[Serious] Suicide survivors of Reddit, what was your first conscious thought after you realized that you hadn't succeeded?

I can't speak for everyone else, and I won't pretend to know exactly what you're going through. We each live in our own world, restricted to our own experiences, and I can't pretend to feel right now what you're feeling.

What I can tell you is that I was suicidal not so long ago. And I can share with you what I've discovered since.

I was, perhaps, 20 when I started to feel like nothing mattered. We've all heard the stories of people who no longer care about the things they used to, and for whom interactions and obligations become a chore, and who sort of check out mentally and emotionally. After 5 years of continuing to go through the motions, I found myself trapped in a job I was apathetic about, engaged to a woman I didn't love, with constant feelings of guilt about just how much of an apathetic piece of nothing I'd become (I was acutely aware that there are plenty of people on this planet who had it worse than I).

I'll skip over the intermediary details because this thread has more than filled its viscera quota, but I'm still here... and I'm happy that I am. More than that though, the thing I wanted to say is:

Forever is a really, really long time.

"This too shall pass" feels like a lie sometimes, but sooner or later it comes true.

Do you remember your first love? That feeling that nothing in the world could separate you from this person, and that it was meant to be, and that the heavens themselves had moved to make it so? Do you remember finding out that that was a lie, and that almost everyone around you had had that same feeling at some point or another in their life?

We deceive ourselves constantly into thinking that our world is this static... thing... but the really curious thing about people and time is that even our baselines change. The average human lifespan, depending on your gender and socioeconomic status and where you live is something like 80 years. I spent 5 of my 80 years in a world where nothing mattered, and where all I wanted in the universe was to be allowed to check out without hurting anyone.

But if that means that I get to spend the next 45 doing the things I've come to love again, and that I get to build that world and that future to be whatever I want and need it to be?

Well. It was worth it.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent