Paraphrased Random Excepts from Chapter 8: Sirens of Suicide

I’m not proud of my suicide attempt. It frightens me to share my story because I don’t want to glorify or condone my actions. I share it because I believe I’ve gained some valuable insights into the phenomenon of suicidal thinking.

My suicidal thoughts had been simmering inside of me for a very long time. We know they were there at the age of thirteen [in 1968]. After my suicide attempt in 1984, I was able to go many years without encountering those thoughts again. But they would return to haunt me now and again, especially when times got really rough.

I couldn’t understand why they would, because it seemed as if I had already dealt with all of the issues and brought healing to my inner being. Even while being haunted by those thoughts, I would know to the core of my being that dying was not an option; I knew I wanted to live, indeed, that I enjoyed living.

So why were those suicidal thoughts still there?

Finally, I stopped pushing them away, and started allowing myself to feel what lay behind the thoughts. What hit me is that there was NOTHING substantial behind those suicide thoughts. In fact, the call to suicide sounded exactly like the song of the ancient sirens. Remember the old stories of sailors being at sea for long periods of time, and how they would think that they were hearing the mermaids beckoning to them? Legend called them the "sirens of the sea.” And the sailors who didn’t know that those voices weren’t real would jump overboard and drown, in their rush to answer the sirens’ seductive song.

That’s now what I believe the lure of suicide is…a siren’s call…beckoning to us with promises of peace, full of soothing assurances of respite from the pain, and an end to the despair and darkness. The answer, the way out. Death.

What takes my breath away while reflecting on this, is that these are exactly the same promises that God makes to us: promises of peace, safe respite for the weary, an end to the darkness, home for the lost, hope for the despairing. The answer, the way out. Life.

Those of us stuck in depression’s blinding confusion and dark despair are faced with two very distinct calls, beckoning to us from deep within our darkness. Both promise the same thing. But one fulfills those promises through death. The other fulfills those promises through life. And if we’re not even aware of the existence of BOTH voices, and the unique nature of each voice calling us out of our darkness, how can we know which one to listen to?

The siren of suicide had become an obsession inside of me. It gripped me, bit into me like a vicious pit bull and wouldn’t let me go no matter how hard I tried to escape or distance myself from its clutches. That’s the nature of a siren. Once it’s inside of your head, it won’t leave you alone. It calls over and over and over again, haunting every thought, leaving no room for logic, no safe space for reasoning it out, no silence for the other call to break through.

I firmly believe now that the only way you can possibly hope to truly escape its grip and successfully fight off the siren of suicide is through the power of knowledge. The sirens will deafen you to all possible truth about yourself, and continue to convince you that you’re a nobody, that nobody cares whether you live or die, that the world is better off without you.

But those are the lies of mangled thinking. And what have we discussed about the way out of our mangled thinking? Truth, Knowledge and Compassion. Here’s where we grab onto their power and use them to map ourselves out of the quicksand.

Without the power of knowing what you’re up against, you will not be able to see just how much the voices in your head and the sirens of suicide have lied to you about your unworthiness and hopelessness. With the knowledge that the siren’s call is just that, an empty promise that is only capable of repeating the lies that we’ve been believing in for so long and offer only the finality of death, we can steel ourselves against the onslaught of those haunting voices...and say "NO, I choose to LIVE".

Those of us who are groping our way through that darkness need hope and light to find our way out. Truth and Knowledge give us that hope and light. Knowledge of our core truth that we are loved and have a rightful niche in the world. Knowledge, specifically authentic self-knowledge, opens our eyes to other possibilities besides death.

It’s not knowing what exactly we battle against that allows the sirens of suicide to come whispering into our minds, camouflaged as a friend in the midst of our most vulnerable moments. Knowing what lies we fight against gives us the chance to ground ourselves in the Truth so we can resist the empty promises of the sirens…by flinging that Truth into the sirens' lies, we destroy their power over us.

And those of you who care for those of us caught in that darkness can help to map and light our way out by being aware of the lies that haunt our darkness and deafen us to all other voices.

Don’t give up speaking the truth of your love.

Truth is our best map out of the darkness. Believing that our lives are worthwhile, that we are loved and have a niche in the world is almost impossible for us to believe when we’re stuck in the quicksand of depression and despair, but it’s exactly what we need to be told over and over again. We need to be steeped in love and "Truthed" back to life.

[ September 10, 2005, 08:58 PM: Message edited by: Eagle Heart ]