Behind the Persona
There are depths to people
Part of being a Functioning Adult™ involves building an unemotional, non-offensive publicly-facing persona that no one gets to pierce or see behind under any circumstances.
The more artificially bland someone is, the more likely they are to be accepted by quote-unquote polite society.
I think that’s part of what makes suicide so shocking. In death a person suddenly seems like more of a Real Person than they did while they were still an actual living, breathing biological organism with a pulse and functioning heartbeat who you could have chosen to talk to but didn’t.
Suicide makes you realize that the part of a person you see publicly is nothing more than a tiny slice of the total human being behind the persona, and that the guy you thought so little of had emotions so vast and deep that you wish you would have been able to talk to him before he was gone just so you could feel what it feels like to talk to someone real.
When your mild-mannered coworker who’s perfectly polite and inoffensive and is described by everyone as “he’s such a good guy” puts on his old army uniform and shoots himself in the head on his parents’ front lawn at midnight on a random Tuesday, you suddenly realize that he was a full person with depths to his soul that you couldn’t even begin to fathom and that his presentation as a kind of blah guy who just showed up to work punctiliously and did his assigned tasks in a non-attention seeking manner wasn’t even close to the whole him but rather just a pleasant inoffensive island poking out of a deep ocean that just barely concealed the volcanic core beneath until it couldn’t.
If you’re wondering why people commit suicide, now you know. It’s not that they want to cease existing, it’s that they want people to realize that they ever existed to begin with. That’s why they leave notes, and that’s why they often fantasize about being there to see people’s reactions after they’re gone.
Make no mistake about it. If a suicidal person could choose to continue existing just long enough to be able to float above their own funeral, they definitely would.
Suicide isn’t a cry for help. It’s a cry for recognition.
People shouldn’t be shocked when someone who seemingly has it all decides to die.
The core of the driving ambition that leads someone become massively successful is the hope that one day they’ll reach a level where they can finally leave the persona behind and Become Who They Are.
The problem is that they eventually realize that no matter how much fame and success they achieve they’ll always be viewed as a Human Doing and never as a Human Being.
The fake version of themselves becomes all they are and all they ever will be, to everyone but themselves.
That’s the point where they decide that ending their existence is the only way to let the world know that they ever existed to begin with.
The core of depression is the desire to stop being perceived as an NPC.
The depressed person will do anything to get people to see behind the persona. Anything.