> If we can make sure people don’t grow up believing that suicide is even a way to cope with what has happened to them, we could significantly reduce the number of suicides.

The fact that there is a plan B (suicide) keeps me going.

I was actively (almost daily) considering suicide around ages 13-16. I made a decision to postpone it every day I thought of it because I believed I had seen too little of life by that point to make a decision to end it. But it being available as an option made things easier. There was a “backup plan” and I could always use it, which made it possible to endure another day.

I’m in my 30s today. I have used the same strategy in some other complicated life situations since my teenage years, although only a few times and very briefly. Knowing that you can just end it and that it’s available to you not just today, but also tomorrow and the day after that, is so unbelievably useful in my opinion that I’d personally like to see it normalized, rather than the opposite.

For example, when I was in enormous physical pain, my thinking was: “If there are no other options left, I can always just end it. But there are other options, so let’s try those first.” Reminding myself that I am working on solutions, and that if I run out of them, there is still one final option, took all the edge off the pain. It lost its power over me. I was fully in control of how this issue was going to be resolved. And it takes the edge off suicide itself - it’s just one of the solutions, nothing special. Compared to other solutions it has one terrible drawback: you can’t try any of the other solutions once you’ve tried this one.