This first step is difficult; knowing where to begin, what to say.

Many of you aren’t at a place of considering ending your life… but some of you are. For some of you, the last step before you grab a blade, or gun, or bottle of pills, or take the jump… is to make one final quiet shout out for help, asking randomly of the internet to provide a lifeline for you.

So I’ll begin as if you who are reading this are at your end and this one chapter may be your last resort. And I’ll begin just talking, and trusting that it will carry you where I hope it may carry you.

Everything feels different, when you arrive at this place of feeling like there is nothing left for you other than death.

When you had some measure of hope, you were still trying, you had some spark of energy for the effort. You were busy inside your head trying to figure things out, panicking, casting about for options, grasping at the littlest hope. Feeling terrified, angry, despairing, frustrated, lost, seeking, buffeted back and forth between all your pressures, fears, unhappiness. You’ve been so immersed in the drama and turmoil of your failing life, a life that has been plummeting downhill, likely for years. A life which seems to have finally run out of any options that allow you to live further. Finally you fail, nowhere left to turn.

And then something inside you crosses some invisible line, and you feel: it’s over. You let go of the battle. It’s no longer a matter of ‘deciding’, because deciding means you still have energy, still have options and choices. No, you arrive at this place of having no options other than to surrender, to let go your battle.

But there is a while, between.

There is some amount of time between arriving at the place of giving up on your life… and taking that final step. And in that pause–minutes, hours, maybe even days or longer–everything feels different. Suspended. You might still be in a state of trapped panic, lost blindness, marrow-deep fear, barren sadness; or those extreme feelings may leave and you may experience almost a semblance of peace when you enter this in-between place.

Not true peace, because the feelings that brought you here still remain; you’ll still have your fear, some anguish, a deep sadness, you’ll feel the loss of a life you wish you could have made better, you’ll feel the irretrievable finality of what you’re about to do. But whether panicking or in some peace, you will still feel life differently now, because you know it’s the end.

And because you’re leaving, you feel some things losing their grip on you, some of those things that forced you here. That’s why you’re leaving: to make those painful things lose their grip on you. As soon as you arrive at the place of realizing you’re ready to end it, much of the grip these things had on your life… dissolves.

And other things dissolve their grip, too. The people and world moving around you are still so busy, so entirely caught up in their striving, their wanting, their thinking that everything is so important, they’re still holding strongly to their stresses and worries and everything they want and must try to achieve…

…And you’re going. You’re now outside of all that. You’re here among them, yet you’re detached and separate. You’ve left whatever they’re still in the middle of, you’ve left whatever you used to be in the middle of. You’re stepping outside of the great whirl of problems that led to your failed life.

And it’s strange, it’s new ground for you: it took your realization of this being the end, before you could finally let go of all the mess you were in. When you know you don’t have to face tomorrow, don’t have to face any more tomorrows filled with pain and hopelessness and consequences, then the huge part of your turmoil–how to face tomorrow, what to do today and tomorrow, how to solve things–dissolves. Just knowing you won’t be around to face it all, dissolves so much inside you.

And that stuff was taking up a huge amount of space in your head and your life. Now that it’s dissolving… there is some new open space in your head, in your feelings. A part of you becomes kind of blank, now that the survival struggle has gone. You can’t try anymore, can’t go back into that life that was killing you. So it’s just a matter of how long you dwell in this in-between, before you receive the signal that tells you it’s time for your final voluntary movement as a live being on this earth.

It’s a strange new limbo to be in; just existing, at the end, waiting for the signal.

Your consciousness feels different. You know what sleep feels like, what awake feels like, you may know what being drunk or stoned feel like, being depressed or manic, all shadings of consciousness. But now your entire consciousness feels a little different, day and night. Almost like, now that the rest of your life has shut down, you’re waking up a little, before the end. Maybe you almost feel like it’s the first time you truly know what you’re leaving, now that you’re faced with actually leaving it.

