im not staying alive for their fucking feelings. if they cared that much they could have treated me like a human being when i was a kid. im staying alive for my cats. and yeah it means i love them more than my shitty parents.
Hey, staying alive to snuggle cats and spite your parents works too.
Me n you both. cept I have my plants lol
FUCK I need to water my plants.
Go ahead and water yourself while you’re at it
Braided rope. One end in water bucket/tank, other in the planter. Watering is just filling the tank once a month. Great success!
I’ll have to try that
FUCK, I should really set an alarm
So say, we all.
im not staying alive for their fucking feelings. if they cared that much they could have treated me like a plant when i was a aapling. im staying alive for my symbiotic fungi network. and yeah it means i love them more than my shitty owner.
Your plants, probably.
For some reason, this flashed into my mind
For your cats is an absolutely beautiful purpose and reason we all still need you as long as we can have you. Also, there’s an inevitable piece of news that will make at least 75% of the entire world instantly erupt in celebration. I’ll be very sad if my time comes before that happens.
Does everyone in this comment section have a horrible relationship with their father??
What the hell, am I the only one here NOT hating my parents??
Cherish that fact.
I think it’s survivorship bias. People with functional relationships with their parents (myself included) probably don’t feel much need to weigh in.
People’s families are complicated, and sometimes they need to vent. I (generally) don’t see a problem with giving them space to do so.
This is the exact reason I’m choosing to just scroll past some of these comments that are missing the bigger picture.
My own relationship with my family is incredibly complicated. But it’s not really about the family. It’s about the fact that somebody will miss you. But when you’re that deep into depression, it’s really hard to see.
People rarely feel the need to talk about how good their relationship with their dad is. Well except for one friend of mine, but to be fair to her her dad sounds exceptionally good.
But yeah, my father and I haven’t been on speaking terms in a decade.
… this is the tame, fishbowl, lemmy version of 4chan community.
Yes, yes obviously most of the people here come from very fucked up families.
… do you think normal, well adjusted, happily raised children… tend to end up anywhere near 4chan?
There’s a reason 4chan has been repeatedly targetted and 4channers have been repeadtedly weaponized by extreme right wing political groups.
4chan’s demographic is primarily fucked up young men/boys.
Some of us aren’t subscribed to the community, but just browse All
I’m really curious who isn’t out here browsing by all. Maybe some lemmy.world weirdos? Like, I scroll my subscriptions, but the majority of my curiosity is sated by all.
I feel like there’s no human relationship that doesn’t experience strain and parental ones can be tough.
Even though my parents are wonderful people we still have our stresses, mistakes, a few scars, and our differences. They will never know I’m bisexual, they will never know I’ve done weed let alone hard(er) drugs, they don’t share my sense of humor - so we’re not “friends” - but we do love each other.
Mine was not horrible, just exasperating. I warned him about every single thing that caused him issues, but he refused to listen, and that killed him.
Sometimes I wonder how many suicides are invisible, people start to skip medicines, they dont care about health etc
Nah. He didn’t have depression or anything like that. He was just the type of person who thought he was always right and the smartest person in the room. If warned about something, he’d do the opposite out of spite, rather than obey someone else.
Not me. Had a great dad who disappeared after my conception
On average a person will rather share negative things than positive things.
No one consents to being born. Love my parents, even if they are MAGA morons. Even if they kicked me out of their house when they could. Even if they give me massive shit for how I live my life almost every time I see them.
Despite all that, I can see their intentions. My mom wanted a baby to love. My dad wanted me to be a wage slave master and not a wage slave.
I like my parents well enough
While my relationship with father is bittersweet, I would by no means term it horrible. The man taught me most of the things I know when banks were crushing him.
Count yourself lucky
I love my parents. We had great relationship growing up and still do. They are weirdos. I love them.
That said, parents fuck you up even the awesome ones lol. Being a parent fucks you up too. It’s a crazy complicated relationship to have good or bad.
Wait til they’re dead like the considerate son/daughter you are.
My dad killed himself so he beat me to it.
I held his jacket and was glad I didn’t see his body honestly. Good on that paramedic
Lost one of my boys a little over a year ago. Still get crippled with grief from time to time - maybe every other day now instead of multiple times a day. It gets easier, but never easy. In the process of getting a ring with some of his ashes built into them and I think that’ll be pretty special to get to bring him everywhere I go.
Not looking for condolences, just wanted to put this perspective out there in a sea of folks who seemed to have bad relationships with their parents. To those: I’m sorry. I can’t imagine.
