what does it mean to be suicidal?

Hey, Hannah here,

When the word suicide is spoken what often first comes to mind is death. And well, while death is pretty much the most obvious thought, what most people miss out is that it’s not just taking your own life. What if I said that you don’t have to have physically tried to take your own life to be suicidal?  What would you think then?

Someone once told me, a classmate of mine, that to take your own life something must be wrong. He meant not just emotionally but mentally as well, he said that something had to already be gone. I didn’t answer him, I didn’t know how to. But now that I sit here, laptop on lap, thinking about his words, I fully understand what he had said so carelessly.

In a dangerous situation our natural first response is to find safety or to take it head on, it’s usually called “fight or flight” but most people already know that. I remember one time in the swimming pool when I tried to see if I could drown myself. I sat under the pool, holding my breath but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t bring myself to stay there, each time I tried, instincts kicked in and I swam back up to the surface. For a person to willingly commit suicide they must have died a long time ago, they must already have been dead inside. But I’m not discussing why people commit suicide, I’m discussing suicidal tendencies.

‘What does it mean to have “suicidal tendencies”?’ I find myself asking. Does a person have to have actively put a gun to their head or tied a rope around their neck? Do they have to have just considered it or played around with the idea? Or have people with suicidal tendencies already accepted death and are no longer scared of it, like me? Or do none of these qualities define a suicidal person?

 I don’t think there’s ever a one-size-fits-all answer, I think it varies. I think that they don’t have to have tried to kill themselves or even played with the idea. I think it’s possible to be without realizing it.

I think all it takes to be suicidal is to not bother to put the seatbelts on in the car, in the hopes that you just might get into an accident, I mean it’s not suicide if you didn’t do it, right? It’s to eat and eat and eat, even when you’re full because maybe then you’ll become obese and die because of it. It’s not bothering to wear a jacket when you’re going out for a walk on a freezing winter evening because you just might catch pneumonia. It’s staring into space during class, pretending as if you’re working when really you’re imagining death scenes or thinking about what it feels like. It’s isolating yourself and pushing friends and family out so that they don’t get hurt as well or so they don’t hurt you more. It’s lingering at the ropes section of the hardware store or the scarves at the clothing department, maybe even feeling the material of it, testing it’s strength. There’s a lot more to suicidal tendencies than you’d think. Now I’m not saying that everyone who doesn’t put on their seat belts is suicidal or that everyone who forgets their jacket wants to die. Or that everyone who eats to the point of discomfort is dead within but I’m saying that to be suicidal you just have to not want to live anymore and whether you act this by suicide or simply by taking the dark alleyway instead of the main road, it’s still the same and should be given equal attention. Remember though, this is what suicidal tendencies means to me. feel free to comment down below what you think it means. all opinions are very much welcome.

Contact: thelittlethings58@gmail.com or @Hkay05 on twitter

I'm Hannah Kay and I'm just a teenager, sharing the world the way I view it.