When You Want It All to Stop

If you are reading this because you are thinking about ending your life: I am glad you are still here. And I want you to call or text 988 tonight, or your local crisis line if you are outside the United States, or tell one person near you what is happening. Not because you have to be fixed first, and not because reading is a substitute for that call. Because the thing you are carrying is too heavy to carry alone, and you were never meant to.

What the wish is for

Nearly everyone who has been where you are will tell you the same thing afterward: what they wanted was not death. What they wanted was for the pain to stop. Those feel identical from inside, and they are not. Death is a guess about how to end the pain, made by a mind that is exhausted and cannot see any other door. The wish underneath it is a completely sane wish, the same one every living being has: I do not want to suffer.

That wish is not the enemy. It is the most honest thing about you right now, and it can be honored without your dying. What the pain needs is relief, and relief is something people can help with: doctors, medication, a change in the situation, sleep, time, company. Some of those have not worked or have not been tried. Let the people whose job it is try again.

The part of you that is watching

You can check this against your own experience rather than take my word for it.

There is pain. It may be enormous. And there is something that knows the pain is there. These are not the same. The pain is loud and dark and heavy. The knowing of it is none of those things. It is simply aware. It was aware yesterday, when the pain was different, and it will be aware tomorrow. It is not itself in pain, any more than a window is wet because it is raining outside.

The old masters say that this awareness is what is most essential in you, that it has never been born and cannot die, and that it is at ease by its own nature, underneath every storm that passes through it. A sentence cannot lift a depression. But on a bad night, finding the one who is watching the pain, even for a few seconds, changes the arithmetic. The pain is no longer the whole of you. There is somewhere to stand.

You can try it now. Do not try to make the pain go away. Ask, quietly: what is it that knows this is here? Do not answer with words. Look.

This life

Nothing in this teaching condemns people who take their own lives, and neither do I. What it says instead is that this life, the one you have right now, with a human body and a mind that can look at itself, is astonishingly rare and precious, more than you can see from inside the dark. Not because you must achieve something with it. Because in a life like this, that awareness can be recognized, and rested in, and that recognition is the real end of suffering, not the guessed-at one. Dudjom Lingpa wrote, again and again, that people spend a whole life never remembering death and then, on the morning of death, regret what they did not do. Do not throw away the one thing that can actually end this.

Tonight

You do not have to solve your life tonight. You have to get through tonight, and there are people whose whole work is helping with exactly that. Call or text 988. If you are somewhere else in the world, find your country’s line, or go to an emergency room, or wake someone. Put the means away from you, or ask someone to take them. Eat something. Lie down. Breathe out, and rest in the small pause at the end of the out-breath, and let the next breath come by itself. You can do that in the dark.

You are not a burden. The wish to stop hurting is not a sin. And the one who is aware of all this pain is not in pain, and has never left you.