selfish
[sel-fish]
A ‘friend’ of mine wrote about depression, about how sufferers need support, understanding, to not be abandoned or given up on. I know that the irony of her words would be lost on her.
That she has, only yesterday and many times before, abandoned someone who is suffering from depression and needed support. The same someone who no matter what, stopped what they were doing and pulled themselves together, to support her, who never left her abandoned, always tried to understand, and would never give up on her, even when they had given up on themselves!
In the time I’ve known her, I’ve never not once been by her side when she needed. The times she cried for help, however loud or silent, I was physically by her side. The times her depression almost won, I helped pick her back up, I wouldn’t leave her alone or give up on her. The times something was wrong and even she didn’t know what or why, when she just needed a friend to help her understand or to listen. Never once have I ignored a call or message. Yet I have spent months alone, begging the universe to send me someone who will understand and support me, to just have someone say, “Hey friend, don’t worry, I’m here”.
The last time I cried out for help, I was feeling suicidal, I wanted to end it, I sent out a message begging for support, just someone to talk me through it until the thoughts passed, thankfully they always pass. I had no response. A week later I saw this friend, the friend who wrote about depression, who I’ve always supported, She said to me “sorry I didn’t reply to your message, but I’m not going to pander to that sort of thing anymore” she mentioned something about defeating depression by ignoring it. Less than a week later I received a message begging me to help her… for a split second I thought about ignoring her, not pandering to her, but I was always half way out the door to help her.
I wondered to myself, would she remember what she said, “I’m not going to pander to that”, if one day I asked for help and she while she ignored it, I succeeded with ending it all?
Would she think that she had done the right thing not “pandering” to my cry for help. Would she recognise that she had abandoned me, had forgotten to understand and support and had left me feeling like everyone had given up on me? Of course she wouldn’t.
I’ll just continue fighting it on my own, pretending that I’m fine, maybe one day someone will see the pain behind my smile.
“The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
“Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s 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 fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace
“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“Killing 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 suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”
― Sally Brampton“And I want to tell you about everything but I can’t because I couldn’t stand for you to have that look on your face all the time. I just need you to look at me and think that I’m normal. I just really need that from you.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still“When people kill themselves, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.”
― Jeannette WallsBut to a person suffering clinical depression/bipolar could that not seem like a terminal illness?
Does that mean that all the years they spent fighting to stay, all the times they sought help are now forgotten because they’re now defined forever by that one action of succeeding in taking their life?
Blaize 