Suicide is an odd condition.

I don’t think you need a degree to take a look around my site and conclude that my mental health hasn’t always been the best. You also probably don’t need a degree to guess at the reasons why.

I don’t really want to talk about either topic, how low I’ve got, or what brought me there, maybe another time.

What I want to talk about is the odd feeling of having suicidal ideation living in your head.

I cannot remember a time when I was not suicidal to some degree, but it must have existed. There are photos and stories from those times, some of them jog a few memories, but the memories don’t feel right, they’ve been played with.

Ideation is odd like that, its the only disease I’ve ever encountered that can infect retroactively. There is nothing before the thought.

There is nothing after it either, it stretches on infinitely into the future.

Suicide is planar, existing on a perfect continuity. If you cross the plane it becomes part of you forever.

Your self concept shifts, reality tilts on its axis. Anyone can have the thought: “I can kill myself”, internalising the concept “I CAN kill myself” is quite different, its the move from theorising to inhabiting. Its inside you now, and you cannot get it out.

Once its in, it spreads, stretches its legs, gets to know every pathway in your brain.

Sometimes it’s triumphant, screaming, marching up and down inside your mind, read to win.
Other times it’s in hiding, crushing itself down to fit into a bad memory, an insecurity, a smell, biding it’s time until you can’t offer such stiff resistance. Sometimes you round a corner and it’s there, maybe just looking at you, maybe ready to pounce. Sometimes it reaches one hand out and gives you a little tap, just reminding you it’s there, just grabbing a little something to keep itself going.

Whatever it is doing, on the warpath, in retreat, pretending to be at peace, its there, always there.

I cannot remember a time when I was not suicidal, because it infects the past, memories updated, edited, tramped down so it can make a nest for itself.

Whenever it was it first entered me, there hasn’t been a day since where I’ve been free of it. Even now, happier than I have been in years, its always got something to say, sometimes something for any little bump in the road, sometimes something to deflate a highpoint.

I’ll be lying in bed thinking about some non issue and the solution will come to me “just kill yourself”, walking across town the thought, not the urge, not the impulse, just the thought, will come to me, “I could jump in the river here, put my head on the tracks there”

Just a little love tap, just a little snack.

These thoughts no longer distress me, most of the time anyway. They’re just part of the background noise of life, another bad habit, another kind of scar, another ugly thing, like chewing fingernails or a toothache. But this is how it keeps itself alive, so it’s ready when I’m weak.

I have never not been suicidal, nor will I ever be.

I don’t think I will ever kill myself, but I know that I will think about it at least a little bit everyday until I die. The future becomes a kind of race, between internal and external, suicide and other causes.

In reality there is only the one runner, there only ever has been, and he never fails to finish.