What if it were possible to commit suicide temporarily?

As you all know by now, I have a problem with depression. Most of the time, I handle it well enough between therapy, drugs, and of course unloading my deepest personal thoughts on an unsuspecting audience, like all of you.

But there are times when it gets bad. Times when it gets bad enough that all I want is for things to stop. For the pressure of the world, the needs of my life, the constraints of my schedule, to just stop. It's not about trying to find escapism. I can find escapism. I mean completely stopping.


I'm not actually suicidal. I've never been actively suicidal. There have been times when I was depressed enough that I wouldn't argue had death come, but I've never actively and intentionally sought it out.

That said, the whole desire to stop thing sounds a lot like suicide, doesn't it? Maybe that's just because of the title of the post. Maybe it's because of what I'm thinking about. I don't know.

The thing is, I wouldn't want to stop forever. The idea is to stop and catch your breath, then keep going. Keep on trucking along, back to life as it was, but after a bit of a stop. Not a vacation; even on vacations, the world can still pressure you. I mean a complete stop. So temporary suicide. If only.

I've committed suicide before. Sort of. Obviously, I don't mean literally, but I do, oddly, mean Literarily. That is to say, I did it in a story. I wrote a story in which the main character was, essentially, me. She (yeah, that's right. I wrote myself as a female character. What does that say about me?) was a frustrated writer, pushing to find something original to say, something truly unique. Unable to do so, she killed herself.

Now, the story that I actually told was set several years later, when her friends met at one of their regular spots, all of them uncomfortable, all of them remembering her. She was there, but they couldn't see her, couldn't hear her. But she got to see the end result of her suicide, the damage it did to her friends, the pain it caused.

Suicide is a bad thing. Always. Writing that story let me feel like I would know what happens, like I could try it, see how terribly it effects everyone around me. Essentially, so I could commit suicide, but only temporarily.