If Suicide, Why Not Success

If a guy is willing to give up on everything in his loves to kill himself, why isn’t he willing to give up everything to make major changes to achieve success. The simple answer, of course, is that he has lost all hope. Look at it from a different angle for a minute before you take the next step toward your death. Many of the most successful people in the world (not all, but many for sure) found success in the depths of despair. Would it surprise you to know that it takes the same level of emotions and commitment to throw everything away and start over as it does to throw everything away and kill yourself? I’m not suggesting that you get a divorce, quit your job, and move to a different country. Most of us that have been on the verge of suicide, though, have already lost one or more of those things. Do you remember the saying “when God closes a door, he opens a window”? It sounds like a lot of spiritual BS to me too, but I eventually figured out what they are actually trying to say there. So, you lost something important in your life and it’s tearing you apart, this is the best time to knock off some of those barriers that have been stopping you from pursuing your dreams. What have you got to lose, besides that which you were willing to sacrifice by taking your own life.

 

My experience

Hope. That’s the emotion that ties essentially all suicide cases together. The person lost hope. In most, but not all cases, they lost ALL hope. Sometimes they only lost hope in the one, most important, dream they had. When I lost all hope in seeing any of my dreams come true, I wanted to die. Not to stop the pain, but to stop being a drain on those around me and the world as a whole. I had nothing to offer that others wanted and, by taking up space and resources, I used up the things others could benefit from if I wasn’t selfishly trying to hold onto a dead dream. But it occurred to me that I judged those that chose to help me based on criteria that they couldn’t consider. Through the loss of all that I held dear, I decided that I was worthless and, therefore, anyone who helped me backed a bad bet. Maybe those that chose to take themselves out of my life felt I was a bad bet, but those still investing in me probably saw something else. And for the first time in my life I started to wonder if I myself listened to the wrong people. As soon as the seed of that thought sunk in to my soul, it immediately sprung into a full-grown tree. I had already coached many of my friends through the same thoughts and feelings so I had nurtured and fully developed it. I just hadn’t planted that same idea in my own heart yet. Of course, I had been listening to the wrong people. Many people I had trusted to have my best interests in mind only saw what I needed to fix based on their own agendas. Once they gave up and left, I realised that there were also some that where trying to help me find my own agenda because they truly believed in me.

This is the point where I realised that I’d be willing lose all those people and things I had been holding onto because I thought they saw potential in me. But all they saw was how to fix me by their own standards. Once I let them go and began to focus on what I had left, wonderful things started to happen. At first, I didn’t think I had anything left, but by not having anything left in my life that I cared about, I found an empty space that I could fill with whatever I chose. I started filling up my life with the things and people I had wanted for a long time but never felt I had permission to pursue. I soon found that most of those things were also just junk to fill up my life and lead me down the wrong path. So, I let go of those people and only kept the ones in my life that I felt truly supported me and helped me along the path to my goals. Then I started trying things that I had more recently found an interest in. I threw out those activities and people that didn’t help me forward my other goals. Each time I iterated this way, I kept just a little more of the people and ideas that fed my other goals and eventually ended up with enough positive things in my life that I could find hope.

The key here is to keep anything that helps you forward a positive goal even if you have some goals that you never find support for. For example: I have been keeping the things and people that help me be a better writer and those that want to share positivity and love in the world, but so far nothing I have kept in my life has helped me find any financial security. So, it’s not about keeping the things that give me the one thing I want most but to keep anything that helped me achieve any of my goals.

 

If this is you

You’ve lost hope. Now what? Do you really believe that it can’t get better? Maybe you just don’t care if it can. Maybe what you’ve lost can never be rebuilt or replaced. Death could allow you to let go of the dream, and the false hope. But why do you need death for that? Aren’t they already gone? Isn’t that why you feel this way? All you’re holding onto right now is the grief and loss. But those aren’t tangible and keep slipping through your fingers. That’s supposed to happen. It’s a process. Let it happen. Reach out to those around you: friends and family if you have them. They care and want to help, but most of them just don’t know how. If you don’t find support there, join a group. Any group will do if you can find a connection within it. Try a depression group, a grief group, a church group, a recovery group, or, if your can find one, a hobby group. If one doesn’t work, join a different one, or join a couple. If that starts to wear thin and you still haven’t made much for connections, try online groups or even just listen to audio books or podcasts. What you’re looking for here, isn’t people who will listen to your grief and sorrow, but people you can relate to who you can listen to. If you can listen to their grief and sorrow without judgement or negativity, then you can build connections with them.

Those connections are important because that’s where you will start to see who you actually are instead of what others want you to be. You’ll begin to see characteristics in them that you can relate to. Out of those characteristics, you can sort through and pick out the ones you haven’t felt free to pursue before. With a little development, they can become your new direction and even a source of hope.

