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This hits too close to home for comfort. My brother committed suicide. I still think about him often. In the beginning my thoughts were consumed with How could

This hits too close to home for comfort. My brother committed suicide. I still think about him often. In the beginning my thoughts were consumed with How could he do to this us? How could he be so selfish? Look at what he did to my parents ? etc. It took a lot of therapy to make me realize, I was being selfish. My brother was human being with difficulties and life experiences I could never understand. I like to think I understand it a bit better the difference boys face growing up, now that I have a son. Watching his struggles, has been really tough. Seeing the deep lack of compassion they face. I don't why it never occurred to me that boys have such a different childhood experience, I often feel guilty I was not the greatest sister. All I can do is try to not repeat the same mistakes over again.

casefields 5y ago
>The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. -David Foster Wallace

casefields 5y ago

>The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. -David Foster Wallace