Anger, despair, hopelessness, and depression effect everybody at some point in their life. For the lucky ones, it is a bad afternoon or few days and then things get better. Not everybody is lucky though. For some these thoughts come back within a short time after they go away, and for some they keep coming back until they never go away and that is how they feel most if not all of the time. People will say that person’s problem is their negativity. They will offer lectures about the glass half empty attitude, and say that if that person were not so pessimistic then good things would happen, implying it is all their fault.

So what is the answer when you hate life? What is the answer if you sincerely wish you would never wake up again? The answer is 100% dependent on what is the question being asked. Do you hate your life? Yes, probably so, who are we to say that is not true? I have felt that way before and it was 100% true- it was not dramatics for attention or proving a point.

Is suicide the answer to feeling like that? Well, if there is no other valid alternative presented what would your answer be? Take anything you hate – an old sweater with stain on it that reminds you of the night your ex dumped you- you hate it so you want to get rid of it. If you hate something getting rid of it certainly seems like a reasonable thing (once you jump past the knee jerk reaction of how sacred life is and the “you don’t really mean that” automatic responses).

That is why the question is so important. Because life is not like a sweater, a broken toy, or an old clunker car.  Those things you can hate and get rid of them, because you can replace them. In the case of hating life, it is not life that is hated, it is being forced to undergo the pain, the series of events, and even the memories of the things that have made up that life to that point in time.

If you could instead throw away the abusive alcoholic parent, the bullies in school, the brown-nosing co-worker that gets all the credit from a jerk boss at work along with the memories of being laughed at when you asked out that one person you really liked, and being alone on the last 3 holidays- then just maybe you would not hate life. That list is a small list compared to many that hate their lives.

It is Okay to Hate Life

When bad things happen it is okay to be unhappy. It is okay to not want to embrace bad things and to not want to stoically take it on the chin yet again and act proud to have learned another hard life lesson. When your life sucks it is okay to hate it even. What you need to think about more carefully though is the idea of throwing that life away when all you really needed to do is have it be different. We cannot change the past. Neither do we have to live in the past.  We can change things now, and when we change things it changes our present and our future.

Why is it so hard to change things when you hate life? Because it does not seem worth it. If you hate something you don’t want it. It is garbage in your mind and not worth the effort to fix. When you hate your life, all wrapped up in that package is a hatred of yourself since you are the result of that life. Because of that self-hatred, it is hard to see value in fixing it or changing it.

When it is Time to Compare Yourself to Others

Everybody tells you not to compare yourself and your life to others. When you start thinking about suicide it is often in part a result of comparing yourself to others and feeling like you always come up short, so what is the point? I will suggest instead you might consider if your life was different, if your life was more like others, would you still hate it? Most often the answer is no- you hate your life because it has been different than what you wanted and expected, and different than what you see others getting out of life. That is really the key point. The “what if”… What if your life was different?

Life is an ever moving thing. History does not define the future. You can change what is happening in your life.  While all people are scared or adverse to change on some level, and many that proclaim to hate their life proudly stand behind the axiom of “don’t ever change yourself” “always be yourself , don’t ever change” – If you hate your life and the way it is going  then why not change? I hate diet Pepsi, so I don’t force myself to guzzle it all day, day after day. If you hate your life, don’t keep doing it all the same way, day after day.

Make the changes needed so that the future has a chance to be different from the past. Nothing changes until something changes- if you want a different future then change the way you are doing things. Putting the energy that is currently expended on hate and avoidance into change can and will make the future different.

No matter how many examples somebody comes up with of what went wrong in the past, the only way you can know the future will turn out the same is if you continue to insist on doing it the same way and refusing to change the way they do it. “Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results” comes to mind. It is just as true that if you do things differently each time you will not get the same result. 

Nothing changes until something changes- what can you change?

