Why I Want To Die
The title alone feels like the subject headline you would have when submitting your application to the world’s saddest reality TV show…
But I had a fun little brain-spiration involving a way to describe what it’s like when depression hits and you want to die.
I think that suicidal thoughts are a kind of difficult idea to grasp for most people. Sure, there are a lot of moments in your life that your brain goes “wow I wish I was dead.” Like when you remember that you have a test tomorrow that you’ve not studied for. Or when you laugh so hard you fart in front of someone cute.
But in these cases, it’s just a passing thought. At no point do you actually consider ending your life. Humans are designed to want to cling to life, to keep surviving. So the idea of actively wanting to die is pretty much unthinkable.
But suicidal thoughts spawning from depression are (bear with me here) derived from a kind of boredom.
Imagine you have the most inconceivably boring desk job (I apologise now if you do have an inconceivably boring desk job and this hits too close to home.)
I’m talking mind numbingly boring. I’m talking going through documents and noting down how many letters are in each paragraph. Do it now. Do it with this. Count how many letters are in each paragraph until this point. I’ll wait…
…See how boring that was? You probably didn’t even do it because it’s so boring. And that was only 1032 letters you had to count! ( 112, 98, 250, 186, 83, 124, 179 respectively. This ain’t amateur hour here!) But imagine that is the kind of boring desk job you have. And you have to do that all day. Not work hours. All day. You have to work while you eat, drink, go to the bathroom. The only respite you have is sleep.
The only thing you can do is this menial task all day. They’ve unplugged the internet. Taken your phone. Your office is dull grey with nothing in it. All there is is you, the documents, and…yeah that’s it.
Depression is like that. Unending monotony.
Stepping back, what would your advice be to this person in the office with this terrible, boring job?
To quit.
Your advice would be to quit your job. Quit the unending monotony.
When you’re depressed, life feels like that boring office job. No matter what you do, or where you go. Your brain is still counting those numbers in that grey cubical.
And the reason people with depression keep on living is the same reason people stay in monotonous desk jobs; if they didn’t, other people would get hurt by it. People are relying on you to get money to put food on the table, and people need to know how many letters are in those paragraphs. So you keep doing it. Even though you hate it.
But they want to quit. So, so badly. They just want to quit.
People working in a job they hate don’t want to be unemployed. They just don’t want to be working there any more.
People with depression don’t want to be dead. They just don’t want to be alive any more.
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
Originally published at moreimpossiblegirl.wordpress.com on December 29, 2015.