If you really have arrived at the place of knowing it’s the end for you, then you will know what I’m describing. You’ll be feeling it, in your own way. This in-between, this limbo. It might be pretty messy for you, still much turmoil and panic, or it might be calmer and clearer; you’ll each experience it in your own unique combination based on your mind and your circumstances. But you’ll feel some of that essence I described, some of that difference in how you perceive everything. Your mind is altering in activity and reality, so you have to feel different once you arrive here.

And I’m sorry that your life up until now has been so hard on you, sorry it has put you through the grinder of pain that brought you here, to awaiting the signal for your next and final step. Because if you’re in this final holding-area, this in-between of feeling resigned to your end and just waiting for the signal to do it, then you’re so close to the edge that you have only four possibilities left:

First, our minds change so quickly, often in response to the most subtle thing. You never know what will suddenly occur to you to change your thoughts, feelings, and situation entirely. You don’t know the depth of your own mind, none of us do, and no matter how lost you feel… there is something in you far deeper than your current knowledge of yourself. Something that just may rise from the depths and illuminate you, shake you, re-shape you, re-wire you, save you.

Second, there’s the possibility that someone or something else might swoop in and save you. It does happen, and very often. It’s amazing how often people reach ‘the end’ and can no longer save themselves, but something or someone swoops in to save them, in ways that are too varied and unpredictable to possibly imagine or hope for.

Third, you can also be so isolated from others, and so hidden and private with what you’re going through that, for whatever reason, you’re not reaching out or you feel you can’t reach out, and others can’t get to you.  Let’s face it, many people don’t hear any deep inner voice that arises to save them, and that outside person or event doesn’t appear. If something wondrous happened to save everyone, there would be no such thing as suicide, would there? But there is suicide, it happens, people run out of the ability to save themselves and an outside savior does not always appear. So you arrive at the only option you see to escape the pain:

You feel your final option is to take your step into ending it all, to ending you. Sometimes, all too often, this is what happens. You can’t seem to rescue yourself, nothing else saves you, and you receive the ‘it’s time to check out’ signal, and you take the steps to end your life. Thankfully, even at this stage, often it isn’t the end, and something happens to save you even after you’ve taken the step. The world, the people around you, whatever ‘presence’ you believe in or have lost faith in, there are a lot of forces trying to save you, even if you don’t see them and you don’t think they’re there.

But let’s not go to that third option.
Not today, okay?
I want you to allow a fourth possibility.

This possibility is a giant step beyond all previous options. It’s taking a massive step beyond ending your life. It’s a step that takes you into territory you’ve never been, and it’s the option that your entire life has been driving you to but which you could not see.

Sometimes
The last resort
Is the first thing
You must do.

I hope you can step beyond, into total surrender.

Killing yourself is not the furthest step you can take. Killing yourself is not surrender. Killing yourself is still far, far back there. It’s still stuck in the same behavior, the same way of thought, the same way of living your life, that led to everything crashing down and imploding into your life-failure.

Killing yourself is still trying to control your outcome. Your life so far has been about trying to make things happen: make things better, make a change, make it work out, make something–anything!–change for the better. And all your making just didn’t work out. Everything you read that told you how to succeed and save yourself, everyone who told you that you could do it, succeed, solve your problems… it all fell short. It didn’t work. You couldn’t make it work, and they couldn’t make it work for you. All that making, making, making, trying, trying, trying, forcing it to work but you could not make it work.

Your ‘making’, your effort to try force a better outcome, did not succeed. It failed. It failed in a big way, a way that ended up in your total life-failure. And now things are so hopeless and painful and scary, you still want to ‘make’: you want to make it all go away. And since you can’t make it go away, now there’s only one thing left you know you can make happen: the end of you. You can make you go away from the pain.

You, who failed to make anything you wanted to happen, now wants to try force the one last thing you can control and succeed at. It’s still the old you, still the failing you, ‘making’ that decision and ‘making’ that happen.

So why not go beyond being like that?

You have never tried going beyond.

Why not extend a tiny little trust to this new ‘in-between’ area, and see where it takes you?

You do not know what will happen.
You do not know what should happen.
Open, and stay open.