This is where the choice becomes important. What are you willing to give up in order to find hope? What are you willing to give up on to consider suicide? Are you willing to give up the expectation that someone will come to your rescue? What about your sadness? Can you let go of those people that expect you to fix yourself based on their own formula? If your answer is yes to these questions, why do you need to die? Letting go of these things will also free you up to pursue hope. The hardest part is keeping your commitment to let go. But the upside of change instead of death? You won’t hurt as many people and those you do hurt are probably the ones you need to let go of anyway. Yes, you might still die. You might lose everything. You might hurt all those same people. You may end up on the street fighting to find food. But you might just find your place in this world. You might find love. You might find the money you need to support yourself. And you might find success. In death, you’ll only find failure.

 

If this is someone you know

First, although it’s true, they are seeking attention, it isn’t that simple. Refusing to give them the attention so they’ll “just grow up” will most assuredly confirm for them that you really don’t care. It will push them further into their depression and closer the real act of suicide. Even if you tell them a million times how much you care, refusing the attention they are seeking will deny those words a hundred times over. They need that attention, and far more than that, they need your love. The true love that lets them vent their hurt, especially the hurt you might have caused. Even the hurt you didn’t cause but they blame on you anyway. They need to know that their hurt counts. That it means something because it does mean something, especially the misplaced blame and anger they have. It means they need help. Help they don’t know where to find. Help they may not believe exists. They need the attention of someone that will listen without judgement. Someone who doesn’t always have the answers, but will stick by them and support them while they search for those answers. Someone who won’t try to “fix” them.

Be the first connection they can trust. It might look like they have other support systems in place, but if they are contemplating suicide, they don’t trust them. Be that connection for them. Build the trust they need to open up about the real hurt. They don’t have to cry to be talking about the real feelings, but if they’re just ‘telling their story’, listen and let them talk, that isn’t the hurtful stuff. Don’t dig for detail and don’t get them to ‘talk about their feelings’. Just listen, respond when its appropriate, and keep the conversation open. It doesn’t happen all at once. In fact, it probably won’t happen in the first sitting. They got to the point of suicide because too many of their ‘friendships’ didn’t turn out to matter at all when they really needed them. Be the guy they can count on. Set your boundaries and stick around for the long haul. At some point, they will start talking about things they like and dislike. That’s the beginning. As they sort through the hurt and pain, they will eventually start to remember the good things. They need to process that pain and they aren’t capable of doing so alone. They will come out of it, and when they do they will begin to see who was still there when they needed them. Be the foundation they build the rest of their life on. Or, if that is too much responsibility, with proper boundaries, you will be the support they need to build their own foundation that won’t depend on you.

 

What it means

When you get to a point in your life that you’ve lost hope and you’re prepared to sacrifice everything and just die, remember there are more than one way to put and end on something. Death is only the most commonly thought of solution. It’s not the best, or even the easiest, solution. I promise that some of those people that haven’t helped or listened to you would still be greatly saddened by your departure. Death is admitting failure. It’s quitting. Maybe that’s ok with you. But, just for a moment, imagine what you could find if all your dreams came true.

If you let go of those same things that suicide removes you from, you can find the freedom to finally pursue those passions and dreams that were out of your reach while you held on to people and things that didn’t support you. By filling your life with the things that support and forward your goals, you begin to create positivity in your life. Eventually the only people you will have in your life are those that help you chase your dreams. As you reach for your stars, you’ll have the support, happiness, and money that you need to reach even further. Do me a favor when you get there: remember that others are still struggling to find hope. Help them see it. Be their last hope if you must, but help them.

If this offered you some hope, or showed you how to offer hope for someone else, drop me a line and open the conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Attention Deficit Disorder – Complications vs Uniqueness

Attention Deficit Disorder in adults is a real thing. Know why I know this? Because my Psych told me the other day that I have it and gave me a good book to read on the subject of ADD: Driven to Distraction by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey. It deals with ADD in a broad scope so some of the things in it don’t apply to me. They talk about kids with ADD for example, and both adults and children with ADHD, both of these don’t apply to me. I didn’t have ADHD as a kid either according to their description of it. But the stuff about adults with ADD nails it right on the head for me. I fit about 92% of the profile for an adult with ADD (the 92% is an estimation but I don’t like round numbers so that’s what you get, it’s an ADD thing). Here are my personal observations on the subject only slightly influenced by the things I read in the book I just mentioned.

ADD & Depression

Depression is one of the most common side effects of ADD in adults. It turns out that people who are constantly misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and mistreated by all the peers and authority figures in their lives are more likely to suffer from depression. Go figure, hey? Apparently most people have a driving need to be accepted by their fellow man (or woman as the case may be). It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that depression is more often a side effect of some other mental disorder than a stand alone condition.

