13 Reasons Why

Posted On April 19, 2017

I’m blogging from my bed with a mobile app that doesn’t seem to 100% know what it’s doing, but here goes. I’m in bed and I feel like shit, but I also have thoughts that won’t go away.

I have been watching a Netflix show called 13 Reasons Why. I finished it earlier. I have read a lot of criticism about it, but I’m not sure that some of the people saying those things have actually seen it themselves.

I don’t really think that it glorifies suicide. I think the actual suicide scene really downplayed what it’s like to actually sit there and slit your wrists, but it definitely didn’t make it look nice, and I’m pretty sure I could never do that to myself again, which is probably a good thing.

But as someone whose suicide attempts are well into double figures, let me say something. The show is, indeed unrealistic about how people are around suicide. Because they do not, honestly, care. They will not see the ~error of their ways~, they will not kick themselves for “being afraid to love you,” nobody will yell at anybody else about horrible things that were done to you. That’s the kind of things people do on TV for entertainment purposes, but not in real life. Nobody will be taken to court for making you want to die.

People have visited me in hospital hooked up to drips, looking like shit, and still not apologised for being the kind of person who actually makes someone want to stop being alive. Or shown any emotion at all about me almost making myself fucking dead. People have given cursory speeches​ about how they’ll be there for me and they don’t want me to die, but then not let me sleep on their sofa when I have nowhere to go on leaving hospital, because they “have work in the morning and are busy”, so I slept on some fucking concrete, and then later tried to kill myself again. That’s how people are.

I will probably experience suicidal ideation for the rest of my life and I’ve been having a lot of it this month. That’s just the way my brain is broken.

I guess the long and short of it is, if your motivation for suicide is to make people regret stuff, that is a waste of your time and life. They will not regret it. Just trust me.

On the flipside, I lost someone to suicide almost 14 years ago now, and I do think about it, I do regret things, I do wish I told her how I felt. But I think it was a very different situation, and this person’s motivation was escaping something rather than making anybody feel bad. Do not kill yourself to make people feel bad, because they won’t.

You could leave people letters or tapes or whatever you want, but they are very unlikely to be read or listened to. Trust me again.

I know this is hypocritical coming from someone who currently wants to die, but, my only advice is to carry on doing whatever you need to do to be happy in life and move away- perhaps literally – from people who make you want to be dead. I won’t follow my own advice of course.

I actually find it quite fucking insulting that people think shows shouldn’t be made about suicide. That doing this at all, however the tone or portrayal, is always glorification. I think people react like this because actually, they don’t want to acknowledge the gravity of what suicide is. The act of making yourself not live.

You could have a complete blackout of any mention of suicide, for the whole of life, and people will still try to kill themselves. They just won’t be able to articulate the fucking internal hell they are feeling.

Not letting people know the ins-and-outs of suicide doesn’t make it not happen or make people not need to escape their lives or make people kinder.

And no, nobody needs to message me about this post with the usual stuff about how they’d definitely notice if I died etc.