I probably know more people who’ve committed suicide than anyone besides a shrink who works at a State hospital. I don’t write that to be funny, because suicide isn’t a joke. I write it because it’s true.
I’ve prepared a 240-some Power Point slide presentation on suicide. As a mental health professional, I lost a client to suicide. For a long time, it was as if I had a list of dead people who piled up inside of me. I had to empty out that trash; not the suicides themselves, but my memories of them.
Some will tell you that suicide is a selfish act. Not always, I think. It can sometimes be motivated by a desire to save others. Why else would a bird play lame or fly from its roadside nest across the grill of my truck, but to decoy me from its newly hatched young?
Some people say that suicide is an irrational act. Hmmm. What about the warriors on Masada, who, rather than die at the blade of the Roman and have their children enslaved, decided to martyr themselves and their families in their mesa fortress?
Some will insist that suicide is a self-destructive act. It can be, but what about those whose lives have come to the end of their usefulness, to a practical end? Or those who are in so much pain that they choose to die? Do I really have the right to judge the act of another which is, in essence, the ultimate personal choice? If we think enough of a sick dog to put it down, why should we keep each other alive at all costs? Do we prolong their lives for them, or for ourselves? I don’t believe I have the right to exercise the power of death or life over another.
With all this said, the fact is that suicide is usually tragic. It can leave behind many traumatized survivors. It’s most often a solution to perceived emotional pain that’s perceived as irresolvable. As someone who’s struggled with suicidal thoughts, I can say that I conceived of suicide as killing my worst enemy, which is my head and its contents.
Someone once said that if you commit suicide, you’d be killing the wrong person. What he meant was that the victim of suicide isn’t the same person she was yesterday. She’s changed, and she’s seeing a distorted version of herself, someone from the past, a snippet, a judgment, her view of what others see her as being; or his warped perception of what he sees as himself.
No one sees themselves as they really are. We see an inner model of who we think we are. That’s the head and its contents; just a collection of committees and subcommittees who think they know better, a cacophony of voices who think they warn us of dangers that really aren’t threats at all. There’s the Committee on UnMichael Affairs, which keeps track of everyone who’s snubbed me since kindergarten. There’s the Mike Subcommittee on Failures and Insufficient Personal Performance (not in the bedroom), which keeps a running tab of every mistake, error, transgression, and way in which I don’t measure up, always based on the recommendations of the panel of experts who testified in hearings before the Subcommittee:
Mike always got chose last for basketball.
I know. And then he ripped open his corduroy pants when he came down for a rebound.
Who wears corduroy pants anyway?
Hey, it was the 70’s.
I’m the Chair of every committee and subcommittee, and I always vote myself a thumbs down.
People who want to do themselves in are often just trying to do away with their judgments about themselves. They can’t handle the messages the head gives them: ‘I’m a piece of shit.’ ‘I haven’t done anything with my life.’ ‘Nobody cares about you.’ At its worst, that’s what the head tells us about ourselves.
It often begins with a sense of insufficiency, of not being enough in a world which seeks to measure us by quantity, or by a quality which we think we can’t live up to. But it’s not the world and its judgments about me. It’s me and my judgments about myself. The core of every human being is love, yet wrapped around that core is an insulating lie. The sense of shame that I feel clouds the love that I am because I believe I’m not good enough. Poor me. Bad me. Yet feelings aren’t facts.
The content of that messaging and programming, downloaded upon our hard drives, can become so negative that some of us feel the need to throw it off onto someone else and blame them. We judge. We attack. That’s externalizing. Or, we turn in the opposite direction and attack ourselves. That’s internalizing. This internalization, taken too far, can lead to suicidal thoughts. The programming can become too painful to tolerate. It’s KFUK radio, evil talk radio blabbering into our ear day and night. We try to turn off the radio any way we can.
Sometimes, we can’t turn off the radio. We can’t even dial down the volume. So, we might as well just shoot the radio.
Is there another way? There is.
The problem usually begins in childhood with the beliefs I develop about myself, about others, and about the world. In my case, there were three prime beliefs that sabotaged me—
One, I’m not enough. This lie takes all sorts of forms, but at its core is a sense of shame. I covered up this naked insufficiency with all manner of bluffing, bravado, defensiveness and attack. When bullshitting and blaming others eventually failed, my house collapsed in on itself and I blamed me. I switched from externalizing to internalizing. Bad me. Poor me. You can only handle listening to that programming for so long before you seek escape.
