Don't Kill Yourself; First, They'll Make Fun of You, Then They'll Forget You

Today is publication day for my new novel, The Mind Reels. In the book, the protagonist Alice confronts the possibility of killing herself, as many people with bipolar disorder do. Somewhere between 30% and 60% of us attempt suicide in our lives; something like 10% to 20% of us succeed. I’m here today to explain to the younger people out there why you should not attempt to kill yourselves. The reasons you’re probably thinking of are good reasons, but that’s not what I’m talking about today. The reason you shouldn’t kill yourself is that it’s not going to go down the way that you think, the way that you hope. You’re thinking that it’s going to be some grand statement, some romantic and artistic gesture that will make everyone understand you and regret everything they didn’t do for you. I’m here to tell you that that’s not true. The truth is that, if you kill yourself, people are going to make fun of you, your peers and even your friends, perhaps especially your friends, and then they’re going to forget about you. And those are good reasons why you shouldn’t kill yourself. It’s not going to be the way you’ve imagined.

This isn’t an exercise in tough love cliché, and it’s not some sort of reverse psychology, nor an attempt at shock value. It’s merely an explanation of what happens. Every high school has a story about the kid who unalived themselves. People post long captions about “gone too soon” and “forever in our hearts” for a week, maybe two. They write your name on their sneakers. They put a hashtag in their Instagram bio. There’s a vigil, maybe a T-shirt with your face on it. Then they move on. They forget your favorite song. They forget what your laugh sounded like. They forget all of the things about you that you thought your suicide would etch in the great book of their hearts. They forget you. Meanwhile, some people - the people who really loved you - are scarred for life. They’ll carry that pain forever. But they were never the one whose attention you were trying to get in the first place. Right? Right. And the world, your peers, the ones you think you’re going to impress? They’ll stop talking about you long before the semester’s over. I’m just being real with you. It’s harsh. But life does go on.

For the record, if this is specifically about some romantic partner who no longer wants anything to do with you, if you want to get their attention and love back or, even better, fill them with regret that they carry with them for the rest of their days… don’t. They'll say the right things at first, share the same trite message of condolences as everyone else, an act as easy as reposting someone else’s Instagram remembrance and just as deep. And inside they’ll feel put upon, not mournful, and their friends will tell them that you have treated them terribly and that they should never have been put in this position, and those friends will be right. And after a little while they’ll stop thinking about you at all.

If you think that sounds cruel, you’re right, maybe. Certainly according to the logic of your bleeding bereft heart. But this is reality. The people you imagine watching your funeral with tears streaming down their faces will be back to scrolling TikTok that night. The teacher who wrote a note in your yearbook about your bright future will feel momentarily wistful and then they’ll be teaching the same lesson they were always going to, the day after the memorial assembly. The boy or girl you’re secretly hoping will finally understand you after you’re gone will go back to their life. Listen: this is not a movie. You’re not the tragic hero. You’re not the romantic poet dying young. You are not the protagonist of reality. You’re just another person gone, and most of the world will keep on spinning without you. Those rare ones who will remember and miss and ache for you, well, you already had their attention, and they don’t deserve this shit. The only people you’re going to hurt are the ones you have no business hurting.

And even worse, it won’t be noble. It won’t look beautiful. It won’t look like your pain was transformed into something meaningful. It’ll look sad and vaguely ridiculous, a decision people will whisper about for a while before filing it away as “what a waste.” Your peers will make cruel jokes. They will! They’ll sit at the tables in the cafeteria and find some way to chuckle about your particular means of death. Hang yourself? They’ll grab their private school ties by the end and lift them up above their neck and say to their little clique, “Hey guys, who am I?” and everybody will laugh, even the people you think will never betray you, they’ll laugh because there’s nothing else to do and because you were the stupid asshole who removed themselves from reality and thus gave them permission to laugh. Overdose on pills? They’ll draw pictures of you surrounded by discarded medication bottles, your eyes X’d out, stupid look on your face. They’ll say ugly things. They’ll turn your tragedy into a meme. They’ll say you did it for attention. They’ll get the details wrong. They’ll talk about your death as if it’s gossip, not a human life. You will not be there to defend yourself, to explain that it really did have meaning. And then they’ll stop talking about it altogether.

You know the official reasons you’re not supposed to do it. They tell you that you have so much to live for. They tell you that it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. They tell you that you will do terrible damage to the people who care about you the most. And they’re not wrong, usually. But all of those reasons still tend to make it sound like some grand gesture that’s going to ennoble you and turn you into a outsized figure, if only for a little while. And let me tell you right now, there’s not going to be anything grand about it. It’ll be just another little indignity in an existence filled with indignity; your non-existence will be just as meaningless and hapless as your existence was. The truth is, your life right now might feel unbearable. You might feel invisible, unloved, trapped. And maybe killing yourself ends that. But killing yourself doesn’t fix that, and if I understand you as well as I think I do, what you’re trying to escape is the appearance of being pathetic, the appearance of living a life not worth living. I suspect that you hurt as much in the gaze of others as you do in the light of your own harsh perspective. Well, suicide doesn’t make people see you. It doesn’t make your life into a story worth telling. It just stops everything. Your pain ends, yes. But here’s the thing you’re not really contemplating: it really truly does end, everything, all of it, you yourself end. That’s what you’re not really grasping, because our minds aren’t built to grasp it - the totality of our own nonexistence, all that it means to be an ex-person, a former life.

If I know modern culture, and I do, I can tell you this: you’re almost certainly pondering the end of your existence from a standpoint that assumes that you will go on existing. This isn’t as abstract as it sounds. You think you want to kill yourself and in some distant vague abstract way you understand that such an act is a cessation, and ending, an erasure. But because you’re a part of the generation that you are and from the country that you’re from and in the culture that you’re in, I’m quite confident that you actually don’t have the slightest idea what that would mean, an end to yourself. I think your entire life has been lived in a society which serves as a machine for convincing you that there is no such thing as a world outside of you, and you therefore have no idea what actual suicide would actually be. You brain still believes that you’re going to go on. But there will be no you. For you, the universe will cease to exist, and not in some cool Schopenhauer way. You just won’t be around anymore. And no matter what you want to say to me, I know some part of your brain is thinking, “Once I’m gone, they’ll regret it all and they’ll miss me, and I’ll sit back and laugh.” But you won't do anything. There won’t be a you. There will only be a memory, and that memory will mostly be something brief and ridiculous and pointless. And no one will think your death was cool after the fact. I promise.

You have to live. “Draw your breath in this harsh world in pain,” as the man said. Because the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is this: your death won’t be what you think it will be. It won’t be grand. It won’t be “aesthetic.” It won’t be a blaze of glory. It will be a sad, undignified, prurient matter of a stupid looking corpse and devastated parents and people making cruel doodles of you in algebra class and a hole in the ground and a bunch of people awkwardly moving on and eternal nothingness. Don’t fool yourself about any of it. It will hurt some people, briefly, and a very small number of others for a long time, and then for most of eternity your stupid grandiloquent death will exist as some trashy non-event that no one has any particular reason to remember. Don’t give your pain the ending it wants. Stay. Even if it feels like hell right now. I’m not saying it will get better; it might get worse. But the alternative is to take whatever’s left of dignity and art and meaning in you and turn it into a bunch of funeral expenses, insulting memes made by the very people you’re trying to hurt, and dim memories easily discarded. So stay. There’s nothing else you can do. This is it. I’m afraid that you have to live.

Find options for ordering The Mind Reels here.