I Wish I Could Stay in This Moment Forever 6

Note: this essay speaks directly about depression and about the wish to end one's own life. It describes no method, and nothing here glorifies any of it. But if today finds you somewhere very dark, read it when you feel steady enough, or read it beside someone.

I. The Essay I Could Not Write

Three nights after the phone call I wrote about in part three, I sat in front of an empty file.

The same chair, the one I have been watering the plant from all week. The plant still stands on the table, its leaves long dry now. The cursor blinked on the first line of a page with nothing on it, steady, patient, like the heartbeat of someone who was not me. I had named the file days earlier: part six.

I have written five essays in this series. One about a moment passing. One about choices that must be paid for. One about absence. One about the thin line between staying and clutching. One about being remembered. Five essays, and not one of them made me sit that long in front of a blank page.

Because the sixth one is about me.

Across all five essays, the word stay in this series has carried one meaning: to stay inside a moment, to stay until the party ends, to stay beside a person. Only in this one does the word carry its plain, literal weight. The man who wrote five essays about greedily wanting to stay spent a great many years wishing he did not have to.

I typed a sentence. Deleted it. Typed it again. Deleted it again.

There is a very familiar voice in my head, and it never shouts. It speaks calmly, reasonably, almost kindly.

Who are you to say anything about this?

And it goes on, still kindly. There are people out there carrying stories a hundred times heavier than mine. People who have lost everything. People with no roof at all. People no one has ever once said a gentle word to. And what do I have? A sad childhood. A body that did not turn out the way I wanted. A mind that runs too fast and too dark. Measured against the world, my pain is not bad enough to earn a voice.

I sat with that sentence for a long time. Long enough to notice something that ran a cold line down my spine.

That sentence, the one keeping me from writing this essay, I had heard it before.

I heard it in my teens, when someone reached a hand toward me and I pulled away, because it is not that heavy, why bother them with it. I heard it in the years after, every time someone asked whether I was all right and I told them I was, not because I wanted to hide, but because I sincerely believed my trouble was not serious enough to be worth their time.

And I heard it most clearly of all on the nights I lay in the dark and believed, with a calm that frightens me now, that the world would run a little more smoothly with one fewer person in it.

Three different sentences, spoken at three different points in one life. But peel the skin off them and underneath there is only one.

You do not qualify.

Not qualified to speak. Not qualified to be helped. Not qualified to take up room in the world.

One belief, three costumes.

And I understood that the only way left to answer it, after all these years, was to do the exact thing it had forbidden me to do.

The sentence that kept me from writing this essay is the same sentence that once kept me from asking for help. And long before that, it was the sentence that nearly kept me from staying alive.

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II. A Child's Arithmetic

My sister told me about it quite calmly, the way people recount a distant memory. She meant nothing by it. I am certain of that, and I need you to be certain of it too before you read on.

She said that back then, before I existed, the family was happy. Our parents were close. The house was warm. She was loved without reservation.

And then I was born.

She said nothing after that. She did not need to. Because a child, hearing that much, will finish the rest himself.

That child performs a very simple calculation, so simple that no adult would ever think to look for it. He hears: before you, everything was good. He looks around and sees: and now it is not. He sets the two halves side by side, and he finds the one variable that changed between the two pictures.

The variable is him.

That is not logic. But it wears logic's clothes so perfectly that the child believes it for twenty years. A wound learns to speak in the voice of reason, and from then on it never needs a defender. It can prove itself.

I grew up with that arithmetic already installed in me, an answer waiting before the question could even be asked. Why am I always at the back of every room, in every friendship? Because I am the variable. Why do I struggle in crowds, why do I misread the look on a face, why does the whole table go quiet when I speak? Because I am the variable.

Back then I had no words for what was happening inside my head. Only much later did I learn they had names: depression, and autism. But a child without words still knows how to hurt. He simply does not know that the hurt has a name, has a cause, and that other people out there are hurting in exactly the same way. He assumes it is his nature. He assumes it is simply who he is.

My body did not take my side either. There are defects I have carried since birth, things I did not choose and cannot change. As for looks, I was not given any. Every mirror was a reminder. At the age when a child learns to price himself using other people's eyes, I learned fast, and I priced myself very low.

Then comes the worst part, the part I weighed for a long time before deciding to write it down.

My mind would not sit still. An ordinary sentence from another person could be dissected all night into seven layers of meaning, and every layer proved I deserved to be discarded. A pause between messages, I read as a verdict. A furrowed brow, I read as the final truth about my worth. People call this overthinking, and the word is far too gentle. It does not feel like thinking. It feels like a mill running twenty four hours a day, and the only thing it will consent to grind is me.

I will not hide this next part either, much as I would like to.

