From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm
“I’m done living.”
It was a few days after Christmas and I was sitting in a car outside our Central New York hotel, with heavy snow swiftly obscuring the world outside the windows. My tears turned cold as they ran down my cheeks, and my labored breath shot white clouds like fireworks in front of me.
After months of a slow and steady slide into a now lingering sadness—all my exhausted mind could now process was, “I’m done.”
I didn’t want to kill myself (at least I didn’t process it that way in that moment), I just felt as though I’d exhausted every possibility that a living person could to not feel like this: prayer, therapy, meditation, medication, working out, nature, journaling, art, breathing exercises, positive thinking—and it was all presently failing me. I’d simply run out of options and energy, and I was done.
It didn’t matter that all the objective evidence of my life testified that I should be happy, that I was fortunate, that I had so much to be grateful for, so much to want to live for—none of that registered in that moment, none of that tipped the scales toward hope. The dire story I told myself didn’t require data. It never does.
That’s what people don’t understand about those of us who live with the inner monsters: intellectually we understand that this makes no sense, which is often part of the problem. We don’t just feel terrible—we feel guilty for feeling so terrible.