Should I commit suicide? (Advice on suicidal thoughts)

No. Just no, you shouldn’t. It might feel like the only option, now. It might feel as if you have to, as if there is no space for you, as if the world is better off without you. It might feel that there is a better place after this life, and while this might be true. You don’t have to, this place can wait, it will wait. 

If there is even one small hope in you of a better life, if there is still one thing in others you admire, if there is still a video on youtube that you enjoy, then let this be your saviour. You might not be seeing it in yourself right now, or deem it as possible to be like this. But you are, and you are fully capable of doing it. You might just have to take a closer and a more gentle look on yourself and your past, present and future.

Before I start talking a lot I would like you to do an exercise. This works better in a video, and this video is yet to come. Read this paragraph and do it while reading.

 Let’s take a moment, to take a deep breath here. Feel how your lungs get filled with air, maybe you can feel your heart pumping. Breath out again, feel yourself getting heavy. If it hurts or feels uneasy in any way, just be okay with that. Love the fact that you care about things. Take a breath and imagine how the air wants to be inside your body and give you all the love and care you need, now let it go and feel how you share this love with your whole environment. Now you can breathe at your own pace again, if your head is now trying to solve problems that aren’t there, let us take a look at our surroundings. What do you see? Is there a direct threat here? If yes then run away as quickly as possible! If not, then ask yourself whether there is something in this room or surroundings that you are absolutely grateful for. If not, then take a memory of a moment that you were feeling like this. Close your eyes, and fill yourself up with the feeling and when you’re ready open your eyes again.

So, and we’re back at the subject. Now did you notice a small change inside you in the previous exercise? Now can you imagine that you could develop this same grateful feeling, for your suicidal thoughts? This might seem crazy and weird, but I’ll tell you. This is the feeling that saved my life, this is the driver of my life, I could even make it more fantastic, by telling you it is the very driver of my greatest inspiration. 

I am here to congratulate you with your absolute golden ticket to life. Which might seem wicked and absurd. But it can be. For let me ask you a question: what freedom in life do you gain, when you are not afraid of dying? Can you make this your ultimate freedom? Isn’t your willingness to die not secretly your love letter to death, telling you that you accept it. That you are willing to see the imperfections of yourself and of life. Now the only challenge for you is to get this desire to work in your favour. 

You might be thinking, that easy talk for a person that is not feeling like me. Well yep, it is, but iIve felt the same way as you. Maybe I didn’t experience the same horrific event as you did, but I've been where you are. I’ve asked myself a thousand times: should I do it? I’ve told myself a thousand times that I wanted to die. And when I got to the point of truly conceptualising it, I realised I was free. I realised I could go anywhere I want, I could forget about everything, I could let go of the people I didn’t like. I could let go of the feeling that didn’t serve me any more. I realised that death wasn’t so far away from life anyhow. And that what I was seeking in death, could be found in life as well. I just hadn’t been in the right place, mindset, time or whatever yet. 

And actually, at first I hated to know this. How easy would it be to just not be doing the things I was afraid of. How easy would it be to just be laying in my bed all day. How easy would it be to just wither away. I will tell you, a lot less easy than really facing the fears. A lot less easy than accepting and loving the pain inside me. 

I had to accept the harsh truth that I was being completely irrational, that it was not my job to take my life. As much i’d liked to be in control of it, this was not my job! My life is not just influencing me, it’s influencing everything around me. I’m not the only one deciding for me to die. Everything around me is. As this is creating me, as i’m creating it. Even if you feel like right now you aren’t loved by anyone or anything! This is untrue. And actually you’re having a grand discovery about yourself. You are willing to let go of all that does not serve you anymore. 

So let’s look at death in another context shall we? What is death to life? It is the end. But what if you take a look at the death of the grass getting eaten by a cow. Then it gives energy to the cow, the cow can make milk from the grass which makes it able to feed her babies. This image not only shows the meaningful aspect of death, but also the transformational aspect of it. 

So what does this have to do with you? Now I’m not asking you to compare yourself to the grass becoming the milk. Well maybe I do, and if you want to, then just go ahead. Yet what I actually want you to do, is to visualise this process within yourself. What part of you is the grass wanting to become the milk? Can we let this symbolic transformational aspect of death take part of us? Use it to let go of certain patterns of ourselves that don’t serve us no longer? Can we be a place for ourselves that arranges both birth and funerals for the different characters in our lives we wish to become or have identified with? 

This way, your suicidal thoughts can become meaningful to you. The thought might trigger a fear in you, they might trigger a feeling of unworthiness or sadness in you. You might feel completely strange or weird and lonely for having these thoughts. And that is okay. We’re here, you are loved, you are guided and protected. The very fact that you’ve found this article and made it to this phrase, tells me that there is hope. Even if you can’t see it yourself yet! And why would you? If your past makes you want to kill yourself, then it’s for the good that you can’t see your future yet. It means that it won’t be anything like it. It means that there is a space for a new possibility. 

Make space for a fictional funeral for your old life, you’re allowed to make it as dramatic as possible. Invite all the people you wish to be there, let them tell you exactly what you want to hear. And you? You’ll both be present as your corps and as the new person you’re becoming. The person you already are! 

When the old you has died, there will be space for the new one. It doesn’t have this space when the old character is still alive! Take space for all the grief you need. Cry everything out, cry for yourself, cry for your death, cry for your birth, cry for the people. And reach out for help. Whether it is professionally, a friend, a family member,  a random person on the streets offering their service. Well maybe don’t do the last one, unless this person seems in no way capable of abusing or hurting you. It doesn’t matter whether this person understands your thoughts completely or not. You’ll find those people eventually. For now just find a person you feel like you can trust, a person who is kind and compassionate. Yes they exist.