Thank you for sharing your experience. As someone who doesn’t have kids to begin with I can’t even begin to imagine
Thank you for sharing. My coworker just lost her daughter to suicide and she has been understandably inconsolable. She’s had an outpouring of sympathy, but I wanted to give her something more than just words from a childless adult who could never possibly relate to what she is going through. I will suggest the ring made with some ashes. I think that will help bring her some comfort.
Remember, that people grief in different ways. And it’s not always about the time after the event that helps, but knowing that someone else acknowledges their struggle(s) after that the event. At least, that was true for me after I lost one of my good friends years ago to suicide.
And now… I’m getting teary eyed just thinking about him and that time period of my life. Like @Artaca@lemdro.id said above… “It gets easier, but never easy.” It’s 100% true. All these years later and I still have days where he comes to mind. And while a lot of the heartache has surpassed, I still have moments of sadness and rare blip moment where I grief over it for a short time.
Anyway… I’m starting to make this too much about me I think.
I’d encourage you to find a way to show that you’re there for her if and when she needs a moment or a person. It goes a long way.
I don’t think I could handle being a paramedic for this reason. The memories just build and they get so many.
I’ve witnessed death myself upclose as family members died. Their final moments burned in forever.
Those memories never fade, you just distract yourself from it. But the memory is always waiting for when you recall a time together with them. There is that fucking final moment again, like a punctuation on a good thought.
To have that be part of a job, even if they are not related has to weigh heavily. They don’t get paid nearly enough for that burden.
I was homeless for a while.
… I know I couldn’t handle being a real paramedic.
Made my way as a make shift paramedic, treating various injuries and wounds that people would… appear with, at or near an encampment or something. Usually just field dressing a laceration, jerry rigging a makeshift splint.
Occasionally a gunshot wound.
I always begged people who needed more care than I could provide to go to a hospital.
Sometimss they did, sometimes they or their friends would refuse.
Fentanyl… zombies is actually pretty close to an accurate description.
I’ve seen more necrotic flesh, gray tissue and pus where either a stab wound or injection site once was… than I want to remember.
Your body can’t naturally heal when it’s … hooked on the blues. The stuff was all crushed blue tablets where I was, everybody just called em ‘blues’.
Successfully stabilized a few ODs … not all of them.
Also happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time: drive by shooting.
The streets are basically like a warzone, if you’re in them too long.
Fuck, I’m two years out of homelessness now, and I’m still doing PT to recover from my own injuries.
I knew a guy who, as part of his job, had to clean up suicide scenes.
That really did a number on him. He developed polytoxicomania, hit rock bottom and never really got back on his feet again. These memories must be haunting you forever.Fair, but I believe it is different to do this as. a job, with strangers, and to experience it with close people. Still sucks.
Boots on the ground
They’ll cut you off at the ankles
And throw the rest away
gods damn, that’s a damn powerful haiku
Thanks!
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As an old and retired paramedic myself, there are definitely parts of me, as a human being, that will never grow back. And I worked in a rural area where you work on neighbors, family, and friends mostly. It was never easy to explain to the family that might be present that not me or god could fix what was wrong. I also did a few suicides over the years. Never easy and they leave a mark that won’t grow back by morning.
The worst thing about any of it, was meeting a family member in a cafe or store in our small town. And they would invariably come up to me and give me a hug and tell me how grateful they were that I was there for them. Despite the fact I couldn’t do shit for the dead person beyond calling dispatch and telling them to send law enforcement to come and do their paperwork and secure the scene until the funeral home got there to haul the body away.
I think often just being there makes a big difference, even if there’s nothing that can be done.
I’m sorry, that sounds so hard. Handling logistics in a traumatic situation is such a hugely important task. Definitely don’t sell yourself short. Even is you didn’t do anything you’re “holding space”
It ruined that scene in the The Princess Bride for me.
Do you hear that, Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when Rugen slaughtered my father.
I’ve heard it to varying degrees, but the worst was the kid that shot themself by accident because dad got drunk and left his handgun out. Mom made it to the hospital and was obviously distraught … then she saw the body.
The noise she made is indescribable. An overcrowded, chaotic Emergency Department full of hardened nurses and doctors dropped into 5 seconds of complete silence and inactivity. Even other patients screaming in pain stopped.
It triggers some primal response in your brain you didn’t know exists until you hear it. It will stay with you for the rest of your life. The sound a mother makes she she sees her dead child is inarguably the worst sound in the world.
