Every 30 Seconds Someone Commits Suicide

Two weeks ago three people committed suicide, whose deaths where highly commented in the news Kate Spade, Inés Zorreguieta, and Anthony Bourdain.

This three humans appeared in the news because they were famous. In the same week about 21,000 human beings also committed suicide and no one said nothing about them.

Suicide is one of the three main causes of death among young people these days. In the last 50 days, it has raised about 60% as a death cause.

According to the WHO, about 3,000 people commit suicide daily in the world. This means that every 30 seconds, according to this statistics, someone takes away his/her life.

While I write this article, 30 minutes, about 60 people would have committed suicide. While you are reading it, according to Medium, around 6 minutes, 12 people.

Maybe you won’t be surprised. Maybe you live in a country where there’s war or with high violence indexes like Mexico, and you think that this is nothing compared with the pits where thousands of human bodies are found every day.

Maybe you consider that in an overpopulated world it doesn’t matter if a few of us disappear.

Or maybe it hurts you deeply in your heart and makes you wonder: what’s happening to us? This is what happens to me.

What Is the Cause?

There’s a lot of theories about suicide. Some studies say that depression is the main cause. Some others talk about economic situations or relationship problems.

I particularly believe the cause is we stop considering ourselves capable of living. And I want to make an emphasis, it is not that we aren’t capable of living, is that WE DON’T CONSIDER ourselves capable. We doubt of our capacity to face life with all the vicissitudes that life brings with it.

A year and a half ago, my husband passed away. I was deeply sad for the first nine months. There were days, weeks, where I didn’t have enough energy to get up from my bed, I just wanted to cry, but I never thought about committing suicide. My sadness was so big that it became a depression, my brain wasn’t capable of producing enough neurotransmitters to balance. Even in this condition and conscious that I needed help to establish my chemical balance, I didn’t want to kill myself. Financial situation became complicated because I spend a year or so without working, but I didn’t think about suicide either. My bonds with others, in some cases, became hard. I was so pissed when they told me “Everything is going to be OK” when I was sure that nothing would be OK ever. And still, I never wanted to commit suicide.

One morning, I woke up and questioned my capacity to survive life without Michael. And the construction I made about myself was that I “wasn’t capable”. When that became the verdict, then I really thought about taking my life.

It was like I felt in the middle of a storm completely helpless. And I didn’t want to die, I had no idea how to live. It wasn’t about life, not even about living in it, I wasn’t sad or depressed, it wasn’t about the financial situation or relationships, all of that was “manageable” while I thought I could deal with it and absolutely devastating when I “built” it wasn’t.

It seems to me that we commit suicide in the second of the despair in which we forget that we are capable for the life that we are facing.

Holy Blumenstein Theory®

The night I searched on the web “how to commit suicide safely” I really freaked out. And I reached for the safest place I’ve ever been in my entire life, Michael’s arms, so crying I closed my eyes, I thought about an image where he was holding me in his chest and I begged him to take me with him once and for all or to taught me how to stay in life without him.

And I remember a conversation “Life has no sense. It doesn’t have the least interest in your happiness. If it’s worth something, neither does it have interest in your despair. It has no interest in you living well, neither on you living badly. It doesn’t care if you are rich or poor. And it couldn’t care less about your self-esteem. About the way you dress. If you are loved or not. If you have a job or not. If you have enough food to eat tomorrow or not. If you are alone or not. If you feel loved or not. If you love someone or not…

“A la vida lo único que le interesa es la vida”.

Because life only needs life. And only in life there’s room to live.

So then I remembered how I in the first days, weeks, months after he died I begged for my last breath, and even there there wasn’t a last breath. For the first time ever, I understood Michael’s phares:

“Whether you believe it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are capable of living.”

In my personal experience and from what I’ve seen and accompained the only thing that can really make you live from life is loosing from sight, in a moment of despair, your enoughness facing life and believe the only choice is not to live. The moment where you think you have no choice because you aren’t capable of creating a choice. That’s the fraction of a second where you believe you can’t because you don’t know how.

If you are there… run… ask for help… call an emergency number… knock your neighbors’ door, it doesn’t matter if you don’t talk, go down and search for the first person you see in the street. Shout, get out, don’t stay on your own. Please, stay in life, you are capable, even when you don’t believe it.

I Don’t Know How?

That night I understood for the first time I had felt deeply helpless not because I didn’t know how to live without Michael, I had done it, but because I didn’t know how to live feeling safe in a world that seemed so challenging without him.

And then again, Blumenstein Theory gave me a way out. Michael used to say that every time we feel go into helplessness, is because there’s a primary need we are not solving, not listening. So, as soon as I felt helpless, I asked myself: what do I need? In that way, I started creating other choices. I haven’t felt as safe as I felt with him, and I have learned to create a new safeness feeling with myself, different and enough to be at ease in life.

Feeling capable means I’m capable of creating, searching alternatives, new choices where I couldn’t see them, and it also means, that if I can’t find them, I can always ask for help.

A Society With Little Compassion and a Great Demand

The living is experimenting, building, creating, finding alternatives, ways, possibilities. That, ideally, are “good” for you. And “good” is something absolutely different for everyone.

We live in a society where we demand too many things to life to value it for itself. That has little “goods” that it considers “good” and has lost the joy of living for the living.

Please, it is your life, “be kind to yourself”, even above a society full of demands and lacking compassion.

Life Is a Choice

You are completely capable of living, even so, that you can choose between living or not. Life is a choice, and how you choose to live it too. And we can only see this when we are in our enoughness in front of it. Please, if you aren’t there, ask for help. I care, even if I don’t know you if you stay in life. Because together we live and learn to live.

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