I’ll never do that. We really do say that quite a few times throughout our lives. From childhoods “I’ll never kiss a girl or boy. To our teen years when we know EVERYTHING and can honestly promise the universe “I’ll never drink, I’ll never lash out in anger, I’ll never lie, I’ll never have premarital sex.” We have a million rules and promises over time that we know we’ll be able to uphold.
Some of those things we just grow out of and realize that they were untenable or unrewarding promises. Some of them we had to actively change our views on. Some, we never meant to keep but seem a good bribe to the powers that be at the time “I’ll never drink… again.”
Sometimes however, situations, pressure or pain take the choice away from us. The first time I struck someone in anger, it needed to be done. The first lie I told, saved my life. The thing is, even going back to that time knowing what I do now, I can imagine no alternate outcome. I’d still have told that lie and I would still deck the bastard.
If you’ve never lost control or compromised your principals, you haven’t been subjected to enough pressure. Push hard enough and anything or anyone will break. Even Chuck Norris sold out and did a United Health Care commercial.
We have many choices in life. We make a thousand small decisions every day. We choose to love, or not. To hate, or not. To judge, or not. Some of those choices make us a better person and some don’t but they all make us feel like we are in control of ourselves and everything we do. It makes it easy to judge the choices of others as well.
Just try to remember that there was a time in your life that you had to let some of those great moral promises slip through your fingers. If you never have. Congratulations. I hope the cave you’ve been living in is nicely furnished. The only other way you’ve made it far enough to learn to read and avoided compromise is if you’re deceiving yourself or a complete sociopath.
We all like to follow the loss of a person who commits suicide with pithy statements about how it is the most selfish thing to do. We like to diminish the life of the person and all their accomplishments with the simple act of vilifying how that life ended. Really it’s our way to make ourselves feel better, to alleviate the loss by diminishing the person we lost. We can understand how the gut shot cowboy may have chosen to end his life early instead of suffering through the pain just to have it end anyway. We can even give the nod to the cancer patient who just can’t take anymore.
But when the pain is emotional, well that just isn’t the same. Is it? Do you remember your first love, how that felt. Remember how it felt when that first love left you, died, or cheated? I do, and I’d would have rather been shot in the gut. Remember when your best friend turned on you? When your dog died? When your child died? How did it feel?
If you’ve never experienced these things, good. However you don’t get to judge how much they hurt. If you haven’t been shot in the stomach, you don’t get to judge that either. So I guess you’re not in a position to make the comparison of which pain is more intolerable. Pain, and pain tolerance are subjective. Some feel more and some can handle more. Some people twist an ankle and black out, some can break a leg and walk home.
Suicide. Sometimes it may not be a choice, or at least not one among many. Sometimes when your body betrays you, when your heart is broken, when you’re alone and drowning in your own sorrow, and the only thing you can see is more emptiness. Sometimes, maybe it’s the only choice you can see.
An exhausted, drowning person can’t always pull themselves from the water before it’s too late. Maybe, just maybe, we subject them to our hate and judgement because we were not there to throw them a line.