—When you contemplate death and suicide, remember what you’ve said to a beloved family: “No time soon”. This. Is. A. Promise.

—That you can contemplate suicide simply as a concept is a good sign that you are not suicidal. (this is more for the reader that isn’t me. I am fine. A lot has changed for the better and I am not afraid of telling people when something is wrong)

Suicide, it must be said, is not the coward’s way out. It is the way out of one who has lost hope and cannot be convinced to continue searching. Suicide is the result of a stretch of life trapped in a vacuum.

On that note, to say nothing of the friends who love you, you are a constant and welcome presence in the lives of at least 7 young children. Do not be an example of surrender or leave their parents to explain why “God allowed” someone who made them happy to decide they weren’t worth sticking around for. 

Battle your demons amongst the adults in the room and keep the children from seeing the impact of the battle. Some other darkness will befall them in life, why hasten that arrival because you lost sight of the fact that they and their parents see you as someone worth having around, to say nothing of what they think of you? Parents don’t let just anyone around their kids.

If they have not experienced loss yet, do not be their first example, be someone who can help the parents walk them through it if you are called to it.  If they have experienced it, do not add to the list. This is arbitrary and there is enough suffering and darkness to come in life it doesn’t need extra help from you.

—Choose who you talk to about your demons. However, take great care not to make your battle the focus of your relationship. 

Fighting them alone is going to get you killed. Find that Aristotelian middle ground, and go to God, alone or with allies.

—The statement that you “do not expect to see 60” has greater implications than perhaps you first realized. Does it mean that you will turn 60 and shoot yourself after a birthday party, assuming you have one? Does it mean that you will kill yourself before you get anywhere near? What’s with the arbitrary limit, anyway? In the short term, you will help and be with others and those relationships inevitably strengthen. Have you already decided long-term that they’re not worth it? You either long for death, (in which case, what are you waiting for?), or, more likely, you don’t understand what you are saying.

You do not know the time of your death and can only make such a bold prediction by trying to guess the days God has given you or deciding that you will one day make the decision for Him.

—Why die by your own hand? What is the nobility in this? And why does your vote matter more than everyone else who has invested so much in you so that you do not feel so alone and worthless? There are implications in the statement that you don’t expect to live long that you likely did not consider.

—You have time and space most don’t and have worked hard to let yourself be loved and cared for by others. Do not squander that effort, nor what God has given you and what has been brought about by opening yourself up to it.

“If death has no sting, I suffer momentary pain and head to eternal glory”. Foregoing the massive theological problems there, if you were completely and irrevocably alone, this may be acceptable. But you aren’t, so it’s not. Moreover, you are not a Stoic, you are a Christian. You are not a hermit, you are very much part of the community.

Stop it. Now. Your life is no longer just about you.

—“Why die before your time?” (Ecclesiastes 7:17). Stop worrying about this. “sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34)

Sardonically, consider this: One day, nature itself will kill you. So relax. You don’t need to do anything. 

—That being dealt with, consider your main enemies in life: loneliness, doubt and self-hatred.

Loneliness will be with you for a long time. Keep always in your mind that you are alone at 11:00 at night, but that you are with people almost every evening. At one point, being in community was your hell, and being alone your solace. If you had to pick between that arrangement and now, would you not choose this battle where you are very alone at times, but get to look forward to the next time you see the friends, who are in turn excited to see you, instead of the one where being around people was the “less uncomfortable” option?

Again, seek joy in your friends and family. When you are alone, contemplate your relationships, and the God who gave them to you. Alone does not have to be idle, nor should it be.

—-Your depression comes from an idle mind. Death awaits in depression, keep your mind busy, but keep your pursuits pure; philosophy, theology, training, service, things that work to prevent further decay of your mind, your circle and/or your space. If you can do nothing in that moment to make things better, do everything you can to keep things from getting worse.

