I am your friend whose death is a ‘blessing’.

I’m sure you all have seen the articles about “My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing.” The sad truth is that I am that friend who is most likely to wind up dead “before my time”, and before that day comes there are some things I want you to know.

First off, death only becomes an inevitability when people like me run out of options. We are always looking for doors and windows and hands and hearts — places to crawl or run to, something enough to give us hope for even one more day. It’s not your job to save us (and we’d hate you for taking that on anyway) but a little love and understanding go a long way in persuading us to want to stick around. Your gestures don’t have to be grand, but they do need to be genuine.

It’s hard to ask for help, and we don’t always know how to reach out. “Let’s go for a drink” or “I want to hang out” can be code for “I’m in crisis and need to know that I matter.” Animals work hard to hide their pain, because they know pain is a sign of weakness; an animal who begs for help often is at death’s door. We don’t often beg directly, even though you may see us self-destructing in a hundred ways. This is how we cry out when words fail and we fear seeming weak and vulnerable.

When you stare into the void for so long, the void becomes an interwoven part of you, like the way cancer grows in the body. I realized recently that I have been dealing with suicidal ideations for nearly 2/3 of my life. That’s a long time to dance along the edge of subway platforms, with razors, with pills, to resist the siren song of the one forbidden fruit without giving in to its call. But, we are not just our darkness, though that is what you are most afraid of because it is apparently so foreign to you.

It’s like Anne Sexton says: “to thrust all that life under your tongue.” We live life like a rollercoaster, we want to grab it with both hands and dance in the rain. When life hits us hard, we go down for the count. And it’s okay that you do not feel things as deeply as we do and cannot understand the extremes — it may be the cushioning that saves you from the same fate we face. All of that energy, whether life-affirming or pure entropy, it has to go somewhere, and it shoots through us like lightning finding a mark. Life and death are our yin and yang — the greater the light, the greater the darkness.

Often, life in unkind to us in ways you cannot fully fathom. Be grateful for that too. Circumstance, genetics, human cruelty, random rolls of the dice… all of these grind us down into the dirt, leeching our happiness at random or all at once. Trauma changes the brain and body in ways we are only beginning to understand; our minds, shaped by trauma and sometimes disease work in ways you cannot fully fathom. Be grateful for your luck and health.

In our darker moments, we may lash out at you, even though we don’t really mean it. This too is self-destruction of a sort, or we may be looking for a reason to slip away. Hold tight. We don’t want to become the monsters we fear we are, but every time we are left out or ignored or mocked, we are pushed that much closer to that irreversible transformation. We inflict pain when we are in pain, like the ouroboros eating itself until there is nothing left. And pain takes many forms, like the horror of the recent tragedy in Orlando to driving your car into a lake far from home, where nobody will ever find you.

I fear the day that I run out of kind hands and hearts, the day that the pain becomes too much to take. So far, I have been able to coast along, to dig myself out of various traumas and keep a brave face for the outside world. But something broken can only break so many times before it shatters completely. Dying peacefully in my sleep when I am old seems too impossible for me; when I do choose to slip away please know that it was not your fault and I am not doing it to cause you pain or to get attention.

My reasons for both living and dying are as complex and thrilling as my darkness — and my light. Remember that.