A popular opinion is that suicide is selfish.

Here is a real suicide note written by a real person. Fortunately she was not successful in completing it and now is a passionate advocate for the understanding and prevention of self-harm and suicide.

(Please do not read this if you think it might act as a trigger for you.)

“Hey everyone,

Having never read a suicide note, im not 100% sure what they’re meant to contain, apologies, explanations, recriminations? I don’t know. I guess it’s kinda up to the author. Anyway, here goes my attempt:

Firstly, I want to say i’m sorry for any and all the pain this has caused. I find it really hard to comprehend that my death will have an impact on people but logic tells me that it will so i’m sorry for any hardship i have caused. I know i have no right to ask anything of anyone but please look out for each other, especially my little sister and I won’t be there for her. There are some organisations out there who help people who know someone who has committed suicide, the Samaritans are rumoured to be particularly good.

Secondly, i want to say that this was no-one’s fault. Please do not blame yourselves or anyone else for what I have done, it was my decision, my failure and my choice, no-one could have stopped or helped me. The reason I didn’t tell anyone is that I didn’t want to be stopped, I know that is selfish but it’s also true. Also, telling someone you are suicidal does not make the feeling go away it just makes the other person worry. Please don’t torment yourselves with thoughts like ‘she tried to tell me’ because I didn’t. I worked really hard not to let anyone know what I had planned. Also for those people who still talked to me about how I was feeling, i hate to say it but i started to lie. I’m sorry for abusing your trust in this way, but I had given up and I no longer desired to be helped. I still respected you and knew that you cared and would have helped if i’d have asked but i didn’t care anymore and telling you would have been a failure in my eyes.

Thirdly I want to try and explain why I did why I did what I did in order that you might understand and that it may be of some help. Life had become unbearable for me. I hated myself so much and so uncontrollably. Anything i did i viewed as a failure and it made me sick just to look in the mirror at myself. Whenever I didn’t have to be somewhere I would hide out in my room trying to pretend that I didn’t exist in order that i didn’t have to face what a horrible person I was. When I’ve spoken to people about how I feel about myself they assure me that others don’t feel the same, however that didn’t alter the way I felt about myself, to me, the fact that I was a horrible person was fact. This hatred isn’t a new thing but it is a major contributing factor to my suicide. I think the actual decision to kill myself came when I lost hope for the future. Life would never get good enough for me to want to live it. Feeling as much of a failure as I did I didn’t see how I could achieve anything in life. When someone asked me what I wanted for my future i listed a career i could be proud of, a group of friends i felt at ease with and a partner. I know these things may all seem attainable but for me, they all seemed impossible and all i could see in my future was pain, self hatred and failure so i chose to give up. To me, at least, suicide seemed like a logical choice, if my future was going to be so wretched and no different to the self hatred of my earlier years, ending it made more sense than living at the misery and then dying 50 years later of some humiliating disease. Im not asking you to say that you’re glad that I killed myself but im hoping that you may realise that for me it was a release. For a long time, thinking of people I would be leaving behind had stopped me taking this final step and coupled with that the bad timing. But then I realised that there was never going to be a good time to leave in such a manner so I decided on my date.

Fourthly, i want to say : I love you all. There isn’t anyone in my life that if I had the chance to say this goodbye out loud i wouldn’t want to say how much I love you. Everyone I know is amazing and I hope that the kindness people have shown to me you will now show to each other and support one another through the coming months. I really am so sorry for doing this and I hope you can both forgive me and move on.

Love and hugs,

——– “

Selfish?