A Possible Answer To Those Who May Believe That Suicide Is A Result Of Weakness Of Character:
So, you believe those who suicide are weak. That's cool. (I'm sure you agree.) You believe that they kill themselves because they don't have the strength to make it in this world. Maybe so, since you must know what you're saying. You believe that they die because they are weak and don't deserve to live anyway. (Okay, but if so, you're dangerously close to agreeing with Darwin...you may want to take a step back....) From what I hear and read, you feel, think, believe that anyone who kills himself/herself has admitted a weakness that could have been strengthened and healed by you, your beliefs, efforts, faith, or Supreme Deity. Okay.
Do you want to stand up for what you believe? Do you? Do you have the strength that faith ultimately demands, the strength to deny even yourself for it’s sake? Okay, take this challenge, then.
You will take it, won't you? Otherwise, you'll show yourself to be weak and thus deserving of self-inflicted death. (See your own belief system.) And, I mean that you'll take this challenge for real; don't pretend, but live it. Feel it as if it were real (because it is....) Otherwise, you shame whatever it is that you do believe in.
Unless you worship some god of suicide, in which case you are so far from home as to be dead anyway, so shut up already.
The challenge:
Go outside and run. Yes, run. Run and run and run. Keep running. And running. See you run. Run, you, run. Run, run, run. Run until your side hurts and your breathing-in feels like an acceptance of icy daggers of bronchial pain for the sake of oxygen and one more minute of living. (In other words, until your chest hurts....)
Now, keep running. You heard me. Keep running. Or are you weak? Run, you, run. Run until you barf spontaneously and surprise yourself with your ability to move forward while simultaneously reliving this morning's breakfast. Wipe your mouth and keep running. Yep. I said keep running. Or do you want to stop? Like a weak person might? No? Okay, then. Keep running, barfo-matic.
And keep running. And running. Now you're stumbling over changes in topography. (That means you're tripping over rocks and piles of dirt and stuff....) Keep running, you strong, perfect, faithful specimen of glory and greatness. (Isn't that what you're about? Faith Is it faith in a god named God? Or is it faith in your unexpressed fears and unacknowledged lack of faith? Doesn't matter. You have to keep running either way...)
Run and run and run. And run. Run until you can't take another breath, until you can't run anymore. And keep running anyway. Can you? Yes? Okay, then. Keep running, you. Run, run, run.
Run until your legs go rubbery and then fail and you find your face grazing dirt and your knees scraping gravel. Blink and cry the dirt from your eyes and crawl or shimmy or urge forward if you can, because you have to keep running! And running. Get up already! What are you, weak? No? Then get up and run! Run, you, run. See you run. And run. And then you fall.
And then you breathe only sand. And then you move only to retch. And then you scrabble forward only to find that you're describing broken circles in the dirt and weeds upon which you have fallen, and that you're going nowhere in spite of your willing it to be otherwise. Now. Permanently, it seems. Because, try as you might, you can't move anything, can't move anymore. Breath is only constricted, painful, and tasting of earth. And of snot. Is that blood?
Movement is all and only at the whim of centrifugal force and gravity as the World, Home, Mother rotates, unaware of your momentary distress. Or permanent distress.
How does it feel? Like you may never take another breath that doesn't also sear your chest with a ripping, burning, scarring, "This one couldn't make it," pain, another breath that doesn't also choke you with the solidness of dirt, sand, dust? (Oh, look! A flea!)
Cough. Go ahead and cough. Surely that would not be an admission of something going wrong, of a certain weakness in the one who coughs. Surely not.
No? Okay, then, don't cough. Choke.
Ah. A cough can be justified, can it? Still, though, it tasted like dirt and grubs on the intake, didn't it? Ca-hack.
No, I'm not making fun of you. I feel your pain, have felt it. The breathing isn't easy, is it? Unfair, isn't it, that something so essential to living should require effort on the part of the one needing it? Can't you inhale again? What? It hurts? So? Can't you run over there? There, where the breathing is easy? No? Why not?
Pain.
It hurts to breathe. It hurts to move. It hurts, dammit! Everything fucking hurts. Will it stop? No, of course not; it never stops, or everything dies and ends. And that will not happen. Everything is bigger. Always bigger.
Breathe in...does it hurt? Breathe in again...hurts, still? Ah. So, each time you breathe in it hurts. Yes? Make it stop? Why? So that you could keep breathing, but without pain? I wish I could.
You do want to keep breathing, though? Yes? But you don't want the pain anymore? Ah. Run, then. Run, just a few hundred feet there to the picnic shelter and the water fountain and the happy friends and family laying out the yummy picnic of goodness upon the redwood-stained table of joyful childhood memory.
Sounds good? Sounds justified? Sounds deserved? Sounds earned? Sounds like a nice, restful change from the pain and helplessness of the moment in which presently you find yourself trapped? Sounds like a fitting reward for all of your trying and straining and suffering? Does it?
Well, keep running, you. Run and run and run. See you run. Run, you, run. Now, damn you! Run!
Can't? Can't run? All of your body and mind (and spirit) is locked in a diabolic euphoria of lactic acid induced torpor? Can't breathe? Can't move? Can't change the most microscopic of your circumstances by the power of your will? Can't escape the smell and taste, texture and choking of the dirt that clogs your breath, your very existence, in spite of your own wishing it would be nicer, better, easier?
Wish that even one gentle voice might speak to you, now, instead of the clamorous buzzing of blood in your ears as it searches for oxygen that has caught the last train for the coast? The buzzing that subsides slightly with every stifled, muffled, unheard breath composed more of soil and bug-shit than oxygen?
Now.
Now, would you use a telephone or telepath or prayer or wish or hope or please, God, anyfuckingthing to call anyone who might help, listen, understand, just pleasemosesgodjesusbuddhakrishnamohammedregis BE THERE?
Would you grunt, whine, scream, heave, flex, flail, cry, growl, roar, convulse, barf, pee, fart, sing, wail, even explode just to catch the fleeting attention of anyone, anything, anywhere that might at least offer some thin shaving of understanding, or at least acceptance, of your present moment while you occupy what might be the last fractive shatter of quantum reality that includes YOU, just you, so that anyone at all might know that you were here, even if just for a nanosecond of THIS?
No? Really? No? Really, "No?" Oh, well.
Then place your hand over your own mouth and nose. Keep it there. What? It's uncomfortable? It's wrong? It's freaki...fucking evil? You can't keep it there because you want to keep breathing, keep living? If someone else was doing this they might kill you? And it wouldn't be your fault?
It wouldn't be your fault? No?
But you'd die anyway, right?
There ya go....