The Best Reason I Have Ever Found Not To Kill Myself

stick around, it pisses people off

The first time I can remember wanting to be dead was when I was 8. There might have been earlier times, but I don’t remember them. It’s not actually important.

What’s important is that although I have wanted to be dead many many times in my life, and have also actively wanted to kill myself, I haven’t. My brain tells me fairly often that it would be a good idea if I did, which is a thing a brain could say if it wanted to say such a thing, which it seems mine does.

It tells me it has reasons, my brain does. It tells me that it has reasons I should kill myself and that they are good ones, but when I inquire it turns out that they are never all that good. Nor are they particularly reasonable or reasoned, these so-called “reasons” my brain has for thinking it would be better if I deadified myself.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I don’t give in to my brain when it says these things.

But it is not the most important reason. Nor is it the best reason.

I have a much better reason for not killing myself, and I am sharing it with you in the event that you might be in need of a really good reason to not do this thing that your brain, like mine, might try to tell you to do.

Here’s the very best reason I know not to commit suicide: if you anyone other than an economically stable, well-educated, cisgender, conventionally able-bodied, non-mentally-ill, neurotypical heterosexual white male person, you live in a culture—and a world—that largely considers you disposable.

Dispensible. Fungible.

Optional.

Useful as a worker who can be exploited, maybe. Or a sex object that can be exploited, or an incubator of babies that can be exploited, or a market for goods that can be profited-from. Or maybe useful as a Bad Example who can be victimized in order to uphold the power and status of the people already running the show.

(Or perhaps all of the above.)

But otherwise you are unimportant in the eyes of status and power and control, pretty much interchangeable with anyone else who could fill the same roles.

This is not a reason to kill yourself, my friend, as uncomfortable as it might be to think of yourself in these ways.

No, nope, not at all.

Unless you’re one of the canonically valuable people, you killing yourself is compliance. If you do it, you’re agreeing, in the most profound and absolute of ways, that you shouldn’t exist.

To which I say, and I sincerely hope you will join me in saying: fuck that.

Effinbirds, y’all. Accept no substitutes.

Survival is the sine qua non of refusing to play the horrible shitty racist sexist ableist classist misogynist homophobic cissexist games of the power structure we’ve all unfortunately inherited. Your life, even if it frustrates you and angers you and upsets you, embarrasses you or disappoints you or makes you feel pain so bad you don’t know what to do, is the proof that it is possible to exist beyond the the oh-so-limited set of things that our culture tries to convince us are the only things that should matter.

Survival is how you insist that your life has value for no other reason than because it is an example of a way a life can be, and that is vital because the world is difficult and complicated and we need lots of different ways that we can be if we’re going to survive it.

Survival is how you remain a presence, and how your presence remains a testament to human possibility.

Survival is how you give the finger to a system that says someone like you really just shouldn’t be.

Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s bad to be spiteful.

I have survived for a long time precisely because I am aware that my existence on this planet as a fat Jewish queer woman pisses some people off. Frankly, I think those are precisely the kind of people who need a great big sharp shiny pointy pitchfork right in the metaphorical ass, and here I am.

Because seriously, if someone being fat, Jewish, queer, and a woman is something that can make a person feel all icky and squirmy and uncomfortable, then that person deeply, desperately needs to feel icky and squirmy and uncomfortable. That person needs to be uncomfortable as hell, until they start thinking about what it is about themselves — not anyone else, but THEMSELVES — that means the mere existence of someone like me makes them so uncomfortable.

Once they’ve figured that out, they need to sit with what they learn until they figure out a way to improve themselves so that they can coexist with the full spectrum of their fellow human beings without clenching their overworked sphincters hard enough to turn a charcoal briquet into the Hope diamond.

‘Cause as we say around these parts, damn, y’all.

If they can’t manage that, then I guess they’ll just have to sit and stew in their tiny-minded short-sighted spiritually constipated misery listening to their arteries clanging shut because they’re so clogged up with ignorant, pointless hatefulness.

Because I’m not volunteering to disappear.

I hope you won’t either.

The party’s much more fun with you.

And yeah, you know what? We will point and laugh at all the freaked-out people who just can’t bear it that we’re out here in the world being all the ways we are.

There are more of us than there are of them, after all. It ain’t our fault that they can’t see the value in having a billion ways to be.

We can. Yours is one of them.

Stick around, even if only to be a thorn in the side of someone who has richly earned it. Never let anyone tell you there’s no value in being spiteful. You’re all the value it needs.

If you need help:

988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the USA.

More resources for a variety of situations.