Yeah, only once have I heard the whole ER seemingly go silent. It was when we brought in a young trauma victim, (car accident). The pandemonium of a 6 people working all at once, the voices calm but tense and a bit louder, and the er Doc standing in the corner watching and directing the action. We worked the code for maybe 5 or 6 minutes before the Doctor called it. Everything just stopped. People froze from what they were doing. And the whole ER was dead silent for what seemed like hours, but was only a few seconds before everything came back to real time.
Only twice have I had to hear the agony of a mother. Once when I did a drowning. We were searching for the husband/father. I found him in about 6 feet of water. (my big toe went into his mouth-- a feeling I will never forget). My partner and I got him shallow water along the shore. And I did the math and estimated he’d been down 25 to 45 minutes. So we agreed to call it. So I started walking to the house, all soaking wet, to deliver the news. I can still hear her wail right now as I told her and her young son that daddy was never coming home again.
The other time was when we were paged out to a 4-wheeler accident. And an 11-year-old boy somehow drove too close to a drainage ditch and rolled in about 20 feet down. I went down with a rope and found him pinned under the 4-wheeler face down in about 3 or 4 inches of water. He had been dead long enough to be beyond anybodies help. I climbed back up the ditch and explained to the mother her 11-year old son was gone. To this day I pray to whatever gods there are that he was dead before he drowned pinned face down under that 4-wheeler.
The worst part of ALL of those moments was when you were done and driving away from the scene, and you still had that pager on, and you needed to get your shit back in a row and fast. The next call was going to happen at some point. You needed to be ready to 100% focus on that call with no time, or too much time, to process what had happened.
A large part of my younger self wanted to be a paramedic. But I quickly realized I didn’t have the emotional resilience to be one.
I remember watching Nic Cage in “Bringing out the Dead” (Excellent film by the way) and that movie putting the big ol’ nope on that plan once and for all in the early 2000’s.
My uncle was a paramedic. It really messed him up.
A similar experience I had was when I saw my mom cry and pay respects to my grandpa for the last time as he was sent to be cremated.
I respected my grandfather but as we lived half way across the world, I wasn’t emotionally attached to him and didn’t feel very sad. But seeing my mom, usually a very silly lady and a very strong, loving grandma herself, turn into a daughter saying goodbye to her dad in tears for that split second broke my heart.
I saw my dad lose his best friend to suicide in my teens. I’ve struggled with suicidal ideation since before even that. I’m not close to my dad, I have lots of issues with the man, but I can never put him through that again, no matter what.
I’ve lost several people to suicide. The hardest was a good friend I’d known for years and who had been my roommate one summer.
That one was 25 years ago and it still hurts.
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Not a paramedic, but my mother was once a nurse in a hospital. Gave up on the job (where ahe was actually well paid) and switched careers because she couldn’t handle seeing people die every day.
kinda makes me want to do it to hurt my dad but tbh he would probably still not realize that he’s the reason
dw i’m not suicidal but yeah
Let your vengeance be living past, well and better than.
that’s boring. and tbh i don’t even want revenge, literally all i want is for him to acknowledge that he hurt me, but he refuses to even admit he ever even acted aggressively or anything towards me
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents might be the book for you. It wrecked me for weeks, and then I had one of my parents read it. It wrecked them too. This sort of thing is a generational trauma.
This sort of thing is a generational trauma.
yeah, 100%. my dad had an extremely abusive upbringing, like his (adoptive) mother forced him to sleep in the dog house and hit him with whips and crazy shit, so he can’t even perceive that the way he treated me was abusive (even though i have a fucking scar from where he threw a knife at me for literally no reason) because what he did to me doesn’t even register to him as abuse because he loves me.
i’ll look into the book, but fwiw, i’ve had many years of therapy, and i’ve near enough made peace with the idea of not having him in my life. i really struggle to communicate with him, his denials register to me as gaslighting which is really triggering, so it’s hard for me to help him. he also doesn’t read books at all, probably because of undiagnosed dyslexia
I went through this with my mom. In one of our last conversations, I mentioned that years ago, when I was 18 and lived with her briefly, I took like fourty of her seroquel pills to try and kill myself. “Remember when I slept for three days straight?” And told her what I remembered of that time. Instead of her saying, “oh wow I didnt know that happened” and empathizing or something, she just denied it ever happened, got mad at me and called me a liar.
I never spoke to her again. I dont remember our last words but this one one of the staws for me.
The last time I spoke to my step father, the real abuser, was when I was 16. Letting go of that mess was easy.
Sometimes healing, or “forgiveness” (I hate that word) is in letting go. My Bio dad/mom were both raised pretty fucked up, especially my bio dad, not dissimilar from what ur father went through. I mourn his childhood, but not his death (he died) nor who he was as an adult.
