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The Crime of Desiring to Die?

7 years ago973 words

I just want to say that I'm not dead yet, because I got (but didn't answer) a call from the police last night. I didn't know it was from the police until after I'd failed to answer it, and it might have nothing to do with anything here, but still, I thought I should say something to be sure.

I said in a previous post that I'd be updating this thing to essentially make notes about an upcoming exam... but I've since learned that we've been given 54 questions, 10 of which will be randomly chosen for half the exam (the other half is an essay), so I'm just working my way through those instead as it seems a better idea. It's going slowly due to procrastination, but my confidence about my ability to do okay is improving. ("Intolerance of uncertainty" is a big thing about anxiety disorders; if you know what you're getting yourself into, it's much less scary than if you don't. Having these questions that I know will come up relieves much of the psychological burden.)

I'm posting again though because I got three phone calls at about 11pm last night, when I was trying to sleep. I didn't answer any of them because, well, I was trying to sleep, because they were from unknown numbers, and because I'm not comfortable with phone calls in general. But since I was so curious about who it might have been (they didn't send a text or anything), I googled the number and discovered that it's likely that of a Birmingham police station. Odd, since I don't live near there at all, but scary, because it made me wonder whether someone had rung the police again because I'd mentioned suicide here again. Someone did that before, you see.

It's frustrating though, because that's absolutely not a way to help at all. I mean, what could the police do? Find my corpse? Beyond that, all it does is add additional stress and panic; I barely slept last night after googling that number because I was panicking that they'd show up at these halls of residence at any minute, to the confusion and distress of my flatmates and any staff they'd have to interact with to get in. How exactly would that help me at all? I can understand people's alarm when someone talks about offing themselves, but getting the authorities involves - especially those involved with crime prevention - is like throwing coal on a fire, rather than water. Or something.

It also makes me wary about posting about such things here, which is annoying because just getting them out helps a lot. It might not necessarily be me talking about suicidal ideation in a positive, optimistic, uplifting way - "I can get through this!!! :D" - or whatever, but just saying "I'm feeling really miserable and want to die" gives less heavy weight to those thoughts because they're no longer trapped entirely in my head. It's why talk counselling can be valuable even if there's no explicit effort to 'fix' any problems. But if I feel I can't talk about such things without consequences, then I might eventually feel that I have no outlet at all, and I don't want that.

Maybe I'm exaggerating and it was something else entirely though? Some kind of spam call? Them telling me that something terrible has happened to one of the very few people that I know? I dread to think. If they ring again, I'll answer it; if I'd known it was the police, I would have answered it last night. Nothing yet, though. But I'm very much on edge and it's quite distracting.

This is a concern to me because I haven't actually read the comments on my recent posts in the last couple of weeks or so, which is something that's getting to me. I always appreciate comments and don't want to feel like people's efforts writing them were wasted, or to seem ungrateful, but the fact is that sometimes people leave either "helpful" or outright abusive comments that ruin my mental state for days, and I couldn't really afford to have such mental barbs getting in the way during this exam revision. It's a shame though, because often people say interesting or genuinely nice things that make me feel at least a bit better, and those comments are much more common than the awful ones. But I'm ignoring them out of fear of those awful ones. Sort of like how I'm missing out on the many wonders of life because of the threat of unlikely - but mentally scarring - things happening. Oh well.

Maybe that call had something to do with something going on in the comments? I could check, of course, but it's unlikely that I will... It's wonderful, having a mind like this, you know. So wonderful. Having suspicions but being completely prevented from actually investigating them, and being left with confused ignorance instead. Sigh.

Anyway, it's back to revision for me now. There's more I've been wanting to talk about, so maybe I'll post again very soon, but for now I just wanted to at least make it clear that I'm not dead.

Oh, one small comment though: I've been trying to use VR to get back into meditation. I've not been using a meditation app made by someone else or anything, but I've basically been working on making a little pretend house I can retreat to when I need it, and adding simple AI to that Gemma model so I can feel sort of like I'm meditating with someone rather than alone. It's sad, but it also means that I can indulge whims whenever I need to rather than relying on someone else's needs, desires, or timetable. So perhaps that'll prove to be valuable if I stick with it.