There are things you read about, you feel sad about them, but never enough to feel that the same could happen to you. This thing for me was suicide, more specifically student suicides caused due to academic stress. I started feeling suicidal when I was doing my MPhil and it began to get way too stressful. With the kind of space and people around me, I was made to feel that I don’t belong in academia and I started to feel like a student who is just not good enough, who doesn’t understand anything and will never be able to match up to the set gentrified standard. While I was aware that what I was facing was part of a larger structural problem of academia, it didn’t make suicidal thoughts any easier to deal with.
There was this one day when I felt like ending all of this, all of this pain, this hurt, this feeling of abandonment by people I used to look up to, this feeling of being a disappointment, a loser and I was so sure that it is only by ceasing to exist will this pain cease to exist as well. As is evident, I did not go ahead with the plan and I could not be more proud of myself. While I was suicidal and since then, every single day onwards, I just remind myself of this one mantra: Just Stay.
Often times, when one is suicidal, we don’t know what to do, when to do, how to do or not to do. It all seems hazy and the clouded vision certainly does not help. In such times, I have personally felt that asking yourself to Just Stay is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself. You might not know what lies ahead, whether it will all sort out eventually or not, but you have to just stay and be in that moment and the next to see what lies ahead. This is something on the lines of feeling all your feelings but a bit simpler.
There are times when we are simply unable to feel anything; numbness and chaos simultaneously house our little mind palaces. In such a cul-de-sac situation, it helps to just exist. You need not lay out a foolproof plan for the future, mull over the past or figure out what you are feeling and why in that very moment. Let that moment pass. Just Stay for the next moment and the next and the next and so on.
It sounds like a cliché but just hang in there. Nothing, absolutely nothing is worth taking your own life. Give yourself some time and love and you will figure it out. Life may not be a bed of roses but it will also not sting you at every single moment. Just. Stay.