–As you get older, it is statistically likely that loneliness will become a more oppressive force in your life, as you will be spending considerably more time alone than with people. Knowing this, like the impending death of a loved one, will not prepare you for it. Regardless, you must strengthen your mind to where it bends but does not break.

–On doubt: recall Peter asking Jesus “To whom shall we go”. Doubt is not atheism, it is uncertainty. But everything is founded on God. It has to be, everything else is how one “ought” to act. Where you have questions, seek answers, but do not “deconstruct” your faith as others have, deciding the answers were not good enough and, though they don’t find better answers elsewhere, still decide to discard the rest of their foundation.

You have no place to doubt long, firmly established friendships. Use them to tether you to a rational thread; God created you, God created your friends and put you in each other’s lives, God gave you reasons to live, of which they are some. No secular belief system gives life this structure.

—“Deconstruction” as it seems popularly used, is caused by the belief that you are capable of ripping out your own heart and finding something to replace it, that will inevitably work better than what you just yanked out. It’s the New Atheist’s impact on society, minimized; tear out the center, with the promise that something good will naturally, almost without cause, take its place. The assumptions being that what’s at the center is so bad that anything else is an improvement, and that the person who is capable of destroying something others helped build is equally capable of building back up, better, on his own.

—You really do struggle with accepting that you might, in some way, be a decent person, don’t you? When people thank you for your consistent teardown work, you respond with “it’s fun”, and move on. Some of your friends have told you they love you, but you don’t know what to do with that either, and sometimes think it hinges on not “screwing up”, whatever that looks like and you can’t explain that either. What is the solution to this? What is this based on?

If you’re worried about becoming a narcissist, don’t. Right now, we have a different problem; you’re unlikely to become a narcissist because you do not seem to like yourself much to begin with.

Fragmentary thoughts

—A man on a cross, a stone rolled away, mankind reconciled to its creator and death, Henry Scott Holland’s “King of Terrors”, is stripped of its dominance. The scale does not make sense, and yet it is true.

—-CS Lewis: “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other.

But if either come to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”

How does it surprise anyone that a people so embroiled in hyper-emotional politics are almost to a man, depressed and lonely? Politics as an identity always seems to lead to this, and for what? Try to imagine what the career online or protest activist lives when he’s offline and at home. Does he gather with friends and talk about sports or is it “the world is evil” all the time?

—Understand you are capable of extremes. Just because you have been an unrelenting cynic does not mean you can’t be, if the situation is right, a blind optimist, it’s just highly unlikely.  You are more of an extrovert, but you have been a hermit before, and to become such again only requires not attending anything anywhere, never asking to be with anyone and/or letting your old habits return and get the best of you. While you should not say “yes” to things you don’t find yourself able to go to, just because you want to make people happy, you cannot say “no” to everything. Instead of the modern phrase “find a balance”, instead seek Aristotle’s “Golden Mean”, understanding it is hard to find and harder to maintain

“Find a balance” always sounds like finding a 50-50 split that sustains itself. One puts more effort into finding and maintaining the balance to the point where the rest and rejuvenating activity can’t compensate. Don’t seek a balance, seek healthy tension.

—-“If you’re not happy alone, you won’t be happy with someone”. This is self-evidently untrue. If you are not happy alone, you need people. There’s a better way to say “don’t make the other person the primary source of your happiness.” Besides, one who is the source of his own happiness is a narcissist 

Bonhoeffer’s observation that one who “cannot stand being in community” needs to “beware of being alone”, and his reversal that “one who cannot stand being alone” needs to “beware of being in community” is a much better perspective on this. In the first place, happiness coming from oneself is narcissism. In the second place, putting the burden on others to make you happy doesn’t create an obligation and is just an expression of narcissism. 

If you are not happy alone in the moment, seek community. If you are socially exhausted in the moment, seek solitude. Avoid isolation. Avoid using crowds to avoid yourself. One who is perfectly happy alone may never seek community, and one who is perfectly happy in community may dread being alone.

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