Two Million Thoughts

To kill yourself or to let live and lose sanity? What would you do to save the very essence of you?

If killing yourself would be a sin, wouldn’t allowing yourself to be crazy tantamount to death? Which is the lesser evil then?

Life is soo full of trivialities and complexities that it could lead a weak soul succumbing to the temptations of the easy way out. Heartbreaks, incredibly insistent people, people forcing you what to do, stubborn and shrewd people, or simply anything and everything that makes you a hopeless case– problems, troubles, whatever you call these– these are the root causes that would drive someone to lash at his wrists or to suspend his insensate body in mid-air with a rope attached to the ceiling, or drown a bottle of sleeping pills.

Contrary to what society might think, I have my own weak moments. I have suicidal tendencies. The romance of killing myself started when I was a thousand miles away from home, in the middle of an early-winter night, with all the mess in my room surrounding me, and my heart and my mind urging me to just give up. I was in denial in solving my problems, which, right now, seem so simple to analyze and solve. At that time, it seemed that facing my problems would make me crazy. I wanted the easy way out then. The gleam of my kitchen knife seemed soo tempting in the darkness of the night and the warmth of the idea of finally bidding this problematic and cruel world goodbye seemed more comforting than the iciness of the winter air.

Every now and then, I have had several urges to find the easy way out. But then, there is always something that makes me think otherwise. The idea of blood spurting out from my veins, for example, seem so gross and too brutal. Hanging myself is too complicated while buying a bottle of sleeping pills could be very expensive and could induce the pharmacists to be suspicious.

My Irish lit professor once said that to die young is to die happy. The idea of bidding the world goodbye at such an early age, he said, is romantic. Take John Keates, for example. Everybody, he said, was saying what a shame it was to lose an exceptional poet as him. In simpler terms, dying young will definitely make a lot of people crying at the loss of such a short life as yours. And I kind of subscribed to this thought for quite some time.

A lot of people would probably say that those who commit suicide or attempt to commit one are weak, scared, and stupid. But then, having aborted suicidal thoughts myself, I would like to raise some point in defense of these unfortunate lot. These people, I would say, are brave enough in such a way that they face death, or shall i say, induce death upon themselves. Because trust me, even if I did entertain suicidal thoughts before, I am still scared of staring at the Grim Reaper right on my face, without a choice of turning back.

So back to the question. What would I choose between death and insanity? I’d let the natural course of nature kill me softly…