Waiting to Expire

I live in America, the land of opportunity.

They say people who commit suicide are not brave but cowards. I beg to differ; people attempting suicide face uncertainty of failure of their mission and what that failure may look like or feel like.

They say, think about how your mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, friend, or foe will feel if you kill yourself.

I ask, is lingering in life because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings an adequate reason to live a miserable existence? I should live miserably so another person can be content that I am alive, desolate, and downtrodden, living in eternal torment of the mind?

Did those same people spare my feelings throughout my life? What considerations did they afford me as I fought through this anguish? Or did they gather all the guilt and lord it over me? Think about what others will feel and what the townies will say.

They say to call me if you feel overwhelmed and think you might do something stupid. I did call you many times—and you berated me, heaped guilt trips on my head, gas-lit me, insisting my troubles are simply in my head.

In America, you are not free to end your life—you will be locked away for your safety. I beg to differ; it’s not for my good—it’s for your good, so you can don your hero cape and brag about saving a life. You are not saving my life; you are prolonging the afflictions, the brokenness.

Aside from locking me away and depriving me of liberty until I conform to medical protocols of being mentally healthy and medicated to the satisfaction of psychiatric personnel, you provide nothing.

After becoming a zombie with your psychotropic drugs, you sent me back into society to find a way to pay for that therapy that I didn’t desire.

They say everyone should have the right to life, and they fight for unborn babies not to be aborted. They say that nobody, including the government, should try to end your life. They say every human has the right to life, liberty, and security of his person.

If there are laws for the right to life, shouldn’t there be laws supporting the right to die? We should be allowed to die with dignity whether we have a physically incurable, degenerative, or debilitating disease and if we have a mental disease that is incurable and debilitating. The costs for mental illness are high—they traverse financial, emotional, and social domains.

They say it is unlawful to commit suicide, yet society does little to improve the quality of life of someone despising their life as much as I do. Pump someone full of drugs until they behave as they would want you to behave, whether you want this or not.

They say you have the right to refuse medication, but if you do, there may be hearings to determine your capacity to consent or refuse. They say this is for your good. It is not.

They who say these words of wisdom will be the ones who refuse to come alongside you as you suffer; they will not sit with you in the rain and help life be more tolerable.

They say America is the land of the free, home of the brave. But I am not free to die, and those who say these words of wisdom are not brave enough to sit with me in the storms.

They say

it’s dangerous

waiting to expire,

sitting in the storms