Two, God doesn’t love me. For some of us, this belief may take different forms. To live a human life, it’s not necessary that one believe in God, of course. The belief may be that others don’t love us, that our parents never did, or it may be the belief that reality is hostile. Regardless of the form the belief takes, it’s based on the sense of inadequacy found in Belief #1 – that I’m not good enough – projected out onto others.
In my case, I concluded that I needed to be perfect. God was perfect, and in order to get into heaven (whatever heaven meant for an 8-year-old), I had to be perfect, too. I couldn’t sin. I had to think and feel and perform with perfection or something bad would happen. I had to believe as others believed, as I was instructed religiously. And because some of those beliefs made little sense to me at the time, as soon as they told me about hell (whatever that meant to an 8-year-old), that’s where I believed they’d send me. To me, God became the Enforcer of Belief and punished those who couldn’t accept the party line. I could never accept my humanity. Something was wrong with me. Instead of believing I was a spiritual being having a human experience, I believed I was a human being, irrevocably flawed, who desperately needed to have a spiritual experience, which I identified with perfection. I believed I needed to be an angel. What a set-up that was.
Three, based on the first two beliefs – about the nature of myself and the nature of reality – I concluded that the world needed to make me happy. The world was around for that reason. It needed to supply my insufficiency. Because I looked within and saw all that was lacking, I had to fill that hole with something. I perceived that I could find that something on the outside of myself, because obviously it wasn’t inside anywhere I looked.
These three conclusions were all, thankfully, false. They were the theorems drawn up by an 8-year-old. Yet I carried them well into adulthood. They were the themes constantly broadcast by my radio station, by my head and its contents.
That station still broadcasts, sometimes very loudly. Since children are blank slates who take in suggestions very easily, it’s very difficult to erase original programming. Yet as with any hard drive, the best way to delete my original programming is by reformatting the disk; by learning new beliefs in place of the old ones. I can change the channel. Yet at other times, I can’t do a thing about that either.
What starts the cascade down into negativity? Usually, something will happen and it will trigger the station to broadcast live the hearings of all those committees and subcommittees of which I am chair. At other times, it may just be a bad memory that turns on KFUK radio. If I listen to what that programming tells me about myself, about reality, and about the world, I may be tempted to enact its recommendations. In the past, it told me to cancel the program. KFUK radio doesn’t tell me to do that anymore, but it’ll settle for my misery.
Today, the radio often tells me to enact some kind of self-improvement campaign. Its recommendations usually involve some type of change to my outside world, or a remodeling of my body or my personality. They’re usually about having or achieving. When I’m successful, they only fill the hole for a little while. But like a hungry belly, the hole inside me digests the food I feed it, and then I’m wanting more, better. Usually, it doesn’t take long for that emptiness to come back. When I’m unsuccessful, then it’s bad me, poor me.
Reprogramming the message, dialing down the volume or turning off the broadcast are better strategies than trying to fill the hole with some kind of psychic junk food from the outside. Yet even those three strategies don’t always work. When reprogramming, dialing it down or turning off the noise aren’t working, I have one ultimate response. I can realize that what my head is feeding me is a broadcast of lies. I can step back from the radio, point at the device, and simply say: Bad programming.
It’s been said that my mind makes a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. The intellect is a tool which assists me in navigating my day. It can balance my checkbook, tell me whether it’s okay to pass the driver up ahead, or assess the pros and cons of taking a new job. But it makes a poor guide to the three topics we’ve been discussing: the nature of myself, the nature of reality, and the purposes and limitations of the world. My head isn’t very good at informing me about the quality of truth. It doesn’t always tell me the truth because it doesn’t have access to complete information. And so, the beliefs it forms are often false. When I collapse my true identity with what my head tells me I am, I’m in real trouble.
The truth is the opposite of what my head has told me, and the truth is this: I am sufficient. Reality is friendly and doesn’t require me to be perfect. The world’s a wonderful and fun playground, like I knew when I was a kid, but it can’t make up for my perceived flaws and fill the hole I feel inside. Ultimately, at the enter of my center, I’m without flaw, but I’m experiencing myself as flawed so that I can extend love to the imperfect. That’s the only way love can show itself to love, and show itself what it is. I’m a spiritual being having a human experience. Yet in that humanness, I’m inherently lovable.
Sometimes I’ll believe all that. Sometimes I won’t. But what I believe about things doesn’t change their ultimate nature. Throughout our lives, we all believe in scores of things that end up not being true, starting with Santa Claus. Don’t believe everything you think, I saw on a bumper sticker once. Maybe that’s the bullet I can use to shoot the radio when it’s broadcasting B.S.
Don’t shoot the radio. You’d be killing the wrong thing.
© 2025 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within