TW: suicide, depression, and sexual misconduct

If you, or someone else, is experiencing suicidal thoughts, please reach out for help. You will find crisis hotlines for wherever you may be in the world here

To any family member or someone close to my life reading this, sorry for not reaching out sooner. Things are fuzzy when you’re depressed, and that haze made it hard to reach out. I am a lot better now, and yes, it would be nice to catch up!

I recently finished watching Prisoners, as part of an effort to complete Denis Villeneuve’s filmography. In the film, there’s one scene where a suspect commits suicide after stealing a cop’s gun during an interrogation.

The surrealness of seeing someone’s brains on the wall, their body dropping limp the moment the trigger is pulled, will never cease to shock me to my core. In my experience, films have depicted suicide in one of two ways:

i) Stress-induced: In confrontations and places where escape seems impossible.
ii) Traumatic event: After a long prison sentence, assault or ostracisation, to name but a few.

My experience with the thought of suicide came about a bit differently. I struggled with anxious, racing thoughts for almost five years. This led to a lack of eating and sleeping. Oftentimes, I couldn’t even talk at an understandable pace (earning me the “rapper” title in high school).

I moved abroad to England for university last year. I desperately wanted to call the place I was home, due to my growing disdain for where I grew up. The lack of time I gave myself to assimilate, and the high standards I put myself up to, left me with what I like to call “closing wall syndrome”. Panic attacks were met with this feeling of the walls surrounding me that could have enclosed a better life, closing in on me.

It’s quite funny now to point out how irrational these thoughts were. I still vividly remember dropping my toothbrush on one not-so-fine morning. A sinking feeling in my stomach that nothing I do now, or in the future, can really be significant.

I became severely depressed after this moment. The thoughts of ending my life were persistent. I remember drafting letters to friends and family. The letters contained poorly written sentences on how I could have been a better person in their lives.

To me at the time, the transition from “my life is good, just a bit hectic” to “my life is awful, and not worth living” was sudden. Though I’d be lying if I said there was no undercurrent of the latter during my adolescence.

I’d like to think I worked hard to get past that episode in my life, work that was not without a lot of tribulations. Nasty vitriol that spilt over to now past friends before seeing a psychiatrist, and a depressive rut that was calmed by antidepressants occurring after being inappropriately touched in my geopolitics class at the start of this semester.

It may sound cheesy, but I now like to think of life as more of a journey, where looking back in the past without a reflective, investigative angle feels futile and unproductive.

I’ll end this blog post by just saying thanks to a couple of people, institutions, and circumstances: my mother and brother, my therapist and psychiatrist, and the Samaritans Foundation for convincing me not to attempt suicide[^1].

[^1] - I usually prefer discuss aspects of my life rather than direct them somewhere else. However, I am making an exception for this topic. Talking about mental health often results in sympathy that, while appreciated, sometimes obscures the nuance of my experience. I hope this post has provided a fair glimpse into my experience.