Unrequited love isn’t the worst thing in the world. I can think of a few other things that are worse. Sure, if you love someone and they don’t love you back, it’s no picnic; but I have never heard of someone who has killed himself because he was rejected by a girl (or heard of a girl who has killed herself because she was rejected by the boy, but this would happen even less frequently if it did because girls tend to be the ones doing the rejecting). Now, I know one of you will tell me that it has happened, but I would bet you (and by ‘bet,’ I mean bet my pride) that any person who is willing to kill himself because of a romantic rejection has a personality disorder or some other thing going on pushing him to do it.
That is something people don’t understand about suicide. When a person kills himself (or herself, but men complete the action more often, so if we were picking pronouns, ‘he’ would be the one to pick), people try to understand. Suicide is especially hard on the loved ones of the individual, and those loved ones often wonder whether they did anything to bring that person to the brink. What most don’t realize is that suicide doesn’t work that way. It isn’t a reaction to one incident, and even if it can be attributed to one incident, it is more complex than that one incident. The crux of suicide comes down to mental anguish, or suffering – let’s call it suffering. A person suffers (normal). A person continues to suffer. The person’s life is consumed by suffering, and even though that person continues to fight on, he begins to wonder whether going on is worth it. And I can’t dismiss the logic of this thought.
Imagine you are in pain. Imagine that that pain makes daily living difficult; what others do with ease, you find yourself trudging through. Now, imagine you’ve been fighting through this pain. It has been months. You have been trying to just do those things that everyone else is doing. You know you need to do more. And you need to do more because if you do more, such as run thirty minutes a day, it will help lift you out of that pain. Because ‘doing more’ requires subjecting yourself to deeper pain, you just do the bare minimum, and because the bare minimum is hard, maybe you do even less than the bare minimum. And you’ve been doing this for six months, a year, maybe two. And nothing has gotten better. Well, we learn what to expect of our futures from what we see and feel from our pasts. Maybe this is why childhood trauma can be so devastating. The individual doesn’t code that experience into their conscious memory; more of that memory goes into their emotions, their actions, their reactions. So, when that traumatized child lives out in the world, he suddenly becomes anxious, he suddenly is filled with panic, he suddenly goes into attack mode and hits the first person he sees. And since this is all unconscious, it is difficult to understand why. Of course, just like the child has had trauma seared (which connotes greater permanency) into his emotions, a person suffering day after day has an idea pressed into the clay of his mind. What is this idea? “Tomorrow will be the same as today. I have been at this for six months. I have been at this for a year. I have been at this for two, three, six long years, and it doesn’t seem to be changing at all.”
So, the person does what seems logical to him: he tries to find a way to avoid the pain. The issue with mental suffering is that this pain is very difficult to avoid. One of the ways he could fix the problem is by lying in bed. If he lies in bed, he doesn’t have to face those thousands of painful moments of trying during the day. Of course, lying in bed doesn’t work, because he knows that he should be getting up. He knows that he is more capable than sleeping his life away. And he doesn’t want to sleep his life away. He wants to be a successful person. He wants to be a joy to his friends. He wants to have long conversations deep into the night with people he has just suddenly found a connection to. He wants to show other people his expertise. On some level, he wants to live a full life, but once he has gotten to the point of lying in bed all day, he doesn’t see that it is possible. The pain will follow him around wherever he goes. Years into the future, he may see success, he may see a family, he may see a glimmering life, but he also sees the pain.
There is, of course, one issue with lying in bed all day: the pain does not go away. And since the pain does not go away, he has to find another way out. Some turn to an unhealthy management of their pain. These would be the things your parents don’t want you to take and do. Other people turn to more healthy options that can help lift them out of the pain, but if the pain continues, these individuals almost certainly think about death. Why? If you were in mental anguish every single day, almost every single moment of every single day, wouldn’t you think about killing yourself? Perhaps you stand up straight at that question, puff out your chest, and tell everyone who is around that you would fight through it and come out the other side healthier, but unless you have experienced that mental anguish, can you really know? If you were honest with yourself, would you say yes? Some people turn to opioid addiction because of bodily pain. They suffer. They want a way out of that suffering. Opioids offer them that way. And when suffering mentally, it is the same equation. Suffer, search for a solution, but death seems to be the only permanent solution to the problem.
I have heard the saying that death doesn’t end suffering; it only transfers it to another person. That is a bit deceitful, isn’t it? If this is the only life, if nothing comes after, death has certainly ended the suffering of the person who has killed himself. It hasn’t taken his suffering and transferred it to another person. It has bloomed a new suffering because of his death, but suffering doesn’t shift from one person to another. A person’s suffering is his own. A person who has endured countless years of the suffering I described above does not transfer that type of suffering to the people he leaves behind. Those people experience the loss of a loved one. And they experience the loss of a loved one who has taken his life. Though I don’t know the full nature of what that feels like, I do know it is a different type of pain. It may turn into that long, devastating suffering, but the pain of loss is not the same as this type that brings people to the brink of suicide.
I am always fascinated by the logic with which humans act. Even when they are assaulted by something as chaotic as constant pain, they choose the logical route. People often say emotions are not logical. Sure. I will give you that. I will not say that I understand emotions completely, but I do know that when a person is in the throes of an emotion, that person is acting logically according to that emotion. If I am really mad at someone, I feel (and ‘feel’ is an important word) as if they have wronged me. Since they have hurt me in some fashion, the logical thing to do (according to that emotion) is hurt them back. Why? It will stop potential hurt in the future if they feel pain as well. When I am happy, when ideas are zipping through my head, what logically coincides with that emotion is to be really productive, to make something. If you are envious, well, you could steal another’s things, right? So, the logic works in tandem with the emotion to bring about the result. Perhaps logic is pure in some way. Perhaps we would call it amoral. I don’t know. But this good thing that helps us structure our lives is hijacked by those baser things of our nature to bring about more chaos.
The same holds true for suicide. If you suffer constantly, suicide is a logical way out. It isn’t the only way out. Researchers have found that people who ideate about suicide have had their thinking narrowed by negative thoughts and emotions. They are looking through a paper-towel tube (or a toilet-paper tube, if you like that better). Though the option of suicide is only about the size of a grapefruit, it takes up all their vision. We should trust logic though, right? Logic is good. If we follow the logic, we will end up at truth. But that saying is only partially true. Logic is a double-edged sword. If you begin with truth – I mean, if your premise is true and if you do not err in truth at any point of your rationalization – you will arrive at truth by following logic. But if you do not have the correct information at the beginning or if you are inserting rotten information into your logical framework during the process, you are going to end up with incorrect conclusions. Which has happened to a person who has stepped off the ledge and into suicide, and, in a smaller way, which has happened to the boy who, because a girl talks to him once or twice a week, has fallen in love with her, asked her out, been rejected, and had his heart broken (which isn’t the worst thing in the world).