This post is completely unplanned.  I should be working on posts for Media Guard Group, and yet sometimes other things come up…

In this case it came up on my Facebook stream…

Side note: The person has told me that he uses Facebook as a place to “open up debates” and what he says “are not really his views.”  Well as someone who uses FB for my business as well as personal, I have issues with that…  as someone who uses FB for personal, if those aren’t really his views, then why not create a separate account under a different name.  And as someone who has studied people, “those aren’t really my views” is utter b*llsh*t, they are or otherwise he wouldn’t post them.  (Plus making up a different name every time you go to Starbucks, “so they don’t learn your name” is just creepy.)

In talking to my coach recently I realized suicide doesn’t go through most teenagers’ mind.  I was hooked on Emergency at just 6 years old. While the show was extremely “light” compared to what would be offered now, it was about paramedics and they dealt with suicide.

When I was in 6th grade, someone many of the classmates knew committed suicide.  It was a district wide grade, so I had just gotten to know some of these classmates from other schools.   I didn’t know who died, but there was much conversation amongst the 11 and 12 year olds over who died and why she committed suicide.  There was great debate over her “creepy dad” and how uncomfortable things were at her house.

The summer I turned 13, a relative came to spend the summer with us.  Ann is 18 months younger than me.  She tried to commit suicide, so she was staying with us, and going to camp with me.  Days before camp she told me she wasn’t trying to commit suicide, she wanted the attention.

After we got to camp, she apparently wasn’t getting enough attention so she stopped eating.  She cried over her suicide attempt and everyone paid her attention.  While I tried to tell the adults how she just wanted attention, they told me I was selfish, and how could I be that inconsiderate of my own cousin. Passing me, she whispered “see I’m the center of attention and you look like a jerk!”

She never spent a summer at our house again, while I spent many a summer with people asking if she was coming to camp that year…

But suicide was never very far away.  In the summer before my sophomore year started what I call the “Year of funerals,”  it was actually a bit longer…  I remember when it started but when it stopped is sort of a blur.  It started with a classmate’s dad dying, and his funeral.  He was older.  Then a classmate’s mom’s suicide, then a dad’s death, then a brother was run over and killed, a suicide, the child I had babysat for died (heart problems), death, death, suicide… friends of friends, relatives of friends, teacher, on and on it went… I went to 6 funerals in one year, and I only went to some, and after the child’s funeral I said “no more.”

And as I’ve said before, during my marriage in an extremely morbid joke to see if they (his dad and him) noticed a thing I said, after being asked “What are your plans?” I answered with, “I plan to get a gun and shoot myself.”  Fortunately someone at the next table overheard…

But I was still on a slow road to suicide by continuing to eat very little…

Years later I was in training at a crisis center, it was a rape crisis center, but suicide, and other types of abuse training goes with it. Typically all these things are hand in hand…

Men typically choose a bullet to the brain, which is far more effective than a knife to the wrists…  yup… “results”  Men are more likely to choose to hang themselves as well. Men typically plan in advance. Women are more likely to make a quick decision on suicide. (But it was a man who spent hours locally on the bridge over the interstate promising to jump.)

Ah yes… Drama versus results…

Suicide is not appropriate joke material.

Those things don’t really matter… the fact is someone is considering ending their life.

And “success” at suicide is the loss of a life.  Are those really results we want happening?  And “attempts” that survive, may only survive this round.  Some will try increasingly drastic “attempts” until they reach “success”…  and a life ends and those left behind are left to wonder…

You can see from my past that suicide has not been far from my life.   I’ve seen other sides, but for the most it has been something that has taken a drastic  turn with a life ending or being permanently damaged and the people left behind are left in a world of hurt and quite possibly a life long pain.  The fact is that someone made it into a matter of dark humor rather than realize the seriousness of someone thinking of committing suicide.

It’s the people behind who question their lives, and what they could have done to prevent it. And it’s the people who are left behind who are more likely to commit suicide, because it’s now become an option…

And as bad as life can get/ be…  there are always cheerleaders.  You may think no one cares, no one sees you, no one notices, and there are people who silently cheer your successes and grieve with your failures.  You are a light,  even when you don’t think you are… please live on… please shine on…

Live, Light, Love,

MJ