#very long and hopefully coherent. hopefully. i have been positively chiseling it because i truly do not think you meant ill

[ragewrites]

my younger sister died by suicide the week before her fifteenth birthday. as a twenty-five year old, your poem (fifteen speaks to twenty five) resonnated with me deeply. i've been re-reading it in the hours since i came across it, and i guess i just wanted to say thank you for writing it <3 it's a really beautiful piece and it feels very stark and powerful.

(also - and this is absolutely not a condemnation of you in any way - but my family try to say 'died by suicide' rather than 'committed suicide', as the only other time you would use the word 'committed' is in the context of a crime, which implies the person in question is a criminal rather than someone who was hurting.)

Firstly—all my love to your little sister. Whether it was peace or oblivion she sought, I hope she has found it.

Secondly: I will try to be as clear as possible with my words, so by the end this post might be rather lengthy. Apologies. Know that none of it is a rebuke, only a response to the latter half of your message.

Using the word ‘committed’ was a deliberate, conscious choice. Not because I was trying to apply, or rather imply, any kind of moral connotation to the act of suicide, but because I wanted to provide you—General ‘You’, Reader-You—with the context in which the poem was written. This context being, as I was celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday, my thoughts kept returning to a decade ago, when I nearly killed myself not even halfway through October.

I believed this information essential; as it is both sensitive and extremely private, however, I wanted to be succinct when providing it.

You, general, reader ‘you’, needed to know that the poem is a conversation between myself at fifteen and myself at twenty-five: you also needed to know that I almost killed myself before I could grow to be either of them. You needed to know these two things, no less, no more.

I chose the word “committed” because it was, to me, a diplomatic enough compromise between the blunt impact of I nearly killed myself and a phrase I personally loathe, I nearly took my own life. A diplomatic enough compromise which nonetheless preserved some of that sense of violence the word ‘kill’ has.

Because it is a violent act: the word itself is a Modern Latin construct meaning self-murder, one which the poem tells you (general, reader ‘you’) I am incredibly glad I did not go through with. Frankly it never occurred to me that someone would assume I might be moralizing the act.

Granted, how an individual understands and uses language is deeply personal; you yourself are likely aware of this fact, given your conscious, careful phrasing of the subject. And I recognize the kindness behind your intention in sending this ask, recognize that you likely only meant I could / should be a little more careful with my phrasing in the interest of exercising compassion.

But that’s precisely the crux of what frustrates me.

“[...] the only other time you would use the word 'committed' is in the context of a crime, which implies the person in question is a criminal rather than someone who was hurting.”

This is a statement of generalization. One you are making to the very person who was discussing, however briefly, however veiled by the medium of poetry, her own history with suicidality.

You did not verbally condemn me for my phrasing, yes. Nonetheless, consciously or unconsciously, you did assume something about my stance on the morality of the matter. Not that almost dying myself of suicide, as you put it, precludes by default the belief that suicide is a ‘sin’ or otherwise somehow immoral, of course—and that’s the point.

You do not know me. I am a stranger whose poem you read and rather liked, and that poem, in isolation nothing more than a bizarre fragment of conversation, is all the information you have about me. You can infer from the text that I likely believe in God and that this God of mine probably roots in some flavour of Christianity, but that’s about it. Keeping the caption so short, I thought at most people would believe me pretentious. But moralizing?

Frankly speaking, the biases you assume implicit to the word are in this instance yours and yours alone. Not only because committed is perhaps more often used adjectivally, in its sense of “devoted to”, but because I was speaking strictly about myself, about my own acts and my own person. Even if I had been moralizing the act—isn’t this a little too presumptuous of you?

What right do you, a stranger, have to advise me? The very fact that you attempt to do so makes me assume that whether or not you are aware of it, you already believe your own moral position to be superior.

Again, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt by also assuming that you came to me in good faith. If true, I appreciate the kindness of your intentions; but you do not know me.

You know nothing of me as a person, of my social and religious background, of the web of circumstances which shaped me and affected me so profoundly so as to put me in that precarious a state of mind at the age of fourteen. You are a stranger, so you also have no way of knowing, for example, that as someone who has struggled with suicidal ideation since childhood, I actually abhor this sort of distant, passive verbiage. No way of knowing that to me all it does is reframe suicide as a sort of tragic accident. What kind of raw nerve that is for me.

And this is not a rebuke; it’s far from any actual anger, really. It’s simply a statement of fact. You do not know any of this and it is only natural that you don’t, because these are interior, intimate details, the sorts of things only my best friends are privy to.

How you and your family, as the bereaved party, choose to approach and discuss suicide is strictly your business. I do not know how long it has been since your sister’s death, but I do know that the loss of a loved one, regardless of the circumstances in which it happened, is something we carry with us our whole life. I wish you all the best in navigating and managing your grief.

But you must understand that I myself represent the party which almost bereaved the person dearest to me, my mother. And it is from this position that I kindly ask you to perhaps think twice when you next find yourself reaching out to a stranger on the internet about such a charged topic.