It does not matter what situation you are in:

• Lonely and not leaving the house- need to go out and start seeing people again
• No relationship or not dating – have to be in a place to meet somebody
• In an abusive home and abused- will have to leave for the abuse to stop
• Always end up with bad person- meet people in another way or choose different qualities in dating selection
• Nothing to do on weekends – plan something during week for the weekend
• Can’t stop crying, feeling sad – stop listening to sad music and fixating on sad things
• Can’t stop thinking about suicide – stop searching for methods and start making plans and goals for the future

The list could go on endlessly and it is easy to say those are over-simplifications and then rationalize and explain why none work. It is also just possible it really is that simple and we are just trying to make things far more complicated than they are.

The Question you need to look at is not “do you hate your life”, but rather “what do you hate about your life?” It does not matter if that list is 1 thing or 100 things, looking at them one at a time and figuring out what can be changed,  what is in the past and needs to stay in the past, and what you want in the  future, will allow you to change your life into something that you no longer hate. It will allow you to have a future where you do not struggle with suicidal thoughts.

Are there any painless suicide methods?

Most people find SF when the pain is so bad that they can’t take it any more. That is how I found SF. If you are here, reading this, the chances are you are so tired of hurting, so exhausted by the relentless black hole of pain inside you that you are looking for a way, ANY way, to make it stop. Painless suicide methods seem like the holy grail right now. I get it – believe me – I understand.

Are There Any Painless Suicide Methods?

The simple answer is no. I understand that your instinct now is to click off this page and keep looking, but STOP. Wait. Just stay a few minutes. The problem with suicide methods is that up to 97% of the time, they fail. And that is just the completely committed “I want to die right now this second” group. Suicide is painful and messy and horrifying – and I completely understand if you are sitting here thinking “yes, well so is my life” – I have been there.

One of the most common things our members say when they first join SF is ‘I am too much of a coward to go through with it”. Not killing yourself isn’t cowardly. Not killing yourself isn’t weak or spineless. It is okay to scream for help at the top of your lungs right now – you deserve help and nobody can do this alone.

We have thousands and thousands of members and each and every one of them knows what it feels like to want to fall asleep and never wake up. To stop the pain – for it to be easy and peaceful and painless. Suicide isn’t any of those things. It is painful and lonely and scary. The thoughts and feelings you are dealing with are not shameful or weak or wrong – but really wanting to die and really wanting to make the pain stop are not the same thing. 

What About Pain Free Death?

It is easy to believe – especially right now – that it wouldn’t matter if you died. Nobody would care. I don’t know you and I don’t know what is going on in your life (I would like to) but I have been suicidal and believed those things, and I have talked to hundreds and hundreds of people who also believe those things. Pain lies. Depression lies. Most of all, despair lies. The idea that your death would not matter and it wouldn’t hurt anyone – that your suicide would be pain free for all concerned – it isn’t true. Maybe you want to believe it is true because you don’t want to hurt any of the people you love. Maybe you hurt so badly you can’t see past the pain to the truth. But you are wrong. There are no ‘pain free’ ways to die. There are especially no pain free ways to kill yourself. Not just the physical messy agony of suicide itself, which is never like it is in the movies, but also the emotional pain you are passing to the people who are about you and even the people who ‘only’ know you.

The pain can go away. I know you don’t believe me; I didn’t believe it either. I was sure – 100% definite – that life would never get better, that the pain would never go away, that I would never feel okay again, let alone happy. I felt alone and isolated and like there was nobody to talk to who could possibly understand. I was wrong. About all of it. There are people who understand and who will support you and while right now you don’t think support can help and you don’t see how talking can make a difference, there is something about NOT feeling alone and isolated that eases the pain just enough to be able to breathe for a minute. To be able to think. To give yourself a chance.

You Need to Talk to Someone

There is no replacement for professional medical treatment. If you are suicidal then you need real medical help – but you also need to talk to people you can be honest with, people you can say out loud “I hurt so much I want to die” to. It is hard, almost impossible, to say those things to people who know and care about you in real life. They get scared and hurt and suddenly you are not only dealing with your own pain, you are dealing with theirs as well. For people who already have more pain than they can bear, that is not an option.

