exits

Some time ago, a master/friend told me of this experience he'd had. He had met a couple online who lived in a different town. They arranged a session in which he'd visit them, stay overnight at their place and have both of them serve him. The session came and went uneventfully well and left a lingering good feeling for my friend up until he spoke to one of the two guys in question and found out that the other one had since taken his life.

At the time he recounted this experience i was very affected by it, as i was myself planning my own exit. Well, planning is kind of a big word, somewhat misleading considering that the act of planning it was the only thing that seemed to positively affect the way i felt, perhaps because i felt i was doing something about it. In any case, it was a fairly bad time, as you might imagine, followed by antidepressants and therapy instead of a jump off some bridge. To this day i'm not sure all that really worked. It did for some time but it's hard to isolate what events have an effect on your life when there's so much going on.

Now i'm off the antidepressants and i'm considering spending my money on something other than psychotherapy. I guess i should learn to live happily with my melancholic, depressive self. I don't know if i ever really had depression, i don't understand depression. I was depressed, yes, but i think i had a reason to be and i do now, still. So do i learn to tackle my own ghosts or do i keep living convincing myself that i'm doing something about it? Or do i go check out that bridge? I think i'm way to passive in life to ever do something that clamorous and i'm not oblivious to the effects that a gesture of this nature can have on the people who are left behind - and by that i don't mean only people i might have had sessions with or their depressed friends.

So i stay away from that bridge, i'm unlikely to ever come close to crossing it. Instead i absorb these self-destructive desires the way you might do the blows of a paddle during a session: trying to simply accept them. Without rebellion.