It's nearly Suicide Prevention Month

Why does this matter? Because up to 75% of people living with Borderline Personality Disorder will attempt suicide at least once. I am part of that statistic. And you, or someone you love, might be too.

In 2007, I was broken. I felt like a burden on everyone around me, and I was genuinely convinced that taking my life would benefit them. I've heard people say suicide is selfish. I think that comes from a place that still holds a lot of stigma, and a lack of understanding of what suicidality actually feels like.

So let me bring you in on what it really feels like. For me, at least.

It's been nearly 20 years (I feel old..) since 16-year-old Michelle attempted to take her life. I wrote notes to the people I loved, and I genuinely believed this would relieve them of a burden. I knew what it was like to be with my own mind 24/7, and it felt like a cruelty to hand that to someone else. When your own mind feels like a complete hell, inviting another person into it seems selfish. And yet we can't do life in isolation. People get brought into it whether we mean for them to or not.

That was 20 years ago. I haven't attempted to take my life again since that day. But I have thought about it, both actively and passively.

So what does that actually look like?

For years it showed up as reckless living. Driving far too fast. Making impulsive dating decisions. Then it shifted into something duller: I don't want to be here anymore, so I'm not going to put effort into taking care of myself. Not caring how I ate. Vaping. Not exercising. Wishing I would get sick. Finding a strange kind of comfort in something like COVID, and the higher odds it carried of just not continuing to live.

Passive suicidality is a painful thing to live with, mostly because nobody talks about it. It's finding comfort in the idea of not having to feel pain anymore. It's finding peace in the finality of death. It's daydreaming about just not being here, not as a plan, just as a place your mind goes to rest.

Even though I feel fairly healthy these days, I am still passively suicidal. I think about dying young, often. I don't fear death. I welcome it. In a lot of ways it feels like a gift. Life is hard, and I'm not particularly good at it, and a lot of the time I don't even like it.

I'm telling you this not because I want you to fix it, or fix me. I'm telling you because I spent so many years believing I was the only one carrying something like this, and I wasn't. One in ten people with BPD dies by suicide. That means nine out of ten of us are still here, still carrying it, mostly in silence, because we've been told this feeling is too much, too dark, too selfish to say out loud.

It isn't selfish. It's just heavy. And heavy things get lighter, even a little, when someone else knows they exist.

If you recognize any of this in yourself, in the driving too fast, in not caring whether you eat, in the daydream of just not being here, I want you to know that thought is not a character flaw. It's a symptom. It deserves care, not shame, and it doesn't have to mean anything is imminent for it to be worth telling someone about.

And if you're the someone a person like me might eventually tell: please don't panic, and please don't disappear. Just stay. Ask the follow-up question. Let it be heavy in the room instead of something to be managed and moved past.

Twenty years later, I'm still here. Not because the thoughts disappeared, but because I stopped believing I had to carry them by myself.

If you're struggling, or you're worried about someone who might be, you can call or text 988 anytime, day or night. It's free, confidential, and staffed by real people who understand exactly what I've just described.