I thought about suicide once. I thought about suicide a lot of times. These are times long ago and far away, but some piece of them will never leave me. These were intense times, and they were self-absorbed ones. They were paralyzed. Paralyzed with fear and with indecision, lost in the fact there was certainly at least one decision I could make.

Except for the fact that I couldn't.

Once I joked about it to a couple of friends as a pathetic little way of drawing attention to myself, in the hopes they would try to help me or cheer me or love me. They were horrified because they'd never dreamed of somebody actually wanting to do this. They didn't tell me they loved me. They told me God would never forgive me, and I sank a little bit deeper, and walked away.

I thought about it once in college, and found a pamphlet about ways out, and about what to do if you're feeling suicidal, on a bulletin board on my floor. I perused it in the bathroom, almost sick to my stomach with the idea of how ill my life was making me, and how much I wanted to simply stop, shaking with some strange wish of please please please please please let the words in this pamphlet tell something I don't know yet, and let them give me a reason for one more day.

The pamphlet told me to find my strength in God, and to call a hotline so real live people could tell me more about the Lord's place in my life, and why He wouldn't want me to end it.

To all of you out there: Your god does not make me want to reconsider my thoughts about suicide. Your God makes me want to cry, and makes me wonder if any soul left out there with eyes unclouded by the opiate of the masses against the pain and the misery that sometimes life can bring could possibly possibly understand. Your ultimate faith in your God and your contempt for my heathen ignorance makes me want to die and your act of cowering behind that God to the point where you can give me no logical sense of encouragement or compassion or a feeling of sober joy makes me lonelier than I ever dreamed I could be before.

Help me. Help me as a person and not as a heathen, and know that I'm agnostic because my logic denies me the power of faith and that that is not going to change in my hour of greatest despair. Speak to me as a person. Speak to me of the beauty of the world and all the things I could be. Leave your God out of it. And then maybe, maybe we can talk. Maybe you can listen to me, and, you know, that just might do it. Maybe I can listen, too. Maybe you might just have something interesting to say, something I didn't know yet, and some sort of reason for one more day.

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