nights, but the sum total of good things that happen in life makes it worth living. Itâs just that our brains pick and notice bad things much faster that it does good things, good things happen far more frequently.
Here is why life is not worth a su***de and why itâs never a solution.
The way I see it, every suicidal tendency stems from extreme hopelessness. That hopelessness is caused by either of the following things.
*1) Past unbearable memories:*
Maybe there is something in your past, a tragedy that is so extremely painful, it is almost impossible to get it out of your head. But would ending your life make them go away? You will never be able to eradicate those things, because no one has control over the past. But what you do have control over is your future. The past is gone, what matters now is the now and the future. It will take time, but you will eventually learn how to live with the past and that will help you make a better future for yourself and your next generations. You canât control or alter your past, but you can save other people from getting those painful memories so that they donât haunt them the way they haunted you.
*2) Past guilt:*
Maybe you have done something terrible in the past and the guilt you are feeling keeps telling you âyou donât deserve to liveâ. But trust me; everyone has a dark chapter in their life, no matter how big they are just mistakes. Just like your past you canât change them. But what you can and should do is not to repeat the same things in future and stop other people from doing so. Everyone commits mistakes and blunders; itâs the ones who fix them and do not repeat them that are the real good people.
*3) Life Sucks:*
Maybe generally your life just sucks. Everything thatâs happening to you is terrible, you donât get justice, people mock you, you donât have money, someone broke your heart, your boss fired you; you have been unsuccessful for quite long nowâŚeverything is so f*dked up! But ask yourself the question of what is it that you want. âa better lifeâ right? But is su***de a solution? Su***de doesnât end your miseries; it only extinguishes the chances of your life getting any better ever! So donât do it, the dawn will come, it always does!
As Juliette Lewis once said:
âThe bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.â.
Life is beautiful, itâs just not always a bed of roses.
