This blog contains my raw, unfiltered thoughts. Please be warned.

It is uncanny to find oneself having suicidal thoughts.

I cannot say that I experienced the full extent of that uncanniness.

But I tasted a little bit of it, and this little was sufficient to kickstart a lifelong contemplation on death.

I did not experience it to the full extent because, even at my closest point to suicide, there remained a considerable distance between me and the act itself.

I gave myself a conditional death sentence: if my back pain never improved, I would end my life after receiving my PhD, which I expected to happen in June 2026.

I never settled on a method of ending my life. Even the date remained blurry. Much later, long after my suicidal thoughts had faded, I chose an imaginary date: June 26, 2026. I believed it is worth remembering each year.

When the real June 26, 2026 arrived, it was Friday. The evening before, I was anticipating that the next morning I'd wake up and feel somehow different.

But on Thursday night, I became preoccupied with mistakes in my experiments and hurried to fix them. Then I spent Friday morning forgetting that the day was supposed to be special. I had therapy at 2pm and I asked my therapist:

"Do you know what day it is today?"

He said: "I was told it is Friday".

I said: "Today is the day of my death according to my old suicidal plan that has been invalidated."

He then asked whether I felt anything in particular.

I told him I had anticipated a sense of specialness, but it had turned out to be an ordinary day. I had woken up still thinking about the mistakes in my experiments.

Despite the willy-nilly choice of date and the lack of seriousness in my plan, I felt, unmistakably, that I had stridden over something.

I remember the state in which the reasons to live are overweighed by the reasons to die. In this state, it would have been hard to talk me out of suicide. I am sure people in my life would have tried their very best. And I would simply have watched their best attempts backfire and mourn each additional bit of despair and further loss of hope.

The act of talking someone out of suicide often has an ill-suited goal that feels like persuasion. And persuasion is precisely what I would have found intolerable.

It is easy for another person to project their own desire to live onto me. The moment I detect that desire, even faintly, we are already separated by a grand canyon. They are not even with me so they cannot truly speak to me. Once I spot this misguided intention, every utterance and gesture can only add another layer of broken-heartedness to someone already heart-broken enough to develop suicidal thoughts.

I knew I would also distrust the hotlines, too. From a place where I nearly distrusted the entire world, how could a hotline acquire enough specialness for me to trust it? Look at the operators: how many of them have lived through suicidal thoughts themselves? They are trained specialists, yes. But some may simply be doing their jobs following a script. I know that putting it this way is diminishing — diminishing to a noble profession. But I am agreeing to reveal something of my diminishing part in order to write more honestly.

When I inhabited this uncanny place, if I detected that someone was approaching me from a place of persuasion, I would tell them to fuck off.

They would say that they were acting out of concern, good intentions, and love.

NO.

O, a resounding NO.

One good bet is that seeing true love, true tenderness, and true bravery may prompt me to change my mind.

But those acts — that is not love; that is not tenderness; that is not bravery.

They are the other person's unease, distress, fear of death, and inability to hold space, dressed in meager moral goodness. Trying to “ask me not to die” by provoking my shame or guilt only breeds more despair. Such acts are no different from the things already perishing; they are simply giving me more reason to lose hope.

As a footnote, I once heard Chase Hughes describe a technique reportedly used by suicide hotline operators. Hughes is a contentious figure on YouTube — some criticize him for “teaching psychological manipulation” — but I have nevertheless found gold in some of what he says. The operator asks the caller to rate, on a scale from 0 to 10, how much they want to live: 0 means not at all, and 10 means completely. If the caller answers “2”, the operator asks, “why didn't you say 1?”, therefore prompting the caller to justify their own answer and, in doing so, to search for a tiny reason to live. This speaks to me because it uses psychological manipulation in a good way and it does not impose reasons for living from the outside.

O, I remember a video essay about Tolstoy's four ways to live a life.

The first was ignorance.

The second was epicureanism: people experience more good than bad, but through a moral stupidity, forgetting that all of their advantages, privileges, and allowances are pure luck; and they have a dullness of imagination.

The third was suicide.

The final option was simply, to live:

"To recognize that everything will be destroyed eventually, and that you will die eventually, but to keep moving forward. No matter how painful, or inane, or seemingly pointless death renders things to be, just keep living."

Tolstoy concludes that option four is holy miserable: "This was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position."

I did not know how to understand his notion of "holy miserable", but I largely agree with the way in which, Tolstoy, and the video essay, presented this final option.

My best glimpse into death, though still from a considerable distance, pushed me toward a similar place: circling back to life, as though I had already died once.

The many-too-many can live as though they are dead. So why shan't I live as though I have already died, only to discover that I didn't?

Suddenly, I have this remarkable bonus! What is good about this bonus is that many things which never felt true to me died with the old me. I did not carry them into this new life.

To live is a choice that can be examined and renewed regularly. It is not a permanent contract.

I want to live until the next time I want to die. What happens after that remains to-be-determined.

I do not know when that time will come. But I want to watch, curiously, how people react to this difficult confession.

Some will ask fearfully: But what if this time comes soon?

Some others, less fearful, will exclaim: E~v~e~r~y~b~o~d~y d~a~n~c~e n~o~w !!