 In the beginning I didn’t tell anybody about these feelings I had, it has taken me years to tell them to my relatives even. Yet the first time I spoke to somebody about it, who’d had the same experiences, already changed a lot within me.

I encourage you to seek most help in your direct environment. And professionally. Next to this I would like to offer a space to share this with others, a virtual environment where it’s safe to share this with others. I haven’t found the right form yet, but i’m working on it! 

Ideas, tips, sharing experiences are very welcome in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

Much love and appreciation,

Ilse Vos

Special thanks to perception trainers, Alan Watts and Kyle Cease. For their inspiration, words and advice. Without them, this article would not exist.

Am I bipolar?

Sometimes I'm wondering why I fluctuate so much between being super energetic/unstoppable, and feeling completely exhausted. Usually aware of the fact that I'm working towards this exhaustion, yet still doing it. 

These were my thoughts a few months ago. In the meantime I've realized some things about this, which I wish to share with you. 

So the thing is, when you’ve once experienced a deep and long depression. Once you get out of it, you want to run as far away from it as you can. You want to forget all about it, and wish to never feel like it again.

What I experienced, and am still experiencing, is periods of manic. Periods of bursts of energy, and trying to completely overuse all the energy I have, as I'm afraid there will be a scarcity again. But the funny things, and a thing I often forget, that actually this manic way of doing things, creates a scarcity. For I'm using up all my energy, and then fall back into tiredness. 

The things that get me out of the tiredness, such as exercise, socializing etc. I do every day in excess. As it makes me feel super good at the beginning when I've gone through this period of being very down and filled with aces and pains. But as I start seeing this as the full remedy (forgetting about the rest and relaxation I had) I start overusing them again. Then I start seeing them as bad, cause everytime I use them, I start burning myself up.

As a child I never had this. This is really something that I started to develop after my graduation at the art academy. 

Most of my middle school and academy years I see as one exhausting, depressive blur. With some good moments and days. (Usually the ones that involved alcohol or weeds.)

So yes, I do have a history with the wrong kind of self medicating. And even though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I feel as if it were those things that did save me at that time. The alcohol to numb my senses in an atmosphere my nervous system is not built for. (Too many impressions, too many people, too many tasks, too many questions.) The weed to release tension, from the oppression I felt from society and my school environment. And also to numb my emotions, as I had no way to release them, or had no place where I felt safe to express them. 

This is all past now, but it has been such a large part of my life, I think it was about 9 years that I experienced deep troubles within myself. And after that it’s been 3 years of recovery now, of going back and forth. Step by step, every time. Still experiencing some burn outs, but most of the suicidal thoughts are gone, and i’m even feeling a bright future coming ahead. I even dare to make plans for the future. I’m starting to trust myself and my body again, which makes me able to dare to make promises and plans. 

I usually couldn’t do this, as I was afraid I would lose my energy again. Fall back into the hole. The thing is, when you’ve felt like this for so long, part of you starts to believe that you’ve been doing it all wrong. Part of you thinks that you can’t take care of yourself and never will, that all you make and will make are the wrong choices. As the choices you’ve made before led you towards self-destruction etc. So you start to listen to others more then yourself, which in the beginning is actually a good thing. But here a new vicious circle could start, of not listening to yourself, and your dreams. Which can lead into a new depression. XD

Yes this really makes it seem as if there is no hope. That every decision you make is bad or wrong. That all good things are actually bad things in disguise. And that we’re completely doomed once you’ve stepped or fallen into this spiral. 

But I’ve come to tell you that this is not true. And I’m here to tell you something so absolutely trivial that you might not even want to hear or read it. As it’s been written over and over again through the years. But it might be something that we as a society have forgotten, and haven’t implemented yet. No, I'm not here to tell you that good and bad don’t exist. Bad choices do exist, not in the sense that it makes you wrong, but in the sense that they could hurt you. I also won’t tell you that you should only make good choices from now on. And that you aren’t allowed to make mistakes. As our wrongs make us learn, make us grow, and our “goods” give us motivation to keep going. So what do I want to tell you?

I would like to ask you a question… Why should we be so stressed about our wrongs and rights, why can’t we collectively observe them as they are. As a process of growth, a process of evolution, an experiment in which we experience front row what kind of influence we physically have on existence. If good and bad are both neutral in the sense that there is always a way back to another, a way back to harmony a way back to the middle. A place where we come to understanding why it all happened, or what it all meant or could mean. That the actual existence of both parties implies a divine balance of the two. 

This might be a quite abstract description of the energies that take form in our everyday life. And you might be asking how to practically apply them. I think this question you should first  ask yourself. Where is my balance? How do I find my balance? 

And remember that in every situation, harmony is at the door. You have the choice to make it escalate in an instance. You have the power to make things terribly miserable for yourself, tremendously pleasurable at the other end and harmonious in the middle. Where you take a sneak peak at both sides. To check what the situation is teaching you. 

This is everywhere. If you’ve made a mistake, one simple word, or question or deed can bring you back to balance. 

If you feel like all is going so well, you’re doing nothing wrong, but the feeling starts creeping up that you can’t keep up. Just allow yourself to be vulnerable. Trust in the idea that it will come back eventually. But the more you keep it up it will turn into a bad thing anyway. The more you’re resisting the more strongly it will come up. As the resistance is already a symptom of tiredness, of the flipping time, of the other side of the coin.