Warning: This article delves deeply into suicidal thought so if that is triggering for you please do not read it. Also, it should be known that my experience with depression and suicide is not the same as everyone else’s experience.

Shocking title, I know, but it’s true (I really didn’t mean for it to sound so click bait-ish. I’m sure some people rolled their eyes when they saw it). It was little things really that pushed me to it: I slept through my alarm and was late to my first job, I worked for 11.5 hours at two of my three jobs, got yelled at by a costumer for something that wasn’t my fault, and made terrible tips (like really terrible even if it was a slow night—which it wasn’t), I was expecting but didn’t get my paycheck for my third job, it started raining while I was driving home in my jeep (which is triggering for me because the first and only time I tried to kill myself was in the rain…in a jeep), my mom was out of town and probably asleep so when I finally broke down into a full panic attack I didn’t have her to talk to, and I didn’t have time to do any homework that night because I had to get up for work early. There is a list that just describes a shitty day, nothing really killer-yourself worthy, am I right?

But it got me thinking after I had calmed down a bit; A lot of the time when I see people talking about suicide they always say it’s the lazy/easy way out, the “giving up” technique, and that everyone who attempted to commit suicide and lived realized their problems had easy answers. Now, all these problems of mine do have easy answers, I could quit all my jobs and live on the streets! Okay, that was sarcasm and I’m trying to be serious but most the time I can’t help it. The thing is, I realize that this isn’t going to be the rest of my life; there will be a time when I have one job that covers all my bills and I’ll have free time but my depression is always going to be there.

I guess the title isn’t entirely accurate because I contemplate killing myself a lot; most of the time it’s fleeting or it’s almost a joke to myself; sometimes I think “or I could just kill myself” when faced with a situation that requires me to step out of my comfort zone; sometimes when I’m driving I fleetingly consider jerking the wheel and slamming myself into a barrier at 75mph. But, for me, it’s not the little things that I think about when I concentrate on the thought of killing myself; however, it is the little things that build up that act as catalysts, they push me to think about the deeper, heavier stuff.

You see, self-hatred, hopelessness, that feeling of being suffocated by every action you take, and the struggle to care about yourself enough to get out of bed in the morning are all problems that don’t have easy solutions because rest on my shoulders, a heavy massive object I carry with me everywhere I go. The little things, like not getting good tips on a busy night of working my ass off, add to that object, thin layers that make it heavier. I can scrub those little things gone after a few days, sometimes it takes a little longer, but the rest remains. I recognize that I am capable of making it smaller, that everyone who has these same thoughts are can make it smaller; but I know that it will always be with me even if I manage to condense it and I know that it will always take a large amount of effort to keep it small.

Sometimes the reasons for staying alive are just as small as the reasons to kill myself, on the surface. Each set of reasons has more underneath it: love, pursuit of knowledge, and charity and yet hopelessness, the feeling like I’m faking everything and it’s only a matter of time before people find out, and self-hatred.

Some might say that these problems have easy solutions but they generally say “just stop thinking that way” or “just get over it” which implies they don’t really understand how it works. Being told that people who think about committing suicide or people who actually commit suicide are just selfish beings just adds more to that heavy thing I carry with me, reminding me that I am selfish for wanting to end it and that I am toxic enough to the people around me for wanting to end it.

I hope this kind of shed some light on this topic. I know it’s not positive but it’s my reality. I don’t mean to glorify these feelings (I hope it didn’t come across that way) but they do happen to me and it’s important that I talk about them to try and help people understand what it can be like. If you are feeling this way, please seek help because it is available and there are people who understand what you are going through.