ArteriesBindEveryon
Student
- Feb 9, 2023
- 100
This is a story that I've been thinking about a lot lately and I wanted to hear opinions of people here. I've wanted to talk about this with someone else for years and feel like this is the only place where I can get a valuable opinion. I ask that you please read the entire story before commenting.
The first thing to understand is my experience with suicide. I've been contemplating suicide since I was seven years old. My whole life and still to this day, I've seen death as the end goal of life due to its inevitability and believe that there's nothing wrong with taking a shortcut to that ending. I've never been anti-suicide and think that punishing or being afraid of someone for being suicidal is unethical. This is the story of the one time I betrayed these strongly held beliefs.
There was this boy who we'll call Tim. Tim and I had been friends since sixth grade and were now in high school. I believe we were in tenth grade when his parents got divorced. Shortly after the divorce his mother started seeing another woman. Tim saw this as a betrayal to his family and started to become homophobic. At first it was just edgy jokes but it quickly became apparent that he was genuinely becoming hateful. I started making fun of him for this implying that he was gay himself and was trying to cover it up by being a homophobe, which he pushed back against very heavily. We kept teasing him about him being gay not because we thought he was, but because we wanted him to become embarrassed to be homophobic outwardly.
One day when we were in eleventh grade, Tim tried to "prove" that he wasn't gay by showing us his camera roll, which had a bunch of heterosexual porn videos downloaded in a row. Absolutely no person who was actually straight would do this, and at this moment it became clear that he was actually gay. I stopped teasing him for being gay even though he was still being extremely homophobic. I stopped sitting with Tim at lunch not long after this incident because his hatred had started to become worse. From the people who still talked to him, I learned that his beliefs had only gotten more radical, now at nazi-levels of evil. He'd begun to tell his friends that he was a white nationalist and genuinely believed in ethno-states.
Come our senior year of high school, in I believe October, I run into Tim in the hallway talking with some other people before class. He made a comment about killing himself, but didn't laugh at all when he said it. I asked if he was serious and he said, "Well, you never know." He was smiling, but his eyes and tone were full of sadness. From one suicidal person to another, I could tell that he was serious. I became incredibly concerned at this point not because of the possibility of suicide, but because of the radical beliefs he held at the time. This was the same year as the Parkland high school shooting as well as several other mass murders. While I do believe in the right to die, I also don't believe that anyone should have their life taken away against their will.
I thought very hard about what to do and eventually decided that it would be best to report him to the school councilor. I spoke to two people who were mutual friends of Tim and I and told them what I was thinking. They agreed with me and the three of us went to the office to tell an authority figure what was going on. I felt incredibly guilty about this because while I certainly didn't want a tragedy to befall our school, I was assuming that someone I once considered to be a friend was a potential school shooter. I had no idea if he had access to firearms and no evidence that this was a possibility beyond the fact that he was someone with outrageous beliefs and nothing to lose. And to make matters worse, I was compromising my own held beliefs on suicide by snitching on a fellow suicidal student. I don't think Tim ever found out that I was the one who lead the mission to get him reported.
I didn't speak to Tim again after this incident until the very end of high school. Our school put on a late-night senior party for us graduates. I ran into Tim there talking to some other friends of ours. It turned out that Tim had come out as gay and that he had a boyfriend at one point earlier in the year, though they broke up because he was moving away. He said he wanted to put all his edgy past behind him and start over. We hung out for a bit at the party, then parted ways and never saw each other again.
That's the story. Now, I want you to judge me for my actions. Everything we've been taught by wider society tells me that I did the right thing, but I still can't help but feel that I betrayed myself as well as all other suicidal people by doing what I did. I had no proof that he had any intention of harming others, only that he wanted to harm himself. While Tim came out of the ordeal a better person, there's no telling if my report is what helped him change and what I could've put him through. Did I do the right thing? Am I a traitor to suicidal people everywhere?
The first thing to understand is my experience with suicide. I've been contemplating suicide since I was seven years old. My whole life and still to this day, I've seen death as the end goal of life due to its inevitability and believe that there's nothing wrong with taking a shortcut to that ending. I've never been anti-suicide and think that punishing or being afraid of someone for being suicidal is unethical. This is the story of the one time I betrayed these strongly held beliefs.
There was this boy who we'll call Tim. Tim and I had been friends since sixth grade and were now in high school. I believe we were in tenth grade when his parents got divorced. Shortly after the divorce his mother started seeing another woman. Tim saw this as a betrayal to his family and started to become homophobic. At first it was just edgy jokes but it quickly became apparent that he was genuinely becoming hateful. I started making fun of him for this implying that he was gay himself and was trying to cover it up by being a homophobe, which he pushed back against very heavily. We kept teasing him about him being gay not because we thought he was, but because we wanted him to become embarrassed to be homophobic outwardly.
One day when we were in eleventh grade, Tim tried to "prove" that he wasn't gay by showing us his camera roll, which had a bunch of heterosexual porn videos downloaded in a row. Absolutely no person who was actually straight would do this, and at this moment it became clear that he was actually gay. I stopped teasing him for being gay even though he was still being extremely homophobic. I stopped sitting with Tim at lunch not long after this incident because his hatred had started to become worse. From the people who still talked to him, I learned that his beliefs had only gotten more radical, now at nazi-levels of evil. He'd begun to tell his friends that he was a white nationalist and genuinely believed in ethno-states.
Come our senior year of high school, in I believe October, I run into Tim in the hallway talking with some other people before class. He made a comment about killing himself, but didn't laugh at all when he said it. I asked if he was serious and he said, "Well, you never know." He was smiling, but his eyes and tone were full of sadness. From one suicidal person to another, I could tell that he was serious. I became incredibly concerned at this point not because of the possibility of suicide, but because of the radical beliefs he held at the time. This was the same year as the Parkland high school shooting as well as several other mass murders. While I do believe in the right to die, I also don't believe that anyone should have their life taken away against their will.
I thought very hard about what to do and eventually decided that it would be best to report him to the school councilor. I spoke to two people who were mutual friends of Tim and I and told them what I was thinking. They agreed with me and the three of us went to the office to tell an authority figure what was going on. I felt incredibly guilty about this because while I certainly didn't want a tragedy to befall our school, I was assuming that someone I once considered to be a friend was a potential school shooter. I had no idea if he had access to firearms and no evidence that this was a possibility beyond the fact that he was someone with outrageous beliefs and nothing to lose. And to make matters worse, I was compromising my own held beliefs on suicide by snitching on a fellow suicidal student. I don't think Tim ever found out that I was the one who lead the mission to get him reported.
I didn't speak to Tim again after this incident until the very end of high school. Our school put on a late-night senior party for us graduates. I ran into Tim there talking to some other friends of ours. It turned out that Tim had come out as gay and that he had a boyfriend at one point earlier in the year, though they broke up because he was moving away. He said he wanted to put all his edgy past behind him and start over. We hung out for a bit at the party, then parted ways and never saw each other again.
That's the story. Now, I want you to judge me for my actions. Everything we've been taught by wider society tells me that I did the right thing, but I still can't help but feel that I betrayed myself as well as all other suicidal people by doing what I did. I had no proof that he had any intention of harming others, only that he wanted to harm himself. While Tim came out of the ordeal a better person, there's no telling if my report is what helped him change and what I could've put him through. Did I do the right thing? Am I a traitor to suicidal people everywhere?
