Complicated

[bloodyrosemccoy]

So last Friday, somebody killed herself at the main branch of the Salt Lake City Library.

This is not the library I work at. My library is tiny and scuzzy, and its most notable architectural feature is the emergency exit door, whose sole purpose seems to be to terrify small, careless children. No, the downtown library is big and beautiful and full of light, with tiered floors and window banks and an awe-inspiring entrance hall. I don’t work there, but I love that library.

And so when a woman leaped from the fourth floor and crashed, screaming, down into this entrance hall, I found myself wanting to say two very different things to her:

1. My god. What an awful state you must have been in to so deliberately want to end your own life. Mental illness is a terrible thing, and my heart goes out to you in recognition of that very real, indescribable anguish. I wish we could have recognized your distress and gotten you help sooner.

2.You god damn selfish monster, how dare you use a beautiful, safe, public building to traumatize innocent bystanders? You could have killed someone else, but as it is, you simply left many patrons and staff deeply scarred because you wanted to die FLASHILY. No words can express how contemptible I find that.

The second reaction there is completely unfair to someone who wants to kill herself, because if you are committing suicide, you are probably not thinking straight. I firmly believe suicide itself is not so much a selfish act as it is a fatal symptom of a range of conditions that all fall under the heading of Deeply Fucked Up. Mostly I wish there was something that could have been done before to help her, to keep from driving her to this.

But I can’t deny that I harbor some resentment toward someone who affects innocents around them. It's natural enough, I think, but it's also a sign that there are many, many shades of suck involved here.

Comments

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

As someone who's had occasions when some of my mental processes were screwy enough to allow for suicidal ideation, there were times when the only reason I wasn't tempted to actually do anything about it was because I couldn't come up with a single scenario that didn't seem like it was likely to end in traumatizing or hurting someone else. No matter what, someone would eventually find my body and even if I managed to avoid anyone finding me in time to stop me, whether it was a fresh body or a decomposed one, it would be traumatizing no matter what I did. I could live with disappointing myself and pain more than I could with the idea of hurting someone else that badly.

The upshot of which is that when I hear about someone despoiling what ought to be a sanctuary of sorts with her self-inflicted death, it really is difficult not to judge her for it and resent the pain she caused others in the act, even when I know how far down you have to go before getting anywhere near that rock bottom.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been--well, not suicidal, fortunately, but I've looked down the road that leads to it. And I do rememer thinking that suicide would be a pretty shitty thing to do to people.