Why not let go of waiting for the signal to end it all? Why not keep letting go, as if you were still dying… only don’t take your own life, don’t make that final action happen. Why not stay in this place for a while? Indefinitely? I don’t mean re-entering your old failing life of hoping and searching for something better, a way to work things out. I mean… let all that go, too.

Let the signal go. Let the suicide go. Let the trying and hoping for something better, go. And just ‘let’, and nothing else?

Just let.

You’ve already given up your life. You were going to kill yourself. So you have nothing to lose by just letting. If anything saves you, you don’t need to start grasping for it again, you just let it save you. And if ‘it’ is going to kill you, then it will. But why help it? Don’t do that to yourself anymore.

Just let. Let some deeper force shape your life, and all that is happening in it.

Please trust me that far, and let yourself JUST LET.

Let yourself breathe for awhile longer, and leave everything else to just letting.

I’m trying to buy a little time, with you. If you weren’t at your very end, then you’d still be reaching out to whoever you could, calling a friend, seeing a therapist, calling a suicide hotline or people like the Samaritans.  And it would have been fine for me to send you to other parts of my book and website, the rest of my writings will help spread open your mind and life and will help illuminate just what brought you to this lost state of your life. What I write is very real, it’s not just recycled from the plethora of feel-good motivational spiritual fluff you have to wade through these days.

But as I write this, I have to assume you’re at the end of things you’ve tried, and for whatever reasons you don’t seem to have access to anything or anyone else that can offer help. I have to assume that I’m your final reach-out for help. I have to write this not as if you have a lot of time and options to try other things, but as if I’m your last option. That’s the only way I can write anything that is real enough to maybe pierce through to you.

If you haven’t realized it by now, I’ve been to the edge. Quite a few times, and over a few decades. And the fluff and motivational stuff never worked for me. The spiritual and religious stuff never worked for me. So I had to go deep, head straight toward what was chewing the life out of me. I had to have the ultimate sit-down with myself and face all of me in the mirror. What I found reflected there is what I have to give you, to say to you. And it is all I have to give and to say to you. So I have to dig deep.

I cannot save you, I know that. But I can speak from a place that is so open and unadorned that I know you’ll recognize it’s coming from someone who has been to the edge… and I’m still alive now, and I’m still facing everything. And I hope that is enough to keep you listening a little more, trusting what I say just a little bit.

And if so, then I hope I’ve bought a little more time with you. I didn’t solve anything for you on this page, I just shot for the absolute minimum: I wanted to get you to the end of this chapter, and then I want you to get through the next chapter. And after that, the next. I want to try buy a lot more time with you, and my price is how well I hear even some small part of your voice. And whatever further time I get with you, I want to use that time to keep planting more and more powerful seeds in you, and to get each of those seeds sprouting from your dark ground out into the air and sun, just enough sprout to maybe grab hold of a reason for living again.

I want to get you through the next few chapters. One by one. Everything that brought you to this place of wanting to end it all, is in these first few chapters. Everything. And whatever can be done to save you, is also there. No matter what your issue is, it’s all in there. After those few, the rest of the chapters just help you continue from there, move you past survival and into coping and resolving. But the first chapters… that’s the stuff that will save you, if you can hear it.

I don’t want to lose you. You matter to the world and to me.

Please, please, get to the next chapter, and then the next. I’m currently hoping to rewrite everything better, and add so many more words to fill in the many gaps; when I first wrote this site years ago I had a small window of time in which to do so. I wrote from the heart and from experience and tried to say as much as possible, but there is still so much missing. I am currently writing the many new pages needed, and apologize that they are not yet on the site. Soon.

***A brief note: in my years with this website, I’ve never linked to an outside site. I have considered starting my own forum, where people can talk with everyone about their issues, but I have not done that yet. However, a site has recently begun, and they are doing it better than I could. If you don’t want to read more articles by me, and instead you want to interact with others who are either considering suicide or who have ‘been there’, I recommend heading over to www.SuicideForum.com. I have no affiliation with that site… but they’re doing something I wanted to do, and they’re doing it well.

For now, if you wish to continue reading on my site, please begin Here.