On the flip side, adults with ADD are some of the most resilient people you will ever meet. If we have fought this losing battle long enough to finally feel understood for the first time, we will stop at nothing to reach for the stars. There is a large list of famous people with ADD who’ve done just that. Richard Branson, and Jim Carey are just a couple of big name examples of what we can accomplish if we learn to use our unusual thought patterns to our advantage.

Intermission

OK, I admit there was a two-hour gap between the last three sentences as I researched “famous people that have ADD”. But on the plus side, other than actually finding famous people that share my brilliance, I also discovered that I share a middle name with both Jim Carey and Buzz Aldrin and that’s pretty cool. Wow, tangent. I’m going to leave that in here because this is, after all, an article about ADD.

ADD & Memory

Another common side effect of people with ADD is memory loss. We tend to forget important appointments, grocery lists, and especially “what did I come downstairs for?” The theory, as it was explained to me, goes something like this: memory loss itself probably has nothing to do with ADD. As a matter of fact, if you ask any spouse of someone with ADD, we have an amazing capacity to remember details that baffle most people but I can’t remember to zip up my fly most days. The problem comes in when everything that is input to our brain first has to get filtered through our ADD screening process. And that looks a little like this: information enters my brain, ADD filter looks at the input and measures its importance based on its relevance to whatever random thought is occupying the computing parts of my brain at that exact second, input gets stored in memory based on that rating and linked to that reference.

Here is an example: input is: I discover that my car is low on gas and I have a long trip to make tomorrow afternoon, I decide that I should fill the car with gas on the way home from my appointment today in preparation. ADD screens that information and rates against the details of the appointment I’m about to go into and decides that, in relation to my appointment, my car running low on gas will have little to no impact, so my ADD relegates the car needing gas to a low priority memory slot. Needless to say, although I remember no less than six times before leaving for that trip, I didn’t remember on the way home and it didn’t occur to me when it was convenient to go get gas. So I leave on my trip and remember I need gas exactly halfway between two gas stations when the gas light comes on in my dash board. At this point its down to luck as to whether that distance is small enough that I can make it to a gas station.

I have run out of gas as an in-town delivery driver because my ADD brain didn’t give enough priority to my needing to gas up my car. It was really hard to explain to my boss why I ran out of gas waiting for the next call in the parking lot of a liquor store across the street from a gas station. “I forgot to get gas” just sounds a little lame at that point, but I did exactly that once and had to wait an hour for roadside assistance.

Problem solving and learning

We tend to approach things differently than others. Doing things “the way it’s always been done” doesn’t work for us, so we tend to try a lot of other ways to get the same result. And for those of us that weren’t diagnosed with ADD until we were adults, we usually had to try other ways without the blessings of our parents, employers, or spouses. This is what often makes us feel so alone. I risk doing it wrong a hundred ways before I do it right, but it also means that when I get it right, I can teach the right way to others because I have done all the possible wrong ways and even invented a few that nobody else thought about. I’ve gotten used to just trying to figure things out myself because what works for other people doesn’t work for me. It also means that I’ve gotten used to doing something every wrong way before I figure out the right way. Even trying to copy other ADD people doesn’t work very often because our set of “what works” is rarely similar enough to use the same approach. Most of us find that persistence is the key to success and trying any hair-brained idea might just be our next success story.

The Good Stuff

A couple of other quick notes about the up side of ADD. Dr. Hallowell says in his book that people with ADD tend to be smarter and more creative than the average because we’ve had to cultivate those two traits in order to cope with our inability to copy the success plans of others. From my experience with those that I know who have ADD, he is right. Everyone I know with ADD is either self employed or has the freedom to do his or her job any which way they want as long as it doesn’t hurt the company or the clients. As entrepreneurs, we tend to have the ability to wear all the hats required to be successful. Our biggest problem with this concept is that most of us have never learned to trust our own abilities because of how much failure we have had and how unreliable our own brains have been. Those of us who do succeed typically have found a system that keeps our days reasonably predictable while leaving enough room for distractions.

What Should I Do Now?

The secret to living with ADD is two things in a nutshell. Scheduling myself enough to reduce the risks of ‘forgetting’ something. And having someone I can trust to help me understand my limitations and see my opportunities. According to the doctors that wrote the book I mentioned at the start of the article and my own psych, these two things are far more successful in dealing with ADD than drugs have ever been. My short term plan is to work on the scheduling part. The “someone I can trust” is, at the moment, my counsellors and my psychiatrist. I hope to have a life coach or accountability partner that I can talk to everyday who will help me figure out a useful plan for my life and keep me on a growing and learning pattern. I may still need drugs too, but I will need to build a strong routine with someone that can keep encouraging me to stay with it.

I hope you’ve learned something here and I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with ADD and/or depression. Comment or drop me a line and we can share our stories.