I Understand Suicide

Written By Deb Shine Valentine
Close-up of tree rings showing cracks and growth lines, symbolizing resilience and survival over time.

The rings remind me that staying takes time. Every year leaves a mark, even the hard ones.

Hello Courageous Thrivers,

I understand suicide…

This is not your typical Happy New Year sentiment, but it feels important to me to share it this year because so often it’s when we’re “supposed” to be happy and renewed and ready to go for our best life ever that the heavy weight of depression and despair can hit.

I get that.

Sunny days that feel like pressure.
Holiday celebrations that seem to require one to perform “delighted,” even if hiding under the covers feels more true.
Just getting out of bed can require the bribe of a cinnamon roll or an extra-large Frappuccino.

As you know if you’ve been in my world for more than a minute, I’m a life coach who talks a lot about how I live with so much more pleasure, joy, and beauty than I ever have before, which I do.

The world keeps getting more magical for me.

And still, it feels important to me to share that I understand why people choose suicide or to “unalive” themselves, a term a colleague used recently that really resonates with me. It has less blame in it somehow. 

And I understand the slightly milder version of depression that leaves a person just “getting through” life, not really living.

I’ve never gotten really close to actually following through with a plan to let go of life. The process has felt too scary and potentially more uncomfortable than living itself. But it makes so much sense to me that there are those who do. Especially when they have far fewer supports than I do and far larger traumatic experiences.

When Life Feels Relentless From the Inside

Life can feel relentless from the inside.

The thing about suicide is that it so seldom “makes sense” from the outside. So often, the people who choose to end their time in their human body here on earth seem to have it pretty good. Kate Spade, for example. Robin Williams. A friend’s child who had loving parents and didn’t want for any material goods.

Still, I know what it feels like to believe that the misery you feel inside will never leave.

That’s what I understand.

Perhaps it’s the constant pressure to do what’s right, which ends up being an impossible and moving target to hit.

Or the suffocating squeeze of trying to be who others want you to be or think you are, when you long to be seen and loved for who you actually are, warts and all.

Perhaps it’s the compulsion to keep accomplishing. The next thing and then the next. Never getting to a place of enjoying any of it, or truly resting.

Earth isn’t an easy place to live, even for the most privileged among us.

Beautiful, joyous, and full of love, yes, when we can see it. But still, not easy.

We Don’t Have to Live the Way We’re Living

When we read about other people’s deaths by suicide it’s so easy to see that they had so much going for them. Like when I read about a young, White, D1 college athlete who took her own life. I could see so clearly that she didn’t have to live the way she was living, with all the pressures she was under. But clearly, she didn’t know that. She saw only one way out.

So many of us genuinely don’t know that we don’t have to live the way we’re living.

We don’t have to think the way we’re thinking.

We don’t even have to feel the way we feel so much of the time. Did you know that something as simple as changing body position can lead to a change in mood?

And we don’t have to be dragged around by our moods even when we can’t shake the feeling state we’re in.

But when we don’t know that there are other options, life can feel more like a test than a gift. More burden than beauty.

Life doesn’t have to feel relentless from the inside.

In a prayer written by Pádraig Ó Tuama for the Corrymeela Community in Ireland, there are a number of lines I love, but especially these:

We resolve to live life in its fullness…
We will live the life we are living…

I love saying these lines because they remind me that I can resolve. I can choose. I can live life “in its fullness.”

Choosing to Alive Myself, Again and Again

Here are five practices I use to help me keep choosing to “alive myself” when I’m in the grasp of parts of me that would rather quit.

1. I clean something.
Often it’s the kitchen or clutter in my bedroom. There’s something about cleaning up that infuses just a little life energy in me. It doesn’t require creative inspiration, just action. If I can’t do 15 minutes, I do 5. If not 5, then 3. If not 3, then 1. One minute provides a tiny spark of momentum that helps.

2. I nourish myself on purpose.
I make or buy something easy, delicious, and truly nourishing to eat. Often soup or a green smoothie. This act of caring for my body cultivates life, like fertilizing a garden. This is different than buying non-nourishing comfort food, which often backfires with a sugar high and then a crash back into depression.

3. I let the tantrum speak, then bring in the parent.
My beaten-down-by-life parts often show up as an angry, pouty, whiny voice that screams, “This is too hard. I can’t! I can’t!” I journal and let that part say whatever she wants, without edits or judgment. Then I breathe and feel into the kindest parental part of me. I imagine holding that tantruming part until she softens. Then I write:
“Yes, it is hard. Now, what shall we do about it?”
Together, we look for the answer. Often, I find myself taking a step without even realizing it.

4. I listen to someone who’s been there.
I listen or relisten to a book or podcast by someone who knows what it’s like to feel overcome by life and who has chosen to keep finding light and love. Someone writing from the other side of their struggle. Recently, this was The Eye of the Heart by Cynthia Bourgeault. It’s esoteric and mystical, and I understand maybe one-twelfth of it. But what landed was this:

It matters that I keep choosing to stay human and alive.
There is help available to those of us who do.
The Universe, Spirit, or other loving beings know that Earth-life is seriously challenging.

Whether this is certifiably “true” matters less to me than the fact that it resonated in my body and helped.  

5. I move gently.
I dance Qoya. I lie on the floor with my feet up the wall. I do a gentle psoas release with my hips on a yoga block. I roll out my back or feet with a Pinky ball. Big, heavy emotions have a hard time resisting these gentle invitations to open just a little, creating space to remember what’s good.

Do you know what it feels like to want to unalive yourself?

I think a lot of us do.

And when we choose, once again, to live the life we are living, even for one more moment or one more day, we strengthen the radiance of the love we send out to all the other humans who aren’t so sure they can make that choice today.

I’m sending big, powerful love to you from the other side of my most recent curled-up-into-a-ball-on-the-floor moment.

I’ll be sharing more practical tips for creating joy and getting unstuck over the next few weeks. Much of this is woven more fully in my book as well. Thanks for reading. Thanks for choosing to live the life you are living with me in it, because no one is meant to do life alone.

Here’s to thriving and equity and resolving to live life in its fullness.

Deb

Additional Resources to Support Your Commitment to Aliveness

Deb Shine Valentine
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