“You’re so ugly dude.”
“He dumb as a bag of some rocks.”
“You dress like a bum, that’s how I know you broke.”
“You are worthless and you’re going to stay the way that you are for the rest of your life. Ha!” These are the kind of words that many of us hear from the people in our majority surroundings. Sometimes on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. Some even from loved ones. And I, even at a point in my life, would hear these exact words at least once a week for about four years
MY STORY OF FIGHTING AGAINST SUICIDAL THOUGHTS
Most people who said these things may have thought that they were just cracking a joke that wouldn’t have any significant effect on me. But with it happening so consistently even after my freshmen year, it really started to weigh on me.
At the same time, growing up in a society as a young man that tells you that you aren’t a man if you don’t have multiple women or have any sort of love life, was a hard thing too. My whole life I was considered ugly and never had a girlfriend. Even still to this day, my so-called friends and peers would make fun of me and use that fact to reinforce to me that I was ugly.
Then to add to that, I had a lot of pressure on me from being a preacher’s kid from other members of the church, I always felt it was unacceptable to speak about these feelings and emotions. This in turn led me down a downward spiral within my thought process. My peers were always making fun of me.
With it happening so much, it pushed me to where I felt that I had to fight just to stop them because they would gang up and present themselves as if they were looking to do something to me. I thank God that they never touched me though.
However, all I wanted the whole time was to just fit in and be accepted as one of them. I wanted to be one of the popular people at school to silence all the judgments, criticisms, and lies that they said about me which I believed, and also to feed the false ego that I had built up at that time. (False ego meaning a pride that I built up as a wall for myself to try and shield against all of those things that they said.)
After a while, I began to dwell continuously on all of those things. Instead of just opening up and tearing down all of those thoughts and feelings, I just let them sink deeper into me in silence! I really started to believe in what all of those students said about me. I even remember being utterly sad, angry, and bitter when I was in class to the point where the teachers would even pull me off to the side and ask what was wrong.
A part of me just wanted to cling to them and ball my eyes out to them. At other times I would be so angry that I would just feel so tempted to do something disrespectful to them out of the anger I was feeling. Then came the thoughts about not wanting to live. It wasn’t exactly suicidal thoughts at this point though, but I just felt as if I didn’t want to live anymore yet at the same time I didn’t want to die.
Through previous research I found out that most people who are suicidal don’t actually want to die; they just want to end all the pain and suffering that they are currently going through. This was my exact circumstance as well. I really didn’t want to die, much less harm myself to cause my death. I just wanted all the self-torment, reviling, worry, self-cautiousness, pain, and the like to end. Thankfully, God was there!
Simultaneously, as I was going through that, God was pursuing me. At first, I resisted Him because I was always under the mindset that I would try and become the man God called me to be later on in life, but I realized He wanted me to be that man right now. He was so persistent in getting me to come to that place too. I realized that this was not who or what God called me to be. I said to myself, “Since I know that being so deep in this battle with these suicidal and depressive thoughts is not where God wants me, and with me being at the point with it to where it literally has me by the throat, I’ll just actually go and see where Jesus wants me to be.” So, I did just that. I yielded to Him. And although I didn’t know where to start, I started. I got up and prayed and acknowledged that my value is not found in what others say about me but in what Christ says about me. I got in His word and started meditating on scripture and what God says about me. I started to become more aware of what I allowed to enter my mind and the thoughts that I thought about. Then before I knew it, by the grace of God, all of those feelings and thoughts left me. Now that I’m in my early twenties I haven’t had any thoughts like that in a little over six years.
CONCLUSION
Suicide is nothing to take lightly. If you have any kind of suicide ideation, please I beg you to not let it stay that way. Please seek out help and don’t ever feel as if you can’t tell anybody. God cares about you so put your cares on him. (1 Peter 5:7) Find someone you know you can trust and just express that to them, don’t allow those thoughts or that ideation to linger. Deal with it from the start. God took his time creating you. He said we were made fearful and wonderfully. Just think about that, making something fearfully or cautiously. You’ll take your time on it making it strategically. That’s how God made each and every one of us. If He made all of us this way and for a specific purpose, how much more do you think that would break His heart along with everyone else who is near and dear to you if you were to commit suicide? There’s so much more to gain in living.