Talking doesn’t magically make the pain go away. I am not going to sit here and lie to you that it might. I understand that it is hard to see the point – the POINT is that you want to make the pain stop and if talking won’t do that then it can feel like a waste of the precious little energy you have left. What talking does – in a peer to peer setting – is make you feel less alone. Knowing that people understand and care, that even strangers who are in pain themselves care about you enough to listen and support you, can make you feel less isolated, remind you that you do not have to deal with this alone. 

Talk to us. Write down how you feel. Engage with people who understand – as much as anyone can understand – how you feel. The pain won’t go away overnight but it CAN go away and you deserve to have support while you deal with it. So instead of clicking off here and going back to Google in search of ways to die, stick around here. Join our community and find ways to make the pain go away that don’t involve killing yourself – ways to make the pain go away that give you your life back. 

Do you feel like you really just hate yourself? Check this out. 

Having a hard time thinking about getting from today until tomorrow? Try this one. 

Talking can allow valuable input from others on how to deal with situations. It allows the person talking to get the benefit of both experience and knowledge of others in processing  problems and issues when the listener gives feedback. Even just affirmation that it is a legitimate problem or feeling has value. The sharing of problems very often gives a feeling of having lessened the burden some because once it is shared there is a perception that you are not alone with the issue anymore.

So why is it so hard to talk about problems and feelings? Social pressures and stigmas can make some feel weak or needy if they talk about things. The urge to be self-reliant is very strong in many people and even kindled by cultural expectations. Even if one can overcome the cultural or learned social expectations, there are still ramifications about some issues.

Talking about money problems could lead others to believe the person is not responsible or even untrustworthy. Talking about feelings may make others feel they are over sensitive or “too uptight”. Whether people like to admit it or not, even while they tell people to talk about their problems, when the person does finally open up there are far too often real unintended real world ramifications to the way others see them or feel about them. It only takes a couple episodes of negative responses for a person to decide the risk of talking outweighs the potential benefit.

Where professional counselors and therapists come in is they allow the positive benefits of sharing the problems and feelings without the same potential social risks. Moreover, they are trained in how to guide conversations to be more productive, and to see past smaller issues to the larger underlying issues.

An oversimplified example might be the problem wasn’t the spouse forgot to pick up some grocery items on the way home that caused the person to feel like they are in a doomed relationship, the real problem is they feel like they are never listened to or that the person does not care about their needs or desires in general.

From this point the trained professional might help a person go through a logical list of examples where the spouse has done these things many times or that it is actually infrequent and allow a person to determine if the reaction is justified or not, and in that manner to cope with the feelings better; or the opposite and see the reason the person was so upset about a small thing was it is in fact a small example of a recurring much larger problem, so while the specific thing was small, they were correct in being alarmed overall and not over-reacting.

While having a trained professional is a great support, not all have access to counselors and therapists, and it is not reasonable to be able to get a professional for everything that comes up a person might want to discuss. Many people in the world simply do not have a large enough support network of trustworthy friends or family to listen to them. Some issues also have too high of social risk to for many to feel comfortable talking about to friends or family.

If topics like depression and anxiety carry a high social risk, then how does one discuss self-harm like cutting, or actual suicidal thoughts without feeling like they are seriously risking the relationship and trust of their friends and family? If somebody has suicidal thoughts on a frequent basis or has been suffering from depression for a long period of time they cannot see a professional every time a negative thought enters their mind. Friends and family often have no experience in listening and offering feedback on these issues, so that silence comes across as not caring and may make it feel like sharing was  a mistake.

Use of anonymous peer support groups has been proven very effective for many people in dealing with the harder problems and feelings. Everything from addiction to suicidal thoughts has peer groups that will allow people talk to others that have had similar experiences so are not judgmental, and the anonymous nature relieves the social risk of disclosure. Also peer support groups allow far more frequent help than professional services. They fulfill the vital role of sharing thoughts and feelings while relieving the burden of feeling alone, without social risk to the person that is sharing. It is a chance to talk to people that actually understand the feelings and problems because they have had similar feelings or issues currently or in the past. It allows one to not only have a chance to talk, but to be listened to and understood as well.

Click to talk now – Forums or chat to be heard – Register a 100% anonymous account.