Stay being good to yourself, I hope you find peace and healing in letting go <3
Christ, what a mess. Sorry for that. I just can’t stop recommending this book to everyone, but I know books can’t solve every problem. It did help me reframe things, but it did also slightly burden me with a certain understanding about the way the world is. So much boils down to emotional immaturity and people never growing up.
literally all i want is for him to acknowledge that he hurt me, but he refuses to even admit he ever even acted aggressively or anything towards me
I think i had some good thoughts regarding this in my big-ass reply to you, so if you don’t read all of it, here’s the relevant bits:
- bring up instances of when he hurt you, but as 3rd person stories; “my friend took 2 cookies from the jar when he was 11 years old and his dad shouted at him and called him a fatass” Your Dad:“what a jerk” Yiu: “Yeah. Well, that was you and me when i was 11 Y.O”
- If that for instance doesn’t work, because maybe he approves of that behaviour, then gloss it up a bit: "… Now this friend had trouble feeding himself because he associated the executive decision to get food with his father’s ire. He also started to see abusive name calling as something fatherly and it lead to him putting up with some pretty shitty friends, bosses, romantic partners. We are left with a man with an E.D surrounded by awful people in their life, because he was too young to put his foot down and defend himself and, in those small ways, he has been stuck at that traumatised age ever since.
- send letters about what he did that hurt you. He will read it more than once - how many letters do you send him regularly? Probably not a lot.
tbh, I doubt any of that would get through and it would just prolong an unhealthy relationship.
It’s best to cut ties and move on if possible.
Source: my mom sucks and nothing is ever her fault. The exception to the rule was when she got wicked drunk at my dad’s memorial service and kept shouting that she’d killed him. She only stopped once a couple people stepped in to try and reassure her that she hadn’t, which brought the focus back on her. (Spoiler alert: she did. Without her actions he’d still be alive.)
Half the problem with those is that it is SO easy to justify doing things. Oh, your kid turned out well with a decent job/family/friend group? Well, everything you did must have been worth it then!
I ran into that thinking with my grandmother, when we were just casually discussing pre-k in the context of its effects on people’s chances in life. She immediately threw out the classic, “well, all of [your parent’s siblings and your parent] came out just fine, and we didn’t let them start until first grade! Earlier schooling would have doomed them!”
For them, everything was with “a reason,” even if that reason is completely post-hoc. They don’t do ‘X thing’ that is socially inappropriate? It’s because they were spanked for doing it! Spanking is good! They have a good job now? It’s because they were yelled at if they weren’t studying for hours after school! Yelling is good!
And conversely, they don’t care if the person was hurt. In your example of the traumatized man with an eating disorder? It’s his own damn fault. He was always going to turn out that way. He might have even been fat if he wasn’t yelled at!
It’s just sickening. There’s a reason to cut off parents who don’t acknowledge their actions.
Oh that’s definitively more complicated and much less actionable, you’d have to engage with them a lot to change them in the right direction, or just Hope™ that someone else does that job for you.
This does NOT work. People don’t say “Damn, that girl I bullied is doing well?! Shit, I feel terrible!”, no. The bullies will live their lives and I’ll live mine. They will pass their entire lives without being punished for their acts while I’m being punished for not fighting back.
Yeah people say things like “they’ll get what’s coming to them” which is mostly true if the person never learns or grows, but yeah sometimes people just get away with doing bad stuff and that’s kinda just how it is. It’s fine to be mad at them, the “well I need to get back at them by…” is still focusing on them though. Usually best thing you can do is say “wow what a POS” and try to fix your life for your own sake, sometimes unfair stuff happens and all you can do is try and deal with it.
At the end of our lives, we are completely free. Give your bully a visit in their retirement home.
There is no finer revenge than being happier than your bully.
There is one: being happier than your bully and have it that other people openly point that out to them.
But hey, pretty decent second place!
Ah, no, you still care about what they think. You need to move past that shit and just be happier.
kinda makes me want to do it to hurt my dad but tbh he would probably still not realize that he’s the reason
You’re right, he wouldn’t. And if you try to use suicide to make pthers feel guilty, it’s not going to work; i presume he’s not the only person who you would want to hurt. Some of those others will actually rejoice at your passing, your dad will rationalise it in his head that it wasn’t his fault but rather some lifestyle choice you picked up or a mental illness or “mind virus.” The more you try and put in a suicide letter, the more willing to dismiss it people become; there is no way to succeasfully drag people down with you.
