My morning are pretty routine these days. If it's a weekday, I get up too early and fight the sweet embrace of my bed. I'll put on my work clothes, chuck everything I need into my backpack and walk to the bus station. Then it's listen to music and think time. Sometimes I'm caught up in last night's dreams, or recent news. Sometimes i think about death and killing myself. it sounds a lot more dramatic than it has ever felt in my thoughts. I've had these thoughts so much that they aren't anything new, just something to be acknowledged.

I have had suicidal thoughts since about thirteen. It has been a long road of dealing with it alone, unable to articulate my thoughts, until it became too much and I tried to act on it. Obviously it hasn't worked yet and I've learned how to examine these thoughts and reroute urges. Urges as in, sometimes I feel compelled to do harmful things to myself. Like the night I felt I needed to walk out into a blizzard and just keep walking until I disappeared into ice. I didn't do that either, but I did sit with those thoughts, and was able to understand they came from the stresses in my life at the time.

Mostly these days it's just idle thinking, like one might think of an appointment in the far future, or review your plans for the day. These thoughts always lurk in the back of my mind, for the most part heartily ignored as the background chatter of my anxiety and depression. Just because I have repetitive thoughts doesn't mean I want to repetitively acknowledge their repetition.

I really hemmed and hawed about writing about such a sensitive and vulnerable topic. It's a very complex subject to bring up. It triggers a lot of complicated emotions from people; fear, anger, sadness. Suicide and suicidal thoughts are, to say the very least, awkward to candidly discuss. I have to reassure a lot of very caring and concerned people that I'm OK and we need to talk about this. In fact it's better we talk about this before I am not ok.

So. I decided to find comfort in it, because it gives me feeling of control. If my anxiety spirals out, my depression makes things muddy or stress from the world being a dumpster fire I will find myself thinking that if things went completely as end up, I wouldn't be scared of dying. Things might be utterly terrifying between now and then but that part is pretty set in stone.

Now, I know this isn't a line of thinking for everyone. Some people find this line of thinking a sort of giving up, or weakness of character. So be it, if that's the case, it doesn't really bother me. Mortality is mortality any way you live it. For me, it involves the personal decision that however it shakes out, death is in gonna happen, and I might call the shots on it.