Thursday, July 23, 2009

Staying

Yesterday, this 25 year old girl hung herself with a nylon cord in her room. Single, fairly successful and hopelessly in love, her family discovered her body only after a day and a half when the boyfriend dropped by to visit after not hearing from her after an earlier fight. She was a friend of a friend. But her death resonates through the people she knows. It’s always sad when someone’s story comes to an end. I know a lot of people who walk around with constant thoughts of self-destruction and despair, but most of them usually never get around towards doing anything concrete about it. We wallow, but we don’t obsess about Death. Because ultimately, we want to defy it and really just live. So when we find reasons to feel a little bit better, we choose to stay.

I don’t really want to know anymore about what the lover’s quarrel was all about or whether it could’ve been avoided if people around her had taken more notice (why, do suicidal people walk around with a little black thundercloud above their heads?). There’s really no turning back once death has arrived. And the most we can do is to cope and realize that we don’t ever have to feel like we have to end our stay ever-so-abruptly.

There was also this goalkeeper from the varsity team of this big university who had also taken her life a few years back. The news at that time really surprised me because for one, I was a goalkeeper myself and would have thought that playing for a big-time school was like a dream come true, and secondly, because well, isn’t sports supposed to steer you away from things like depression? Apparently not.

This is my very first blog entry about death and I do hope it’s my last. I haven’t wallowed in my usual choice pits of despair in a while and I think I’m starting to get used to always looking at the bright side of things. Spinning them positively. There will always be a choice on how you choose to view things. I can look at these suicides and confirm what a horrible, cruel world we live in or I can tell myself I will try harder to make the world a better place for my family and friends to live in. Because at the end of it all, you can’t really be truly happy if the people around you are suffering, losing hope or sad.

I always get a little bit scared when I have to take a psych evaluation and there’s a box there that you check if you’ve ever contemplated on ending your own life. Of course any idiot who wants to be considered employable knows to never admit any big-ass form of self-doubt like that, but there’s always that part of me that wants to be honest about how I (once) viewed this crazy world. How I used to obsess about wondering if today or tomorrow was going to be my last. It gave me a skewed sense of power to know that I could choose when I could just quit. It was like one big f**k you to those who didn’t care enough to ask why my life just didn’t feel like it was worth continuing. That dark, dark, gloomy place…

But thankfully, the world has been much kinder since then. I’ve started to appreciate the rain as much as the sun and I’m not so bothered by awkward moments anymore. In fact I’ve learned to embrace all of these things as a oddly perfect mix of what life is really all about. I now understand that just like with each new crush can also come a potentially hurtful jerk. That not all the people I meet with choose to stay and be worth keeping anyway. That I will continually make mistakes, forget a lot of things and sometimes write nothing but crap. That my choices will never be perfect (especially in math) and that even in the hardest of days, I endure.

Sometimes barely, but I’m still here.

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