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THE GAMES
THE PAGEANTRY
The Fourth Category
This is a dark one. It’s also one of my favorite topics, which sounds like a terrible thing to say — I don’t mean I enjoy it. I mean it’s a subject that has been in my life a great deal, and for stretches of time it dominated everything.
There’s a lot here that needs saying and none of it is pleasant.
It is not normal for that to be the background hum of an ordinary Tuesday. The fact that you’ve had it so long that it feels like weather does not make it weather.The Fourth Category
When It’s Already Too Late
Start with the hardest fact. Somebody who is genuinely ready to end their life is, in most cases, simply going to go do it. There’s no clever intervention at that moment. That person had to have been reached earlier — days earlier, months earlier, years earlier.
That’s not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to understand that almost all of the real work happens upstream, long before the moment everybody pictures when they think about this.
The Ones Who Aren’t Sure
Then there are people who hurt themselves without a settled intention to die.
Some of it is communication — an attempt to make visible something that words haven’t been able to carry. Some of it is worse than that, and quieter: a person doing real damage to themselves while genuinely not caring much whether it turns out to be permanent or fatal. Not aiming for death. Not steering away from it either.
That ambivalence is one of the hardest things there is to fight, because there’s no clear intention to argue with.
You do not have to be in danger tonight to deserve help. You don’t have to earn it by getting worse first.
The Ones Making a Statement
And then there’s the person whose act is a statement. Think about what that statement actually says:
I have tried everything I know how to try. My life remains a living nightmare. I have exhausted the alternatives, I have read about it, I have worked at it, and I have arrived at a place where there is nothing left that I can do to make my life livable. If help comes, it has to come from outside.
The only real answer to that is unglamorous and structural: help has to be genuinely, immediately available to anyone, anywhere. Not theoretically available. Actually reachable, by a person at their worst hour, without a waitlist or a maze.
If everyone truly believed they had someone who would listen, this category would shrink dramatically.
The Fourth Category
But there’s another group, and it’s the one I lived in for years.
This is the person who knows, with reasonable confidence, that they are not going to do it. I’m not going to kill myself. I’m deeply unhappy. I’m suffering every single day. But I’m not going to act on it — maybe I’m too afraid of the pain, or the implications, or of what it would do to somebody else.
And yet it’s what I think about. All day. Every day.
This is a large, dangerous population, and it’s dangerously easy to live inside it for years without ever telling anyone, because you’ve quietly concluded it doesn’t count. You’re not in crisis. You’re not going to do anything. So what would you even be reporting?
Here is the thing I most want to say in this piece:
That is not normal.
It is not normal to walk past a high place on a hike and have your mind go where it goes, every single time, without fail. It is not normal for that to be the background hum of an ordinary Tuesday. The fact that you’ve had it so long that it feels like weather does not make it weather.
And I’m not going to act on it is not a stable safety guarantee. It’s a report on how you feel today, made by the part of you that is already worn down.
What I’d Say to That Person
You do not have to be in danger tonight to deserve help. You don’t have to earn it by getting worse first.
Persistent thoughts of your own death are a symptom — the way chest pain is a symptom. They’re treatable. Not by cheering up, not by trying harder, but by actual treatment, from someone whose job it is.
I lived in that fourth category for a very long time, half-convinced it was just my personality.
It wasn’t. It was a thing I had. And things you have can be treated.
If you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, help is available. In the US, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists services by country.