Bob CollinsHere I am again, violating the cardinal rule of the news media: If you talk about suicide, there’ll be more suicides. I’m pretty sure News Cut doesn’t have the influence to lead people to take their own lives (please eschew the obvious joke; this is a serious post), and people who kill themselves don’t suddenly realize there’s a thing called suicide that they didn’t know about until they read about it on a blog, or a newspaper, saw it on TV, or heard about it on the radio.
All of this serves as introduction to a blog post this week from funny guy Ben Huh, founder of the Cheezburger Network, who lives in Seattle.
In “When Death Feels Like A Good Option,” Huh describes spending a week in his room contemplating suicide at the age of 23, and how leaving “a really bad situation to go to a bad situation” actually helped:
I spent a week in my room with the lights off and cut off from the world, thinking of the best way to exit this failure. Death was a good option — and it got better by the day.
I don’t remember why I left my room. The most meaningful act I performed on my long climb out was to leave that room. It was the best decision I made in my life. I left that room and I got back to my job managing a very dysfunctional Internet radio startup where I was the cause of the dysfunction. It was a actually a positive thing that I left that room to leave a really bad situation to go to a bad situation.
It wasn’t for several months that death no longer became an option, but leaving that room and dealing with reality was the best antidote to a make-belief world where life just wasn’t worth it. When I was fantasizing about death as the panacea, the harshness of reality actually helped — it presented me with problems that I could actually solve.
