People who are fighting for their life are not always good friends.

I think we tend to view suicidal people as really sad people. We think we’ll see it in them. We think we’ll see it coming.

We don’t often.

I think it can be easy at times to miss individuals who are struggling with suicidal thoughts because they don’t always just stay in bed for days or display behaviors that are easy to identify as “depressed”. Sometimes it’s more of a behind-closed-doors. Sometimes it’s more subtle. Sometimes it’s more of a “snap”. They keep going and going until suddenly they just feel like they can’t take it anymore.

Sometimes they come across as cocky. Sometimes they project their life as the best possible to hide the truth. Sometimes they continue to show up so nobody realizes.

Without our ability to see them, it may even be easy to resent them. We can be angry at the way they treat us or others. We can be be envious of the life they are portraying. We can be bitter from comparing our reality to their fiction.

People who are struggling with suicidal thoughts aren’t always the nicest. They may display behaviors that actively push others away. They might cut contact with friends or just become “too busy” for relationships.

It isn’t pretty when they’re at war just to survive.

In the midst of that darkness it is incredibly hard to think of others. It just is. This isn’t condemning individuals who are struggling with suicidal thoughts, and it isn’t to excuse their actions, it’s to try to show the other side. People don’t end up suicidal when life is really good. People end up suicidal when they can’t see any other end to the pain they are in.

Pain, when we don’t consciously choose otherwise, often brings out the worst in people. It diminishes our patience. It alters our perspective. It inflames our entitlement.

When I was in the worst spot of my life I had a lot of people who were angry with me. The sad thing is they were (mostly) justifiably so.

I caused damage around me and people saw the things I was doing and were validly hurt and angry. In reality, I was experiencing more pain than I knew what to do with. I was doing my very best to stay alive and I was clinging to the emptiest sources for that. Eventually, it all came crashing down around me. That’s what happens when you are chasing idols instead of God.

It took a lot of pain for me to meet God at a level so deep. You don’t walk through something like that and come out the other side without knowing Him deeper.

I still had to face the aftermath of what I had caused. To this day there are still ripples in my life from the choices I made then.

I think it’s important to be raw in the conversations regarding suicide because I don’t think it always looks the way we expect. In that season of darkness, the people who met me with gentleness and compassion made a radiating impact. There are friends who saw the recklessness of my behaviors and didn’t stop to point out my flaws, but offered a space away from those problems where I could laugh and feel loved. Obviously that isn’t to say avoid conflict, but it is to say there may be times where pausing and just showing someone a tad more gentleness may make more of a difference than you know.