Inevitability

"Everybody's screaming.
I try to make a sound, but no one hears me.
I'm slipping off the edge,
I'm hanging by a thread.
I wanna start this over again,
So I try to hold onto a time when
Nothing mattered."




So yeah. I actually got a call from Green Man yesterday. Not Nick. Green Man. And I had to head out sooner than I would have liked to. I talked to Ryan extensively before I left, and while I'm not entirely convinced he understands the seriousness of the situation he's dived head-first into, I have no choice but to trust that he'll look after Kay.

Meanwhile, Michelle packed up my car with essentials and drove up to get me. We're going to Philadelphia today and, depending on what happens, we might not be going home for a while. I hope not to be gone for longer than a week or two. But I told Michelle to leave a note saying we were spending the remainder of the summer at my grandmother's shore house. My grandparents are in their Florida house at the moment, so their shore house is empty and free for use... and they won't be able to either confirm or deny our presence there.

I'll let you all know more when it's safe to. In the meantime, enjoy the post I've been working on this weekend. It doesn't really qualify as a write-up, since my feelings on the subject have been heavily colored by both my own experiences and my time here with Kay. But it's an important subject, and I couldn't just leave it with nothing. So here's what I have so far.

Until later.

-

Truly suicidal people see their deaths as an inevitability, rather any any sort of decision on their part.

I know I said I don't really have any right to say anything on the subject of suicide, but so, so often I've heard people say, "Oh my gawd, I could just die!" But hyperbole doesn't bother me. Neither do the genuinely depressed people who say to their friends, "I just want to end it all right now!" Those people are angry and fed up, and often very scared and more sad than they knew they were capable of being, but in truth, they want their sadness and pain to end, not their lives.

About the only thing that does bother me is this growing trend among middle- and high-schoolers: rather than tell a person to shut up, or that they are immensely stupid, they say to that person, "Kill yourself." And that's not at all okay. However, it usually only takes me mentioning that I knew someone who killed themselves for them to knock that off, at least in my presence.

(Actually, I don't know anyone who killed themselves, but I do know someone who seriously considered it for a long time, I know someone who is still considering it... and now I know Kay too.)

I'm getting way off-topic.

Back to my point: There is a difference between those who feel like death is the only way to make the pain stop, and those who think to themselves, "Wow, it's a good thing we don't keep any guns in the house, or I'd be dead right now," with very little thought as to why they'd be dead - they just would be. And there is also a difference between them and people who make attempts at suicide that are designed to fail, or parasuicide, in order to get attention drawn to their real problem. And there is a difference between all of those, and people who feel that they simply deserve to die (for any number of myriad reasons).

For the first and third categories, their focus is not on death itself, but on pain. Suicidal thoughts and attempts are not a symptom of their pain, but an attempt to self-medicate. In most cases, they won't actually be able to go through with it except under extreme circumstances (such as being driven insane by fear of a certain faceless stalker), simply because they do not actually want to die. They just want relief.

Oddly enough, those in the second category might not actually want to die either. To grossly oversimplify it, it's like living with cancer. The moment of your death is this great, looming thing, drawing ever closer, that you couldn't prevent even if you wanted to. It's just going to happen. You may even feel afraid to die, or saddened that you won't get to do all the things you had planned in life. But you feel like an arrow in flight. And the rapidly approaching target might make you a bit nervous, but otherwise you can't feel one way or another about it. It's just something that'll happen, for better or for worse. These are the people who actually will go all the way through with suicide, simply because they lack any passion for it.

The fact of the matter is, the decision to take your own life - when it's made seriously, and not done out of fear or anger - isn't a decision at all. It is simply the result of pain exceeding your resources for coping with pain. Pile enough weight onto a pack animal and it will collapse, no matter how much it wants to remain standing.

Where does Kay fall in these categories? It's hard to say. She's taken on more pain than I have the resources for coping with, certainly, but more than anything else, she is angry and desperate. In addition, she doesn't actually seem to want to take her own life; she wants the monster in the trees to do it for her. While that last is cause for concern, as long as she's acting out of desperation, rather than placidity, I think she has a shot at getting past this. Desperation and anger will fade, and hopefully her desire to die will fade with it.


As for how all this applies to... all this... It's difficult. There are those who believe that the people It kills don't actually die in a sense. Instead, they continue to suffer in some kind of eternal torment. Many choose to take their own lives rather than risk the possibility of such an end. Others end it "early" out of spite, to deny It the satisfaction (if such a being feels satisfaction) of a kill. Still others are driven to psychosis by Its games, and come to think that jumping out of a 8th story window is a perfectly logical and viable method of exiting a room.

...I've never been a believer in divine punishment or Hell. I'm even more iffy on the idea that something somehow happens to the souls of the people It kills - as far as I'm concerned, there's only one place for a soul to go, and that's back to All That Is. But people who take their own lives out of fear of these possibilities... they aren't who I've been talking about. If you remove Slenderman from the equation, and they would be able to go on living normal lives.

The people I'm talking about are the people the monster has already broken. People It could kill at any time, It's just leaving them to suffer for a while first. Sometimes It leaves them alone for years at this stage; reading around, I've seen it - middle-aged to elderly folks, locked up in insane asylums or otherwise kept away from everyday society, so tormented and haunted that It doesn't even need to do anything to make them want peace with more desperation than they thought they were even capable of. The people who can't be fixed.

It just... makes me wonder what the point even is! Why It should bother killing us when It can easily make us do the job for It. And, by all accounts, driving Its victims to suicide is a primary method, even moreso than the eviscerations, impalings, and plastic-wrapping we usually hear so much about. It's almost like the more violent deaths are a treat It allows Itself every so often. If the Slender Man is a disease, It's an autoimmune disease. Almost no effort is required on the monster's part, so why go to the effort at all? What's the point?!

Because there are people - normal people like you and me - who are living with cancer. Who define themselves by it, even as they are dying from it. But sometimes, a handful of those people will learn that it's not terminal, that they're going to live.

And do you know what at least one of those people will do upon hearing such joyous, miraculous news?

Commit suicide.


...There's always something. There's always something.