A reaction to reactions...

Just getting something off my chest.

So, two celebrity suicides made headlines. I made the mistake of reading the comments, and saw ignorance of epic proportions.

For starters, my depression presents itself in one of two ways. I start out the day in a good mood, and then out of nowhere a nasty funk sets in. Just, overwhelming sadness. This became pretty easy to deal with over time; pretty much any kind of distraction works. Movies, games, music, conversation. Couple hours later I am just fine. Rinse and repeat whenever this happens.

The other is bad. That's when I wake up and existence hurts. I have no emotions, no thought of being. It isn't that I DON'T care, it's simply that I CAN'T care. Nothing matters. I am an empty vessel floating on an empty sea. This is when I walk the edge. This is when I want to go to sleep and not wake up. There is nothing anyone can do for me. This is an internal battle that I learned to fight using anger and hatred. Primal fires are the easiest to stoke.

That being said, when I see people using words like selfish or cowardly, I get frustrated. Attacking the person that commits suicide as though it was done out of malice. If you haven't been there, you can't know.

I see and hear people say "Oh, he/she should have reached out, got help."

I did reach out. But I learned from a very young age that my thoughts didn't matter. My feelings didn't matter. That I didn't matter. Whether true or not, it is how I was conditioned to think.
When I reached out, all I got was nonsense advice. Get over it. You have no reason to be sad. Get drunk. Get high. Get laid. Talk to God. Never "What's going on?", or "Want to talk?"

Luckily, I am blessed with a strength to fight even the worst days. But not everyone can. At least not forever.