I’ve often heard people compare the depression that leads to suicide as a monster that attaches itself to one person; a demon that sits inside the head of that individual whispering doubts and venom. This perspective that the tormenter only afflicts the individual until they give up is not an accurate one.
It’s a virus.
Specifically, it infects until the soul is worn out, then spreads to contaminate others when the virus has taken over.
We think we end our pain when we end our lives when in reality we are just transferring our pain to everyone who knew us and now knows we are gone.
When you are enveloped in enough pain that you chose to end your own life, you don’t end the pain—you spread it to others who have been touched by you: your parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, ect.
This is often the reason that people will call suicide a “selfish act”. It’s not because these people don’t care about your pain, or the lack of any feeling you have at all, it’s because we as a society have forgotten that our lives are not just our own. Who we are and what we do affects everyone around us whether we realize it or not.
This isn’t to be dismissive of the loneliness that accompanies depression—believing that you truly are alone in this world; but a reminder that your life isn’t guaranteed to be happy one, but a purposeful one.
In recent years, we have put so much pressure on people to “find their happiness” when we have no idea what that means and have no plan on how to realistically reach that vague goal. The enormous pressure and burden of trying to discover a life that will lead to perpetual happiness is an unrealistic goal as happiness was never intended to be everlasting. Happiness comes in small or large doses, and if you are not in a constant state of joy, that doesn’t mean you are not living your life correctly.
The burden we place on today’s society of encouraging them to upheave their whole lives or strive for specific goals has created the most anxious, depressed, and dissatisfied age.
And for what?
To essentially tell people they are failures if they are not in a constant state of being drugged out on their own neurological chemical cocktail?
Contrary to what you have been told: you cannot choose to be happy. It’s an emotion, and therefore it comes and goes organically as it pleases. This is often why people will feel things unexpectedly or subconsciously.
To suggest otherwise only increases the despair and feelings of failure that often accompany the doubts that one’s life has any value.
The suggestion that happiness is no choice is not to be maudlin or in any way encourage people to just give up—but rather to change their perspective.
Although you don’t have any control over your happiness, you will always have control over one thing: substance.
You can’t choose to be happy, but you can always have the power to choose to live a substantive life. Whatever that might mean for you.
Realistically, not everyone is capable of reaching happiness depending on the circumstance of their life. There are people who will live and die in horrible conditions in factories and work camps around the world. There are people who die forgotten about in sexual slavery. There are people who have never and will never know any kind of freedom. People in these circumstances may lead lives where they will never know happiness—but that does not mean their lives have no value.
When we are born, we are not guaranteed a happy life. But your life, no matter how unhappy, will always have a great purpose. You may live the rest of your life never knowing what that purpose is or how brief interactions with others will change the course of their lives, but the social interactions we have with others play the biggest part in forming who we are, how we change others, and collectively how we create the world around us.
Every interaction counts, because you will never have the ability to step back and see from afar what you have set into motion because of your choices.
Choices that you will no longer have the power to control if you give up.
So, going back to when I said that you don’t end the pain by giving up, you spread it to others who have been touched by you, the bottom line is:
You can’t always choose to be happy. You can’t choose the hand you have been dealt in life. But you can choose to have a life of substance, because the only guarantee in this world is that your life—and the choices therein—has purpose. You have the power to choose to lead a life where you love others more than you will ever hate yourself.
And know that you are never alone.
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