Early Access: You Took Away My Gun (Patreon)

This is Sunday's video. CW: themes of self-harm.

September is Suicide Awareness Month. If you or someone you know needs help talking about suicide: https://988lifeline.org/

I made this video 6 months ago. There was snow on the ground, and it kept coming from the sky. We had been living in the new house for about 4 months and all I could think of was how trapped and doomed I was. 

YouTube was going to fail. I was going to fail. I would have to go back to an office if I could even find a job. My life would turn into a series of commutes and a hellish slog through 8 hours of prison. I would have no outlet for my day-to-day feelings, no sympathy for how I couldn't adapt, no time or space to actually take care of myself anymore. I would be in hell again, and it was just a matter of time.

I've played with the idea of suicide my whole life. It's a game I assume a lot of people play now and then. It's a game you can play to make you feel in control because it's the last thing you have control over. If things get so bad you can't stand it, when there's no help and no other alternative, you can end it. That's the final control we all have over ourselves.

So I played with it, in the worst of times. Thought it out, never planned it, but definitely walked through it as a concept. It gave me a sense of peace, in a weird way. Like sucking your thumb as an adult or something, it was shameful but it was powerful.

6 months ago it started to be more than a game. 

It never got to the point where I planned it, but it was becoming more and more of a regular thing to think about. The hopelessness I felt about my life, the lack of control, it was all becoming ever-present. There was nothing else, this was it, and it was never going to go away, because I would never have the control over my life, the agency financially or materially, physically or emotionally, to do anything about it.

I told my partner I was having suicidal ideation. He didn't take it well. We fought. It was very unpleasant.

I didn't notice it, but a couple of days later he told me he changed the combination to the gun safe and had taken my pistol. I kept it by the bed, it wasn't there anymore. I didn't know where it was, and that was fine. It meant something to me that he had taken it seriously.

Getting those thoughts out and admitting them, even if it didn't go well, lifted something in me. I still feel the hopelessness, a lot, and I have a lot of fear all the time about what I see as an unavoidable failure of how things are now, but... I dunno. I don't think about suicide as much. I'm going to therapy. Trying to get to the bottom of some stuff.

The world is shit. It was before you were born, and it will be after you die. I have no solution to any of this. It's not my job to solve the problem, only to survive. I hope you can find a way to survive, too.