Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 "Suicide." It is a word I have become really familiar with over the years, especially the last 12 months. It is a heavy word, it stays in the air hanging, suffocating. It carries the meaning of the worst kind of pain a human being living on this planet can face. And maybe more than anything else, it is a word a lot of people never want to hear – for one reason or the other.  A part of me understands why the majority of us are so scared of suicide even as a word, a concept. It all ties back to the ideas and thoughts I've discussed earlier in this chapter. But I think there is a much bigger part in me that is boundlessly confused by the sheer hysteria the uttering of those syllables sometimes causes. And I think that is, without a doubt, one of the biggest problems we as a society have when it comes to helping people who want to kill themselves. As long as we are this scared of the word alone, that is how long we will lose even more lives that could have been saved if they...

 I haven't been doing that well recently. I don't think there's any specific reason for it, other than maybe the stress of moving and living in a new apartment completely on my own kind of got to me in a way. But nothing has happened that would've made me upset; I've just been hurting a bit more than normally. I guess it comes with the illness – ebbs and flows seemingly without reason.  However it may be, this has resulted in me thinking about suicide more. Usually, the way that I go about working on my art collections and the complimentary blog posts is that I concentrate on one thing that I am struggling with the most at that given time. Working on this collection has been the most taxing so far, which is why finishing it is taking a bit more time than the previous two. It is not that making art is making me think about suicide more; rather, I am making art about suicide and suicidal ideations because I am thinking about them so much right now. That is what is hin...