I’ve considered it myself just to get at everyone who ever hurt me. I too have been cruelly treated, by probably everyone i’ve really known for a sizeable amount of time, whether it’s a friend a bully or a relative stranger. You will never manage to drag them all to the pits of hell, it’s really only their own actions that can determine that.
So. I’ll state the obvious conclusions: you cannot kill yourself to hurt others who have hurt you. Even if they’re usually close to you. Only the people who love you and genuinely tried to treat you perfectly would be proportionately hurt by it. And we only triumph over people who hurt us by living better than them, and a lot of the time you never get to know what that means - so you can only aim on treating yourself well, which aught to be enough.
I’ve also seen one guy who has major beef with his dad basically try this, threaten suicidal behaviour, tell him all his problems are caused by him. It bounced off him like a rubber ball. Maybe your dad is Gen X, boomer, or even older - people of that age are very very stubborn, you cannot expect thsm to react to things the way young blood would.
I stopped talking to that friend (he hasn’t been depressed in a long time and is just an asshole with a massive friend group now). I saw his father in the park recently and he was weeping, as if really reflective about something, some earth shattering news. My only conclusion is that he finally got the message regarding how badly he’s treated his son.
This shows that the best thing you can do to, you know, “drill it into your dad’s skull” is keep talking to him about it. Do it creatively if it helps: send him letters covering what you want to tell him, tell him hypothetical stories and ask what he would do in the situation, then go “well that was me at x years old, and you did/said Y to me and it was terrible.”
In regards to more distant people in your life - you have to assume their sin catches up with them. It seems to be the case for all sorts of peopls, and it weighs on their minds 24/7 and hurts them as much as they hurt you.
I don’t understand the concept of killing yourself to spite your enemies. Your enemies would inherently be happy you’re gone. If anyone loved you enough to be sad that you died, killing yourself just to hurt them is a dick move. It also makes zero sense at all. Usually people consider being loved as something to live for. I would never kill myself. I don’t like giving my enemies good news.
Yep, absolutely - a great summarry,
For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would’ve swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would’ve cared. I don’t live to spare anyone else’s feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family’s respect and care while we’re both here, and I don’t need anyone else’s shame.
To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn’t living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for “saving” can eat shit. If you’re reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it’s a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.
This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents’ child’s life. Yours.
I survived suicide. As a side effect, the action showed me who my real friends were. People started to finally pay the fuck attention to me and my struggles. Turns out I had a rare physical disease that was making it very difficult to participate in society not just as dude, but as a whole. As many have said, don’t do it, I still have stomach issues from the wombo combo of meds I took to do the deed. I was lucky. If you ever feel like no one loves ya or that your are nothing. Just poof for a week to somewhere they can’t reach you and where you are safe. Don’t hurt yourself. Check to see how many reach out to you. If the number is low or zero, instead of saying: “see, no one loves me.” Go “damn, these fucks don’t give a damn about me, let’s find someone who will!”
It’s insane, but: you don’t die, you learn who loves you, and you have your health.
Go forth and fight the demons. As long as you are fighting them others will assit.
That is certainly some experience, and a good life lesson. I just want to remark, if my best friends disappeared for a week, I would assume they just wanted to disappear for a week, and had their reasons to not tell me. Doesn’t mean I don’t care about them.
I think this is less about guilting the victim and more about reminding them that people care about them. The assumption is that those who take their own lives feel like no one cares for/loves them.
Unfortunately, this take often reads like conservative pundits that only “care” about fetuses until they’re born, at which point they’re considered a drain on society.
A lot of the quotes people repeat when trying to help someone ends up backfiring. You can’t just repeat plattitudes. People suffering from mental illness aren’t stupid or deaf, they’ve already heard the lines before. Mimicry doesn’t help.
The only generalized thing I can recommend people to say when trying to help someone with mental issues is to just ask: “What do you need?”. If they need space, give it. If they need to talk, listen. If they need something else, be honest about whether that’s in your ability to help with.
Another important thing to note is to not view them as something that needs to be fixed. And you need to be very honest with yourself about that. Most people will try to “help” because it makes them feel better, not the person they’re trying to help.
everyone cares about when you’re dead
So do it after Dad dies is what I’m reading.
Dad, Mom, sibs, close friends, person who’s nice to you at the bus stop, and of course the person you hate most in the world
Mom is already dead so that’s one name off the list.
Be careful keeping a list with names ticked off or crossed out, that may raise suspicion.
Especially when you only cross them off after they’re dead.
