The Edge

Suicide.

The word slices through the air like a cold, sharp blade. You can almost watch it cut the room in half. People hear it the word suicide and stiffen, their eyes darting down, their hands fidgeting as if the word itself might crawl up and latch onto them. No one wants to touch it, to get too close. But me? I’ve been close. I’ve felt it wrap around me, choking me, pressing in from all sides, like a suffocating fog that seeps into your skin and clings to every part of you. It stays. It never really leaves.

People don’t understand. Just like you don’t “choose” to live with cancer eating away at your body, I never “chose” to live with this. I didn’t decide to carry the weight of a disease that creeps in, threatening to drag me into the ground. It wasn’t like they imagine, this neat little box they put it in—this idea that it’s a conscious, calculated plan, a moment of deliberation. That’s not how it happens. Not for me.

No, it’s this heaviness. It starts slow, like a small ember burning in the pit of your stomach, and then it spreads. It crawls into your chest, makes its home there, and suddenly, you can’t breathe. You try, but your lungs won’t expand, and everything tightens around you. It’s a constant pressure, weighing you down, making it impossible to think. Every thought feels like it’s trapped in molasses, sluggish, sticky, drowning. And then there’s that voice—the one whispering, echoing, louder and louder until it’s all you hear. “There’s only one way out.”

People like to say it’s selfish. They throw phrases like “attention-seeking” around, as if they understand what it’s like to be in that moment. But they don’t. They’ve never felt the way the world closes in on you, how reality twists and warps until everything feels meaningless, and nothing makes sense. They’ve never experienced that crushing silence, the one where even your own heartbeat feels distant, muffled, like you’re disappearing inside yourself, sinking deeper, and no one can pull you out.

I wasn’t thinking about attention. I wasn’t thinking about anyone or anything, except how badly I needed it to just stop. It wasn’t about dying. It was about finding an escape. It was about the overwhelming need to stop the suffocating feeling, the need to find a moment where I could just “breathe.” To feel something other than that crushing weight.

I survived. Somehow. Not once, but again and again. And you’d think surviving would be the end of it, but it’s not. It follows you, like a shadow lurking at the edges of your mind. I carry the memory of how close I came, the knowledge of how easy it would be to let myself slip back. That line between staying and going—it’s razor-thin. People don’t realize just how thin.

We don’t talk about the real part, the ugly, raw parts of it. We sanitize it, wrap it in neat terms like “commit” or “voluntary”, as if it’s a logical decision someone makes in the clear light of day. That’s a lie. The truth is, it happens when the world gets too dark, too heavy, and there’s no light left. When the darkness swallows you whole, and you can’t find your way out.

I’m still here. I don’t know how, but I am. And I’ll keep saying it: we “need” to talk about this. Not the sugar-coated version, not the whispers behind closed doors. We need to talk about the real thing. Because the silence, the shame—that’s what’s killing us. And not everyone makes it back from the edge.