I hurt people who came into my life through love. Not through cruelty. Through a dark mind, a heart permanently braced for abandonment, and the behavior that grows out of such a belief. I know precisely that I was the cause. I am not writing this to ask anyone's forgiveness, and I am not writing it to be told it was not my fault. I am writing it because if I cut it out, this essay becomes a defense of myself, and a defense of oneself has never saved anybody.

I am writing it for another reason too, one that matters far more.

The belief that you are a burden does not survive on fiction. It never has to invent anything. It survives on real evidence, and I handed it that evidence myself. Every time I hurt someone, the voice in my head gained one more file to open and lay on the table. There. You see. I did not make this up.

That is the cruelest thing about it. It does not lie. It only selects.

And on one particular night, the child who had done that arithmetic years ago, now grown, lay in the dark and arrived at the final line of the problem he had begun solving as a boy. If I am the variable that makes everything worse, then there is an obvious way to make everything better.

I will write nothing further about that night. Not out of shame. Because some details help no one, and some doors should not be opened in front of a person standing too close to them.

I will write only this: I came very near.

And the man typing these words, in this chair, beside this plant, was not supposed to still exist to type them.

It never lied to me. That is the cruelest thing about it. It only selected, and every piece of evidence it produced was evidence I had handed it myself.

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III. The Name of the Thing That Almost Killed Me

In three earlier essays in this series, every time I carried a nameless feeling into the research, I found something that eased me. Not this time. What I found this time did not comfort me at all. It only described me, so exactly that I had to stand up and walk around the room before I could keep reading.

In 2005, the psychologist Thomas Joiner, who lost his father to suicide, published a book called Why People Die by Suicide. He was not hunting for a list of risk factors. He was after a narrower and more brutal question: what actually has to happen inside a person before they can do it?

In 2010, with colleagues, he laid the theory out in full in Psychological Review. It has three pieces.

The first he called thwarted belongingness. Not ordinary loneliness. The conviction that you belong nowhere, that no relationship in your life is truly reciprocal.

The second he called perceived burdensomeness. Let me set the definition down slowly, because it is, word for word, the arithmetic of the child in the previous section: the belief that one's own existence is a net liability to the people one loves. And Joiner binds it inseparably to a second component: self-hatred.

Those two together, in the theory, produce the desire to die. The third piece, acquired capability, is what converts desire into act.

I have to be honest with you about the state of this theory, because if I am not honest here I have no right to ask you to believe anything else in this essay. Joiner's theory does not fully hold up. His own research group, in a 2017 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooling 122 studies, had to concede that the three-way interaction, the very part that makes it a theory rather than a list, has a weak effect. In 2020, a study following 308 psychiatric inpatients over twelve months found the predictive model simply did not work.

But there is something strange in the wreckage.

Among all the studies that shot this theory apart piece by piece, exactly one piece survived every round. In that 2020 study, when the model collapsed, the only thing still predicting suicidal behavior was perceived burdensomeness. In a 2022 study of 314 autistic adults, when thwarted belongingness had stopped predicting anything at all, the sense of being a burden still predicted both ideation and attempts.

Which is to say: the belief I have carried since I was seven, the arithmetic a child worked out alone in his head after an offhand story from his sister, is the single most durable finding an entire science has produced about why human beings die.

And it is precisely here that the science handed me something I had not managed to think of by myself in twenty years.

Look closely at the first word of the name. Perceived. Joiner did not call it burdensomeness. He called it the perception of being a burden. He was not careless with that word. The instrument used to measure it never asks whether your family is suffering because of you. It does not interview your mother. It does not audit the books. It asks only what you believe about yourself, and it always measures one other thing alongside it: how much you hate yourself.

In 2011, a team led by Kelly Cukrowicz found that perceived burdensomeness kept predicting suicidal ideation even after subtracting depression, after subtracting hopelessness, and after subtracting the person's actual functional impairment. Meaning it does not track the real circumstances at all. It floats free of the facts.

And in the literature on terminally ill patients, where researchers can question both sides, there is a finding I read again and again. The patient feels like a crushing burden on the family. And the family, asked separately, frequently does not feel that way at all.

I have to stop and say something plainly, because I promised not to overstate. No study on earth has proven that the people who love you would not be better off without you. Nobody can run that experiment, and nobody should. I cannot hand you a certificate.

But here is what the science can say, and it is far stronger.

That feeling has never once measured reality. It has never weighed what you cost the people around you. It measures exactly one thing, and that thing is how much you hate yourself. It is not a report about the world. It is a symptom.

And a symptom does not get to sit as judge.

There is one more thing I need to say, for the people who are like me.

