Over the last 6 months or so, I’ve been contemplating killing myself. I’m not contemplating it so much anymore. I didn’t tell anyone about this until today, so as far as I know, no one knew I was thinking of killing myself. Sometimes I felt like commenting on the notion of suicide itself, merely from an analytical or philosophical point of view, but I didn’t want to let anyone actually know I was thinking of committing suicide, and I especially did not want to make it a public confession e.g. on my blog. When people do that, they’re not really trying to commit suicide, but rather are trying to get sympathy and stuff. A cry for help. I didn’t want help. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. I didn’t want to make people worry about me, and try to talk to me and cheer me up and all that stuff.

I’ll take a long time to explain the reasons for why I wanted to kill myself, so I’ll save that for a future post. It’s a lot shorter to list the reasons I didn’t end up killing myself: I didn’t want to screw over the people around me. If killed myself, I figured a lot of people would suffer, and I didn’t want to do that. My family would feel bad. My distant friends would feel bad. I think my company would have gone bankrupt ‘cause I’m pretty vital to their operation, and so a bunch of people would have lost their jobs. I would have probably let my band down too, ‘cause we were getting gigs and they were all enthusiastic about doing shows and everything. Then again, I’m sure they could have found a better drummer than me. On the other hand, my “home studio” set up is kind of sweet.

I would have caused a lot of shit for a lot of people. Killing myself would have been selfish, trying to end my pain in exchange for causing pain in others. Sometimes selfish thoughts entered my mind, like if I’m gonna kill myself, I might as well try to extract some revenge out of it, like leaving behind a suicide note saying “I killed myself because of such and such person” (and don’t worry Meiko, it was not you whom I was going to target with this note), but I figured that’d be a pretty shitty thing to do, and the targeted person probably wouldn’t even have gotten harmed as much as my reputation as would have gotten harmed for doing such a shitty thing.

I thought about starting a new, secret blog to talk about how I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t want anyone to read it or anything. I just wanted to write, to get the thoughts out of me, and formulate them formally and verbally, instead of informally in my mind. So I started the blog (on Blogger.com, I think), but I never actually made any posts to it. It was too much effort, and I was simply too busy. I’m not gonna give the name of that secret blog, ‘cause I might still use it to blog about other secret stuff, and I like the secret name I came up with. But for now, that blog is considered dead before it even started.

Interestingly enough, I sort of half imagined that my closer friends would not feel overly bad about me committing suicide. In reality, I think they’d feel bad, but I liked to imagine that they’d be close enough to be to actually understand me – and if they understood me, they’d know I’m a rational, calm and collected person, and if I really did kill myself, then it was probably the optimal action given my situation. Back in high school, when discussing strategies for the game X-Wing vs Tie Fighter or Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, I was the one who would bring up the merits of a kamikaze style strategy. In university, I’d talk about kamikaze so often, it’d annoy my Japanese friends who would point out I’m mispronouncing that word. Even just last week, playing the Arkham board game with my buddies, I’m the one who pointed out the benefits of letting your character die in this game strongly outweigh the drawbacks, and so commit serial suicide over and over again was a viable strategy for that game. I’m a slave to logic, and so if killing myself really is the optimal course of actions given a set of conditions, then I will kill myself in those conditions. So I would have liked to imagine my closest friends would be sad, but not devastated. Their feelings might have been comparable to seeing a friend leave home for another country, where his career prospects are much better. We’re sad to see him go, but we all know it’s for the best. Maybe I’m overestimating them. Or overestimating myself.

So why am I writing about it now? The main reason needs some background, so I’ll explain it later. The secondary reasons are that my birthday is passed, and I didn’t want to say it before my birthday. For some reason, it just felt like bad timing, like I’d ruin everyone’s mood, as if they were going to have a party anyway even after I had passed away. Also, because I don’t think I’m going to be killing myself in the foreseeable future anymore, so I don’t that concern about not wanting to look like I’m crying for help is no longer an issue. I didn’t want my friends to come up to me and be like “Hey man, I heard about it… do you want to talk about it?” or anything like that. I didn’t want the awkward attempt at cheering me up, and now that I’m not gonna kill myself anymore, there’s no need for anyone to try and attempt to cheer me up. Finally, writing about it firmly establishes this suicide thing in my past. It’s a catharsis. I’m writing it partially to force myself to commit to that decision of “Okay, I’m not gonna kill myself anymore.”