For autistic people, the numbers are hard to look at directly. A 2023 meta-analysis in Molecular Autism, pooling 36 studies and some forty eight thousand people, estimated that roughly thirty four percent of autistic people have experienced suicidal ideation, against roughly nine percent in the general population. I should be clear that the studies varied enormously, the spread is very wide, and these figures are estimates rather than verdicts. But the direction of them is not in dispute.

What kept me sitting in silence longest was not the number. It was a 2018 study by Sarah Cassidy and colleagues, also in Molecular Autism. They found that in autistic people, two things predict suicide risk in a way specific to autism, unlike the general population. The first is camouflaging: the lifelong performance of an ordinary person, staged daily in order to be allowed a seat at the table. The second is the number of support needs that are never met.

Which means: it is not the difference that kills. It is having to pretend you are not different, day after day, while no one comes to help.

I performed that role for the better part of twenty years. I did not know it had a name.

Perceived burdensomeness has never measured whether you are a burden. It measures exactly one thing: how much you hate yourself. It is not a verdict. It is a symptom.

---

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IV. The People Who Never Knew They Kept Me Here

You are waiting for a moment here. I know. I waited for it too.

The moment every story of this kind is supposed to contain: a bolt of lightning, a morning you wake and the world has turned, a sentence from someone that shakes you awake and you decide to live. I sat for a long time trying to recover it, so that I could hand it to you neatly packaged, a key you could take and use on your own door.

I could not find it.

There was no lightning. There was no single night that divided a before from an after. And I will not invent one, because if I invent one, I am handing a desperate person a condition they cannot possibly meet. They will lie there waiting for their own bolt of lightning, and it will not come, and they will conclude that they do not even qualify to be saved.

What actually happened was far more scattered, far slower, and only years later did I make out its shape.

It was a group of old friends. They did nothing heroic. They gave me a seat, and inside that seat, for the first time in my life, I got to do the thing I loved among people who loved it too, and to be recognized for it. Not recognized for trying hard. Recognized for being good. It was a sensation I had never known before.

It was a girl. I will say nothing about her except this, because the rest belongs to her and not to my essay. She looked at me in a way no one had looked at me. Not through me, and not at me as a problem to be managed. She looked at me as someone worth cherishing. And I, who had spent twenty years assembling evidence for my own worthlessness, suddenly held one piece of evidence pointing the other way. Only one. But it was the first.

It was a community of shared faith. There, for the first time, I saw love between human beings that was not a transaction. People gave without calculating what would come back. I sat among them and could not understand it. Then I sat among them long enough to begin believing it.

And it was a group of five, whom I walked beside long enough to watch all five of them grow up. That is a strange thing, and I think only someone who has spent their life at the edge of every room will understand it: when you witness people growing, year after year, and you are still there to witness it, you slowly realize that you also managed to stay for all those years.

Not one of them knew any of this.

That is the part I need you to hear clearly. Not a single person among all of them ever sat down in front of me and told me not to do it. None of them knew how close I had come. None of them had a speech, or a well-timed word, or a sentence that changed my life.

They simply did not leave.

They kept inviting me. Kept texting. Kept saving me a seat. Kept treating me as though I were the sort of person a seat gets saved for. And that repetitive, unglamorous, entirely unheroic act turned out to be the argument.

In 2001, two researchers, Jerome Motto and Alan Bostrom, published an experiment I think everyone should know about. They took 843 patients discharged after a suicidal crisis and split them in two. One group received nothing further. The other received letters. Only letters. Short, personal, no therapy, no advice, no technique of any kind. Their content amounted to this: we still remember you, and we hope you are well. Twenty four letters over five years.

In the first two years, the suicide rate in the letter group was significantly lower.

I have to give you the rest of it, because it is the truth: the effect faded after two years, and later attempts to replicate it have been inconsistent. This is not a miracle, and I am not going to sell you a miracle.

But consider what it achieved, even for two years. Not medication. Not therapy. Not a flawless philosophical argument. Only evidence, arriving again and again, that someone out there still remembered you existed.

And do you see it? That is precisely the thing a belief like I am a burden, I belong nowhere cannot withstand. You cannot argue with that belief. I tried. I am intelligent, I reason well, I argued with it for a thousand nights and I lost every single one, because it turns my own intelligence against me.

The only thing that ever defeated it was not an argument. It was the presence of other people, repeated, often enough that the evidence outside finally outweighed the indictment within.

In part five of this series, I wrote about Irvin Yalom's idea of rippling, and I consoled myself that perhaps I too had made some ripple I would never see. Now I understand I had it backwards.

I was never standing at the center of the ripple. I had been standing inside someone else's, for years, without ever knowing.

And this is what I want to say to those people, even though they will never recognize themselves in this essay, and perhaps that is exactly the nature of the thing: you saved a life by doing nothing at all except staying. You will never know. People never do.

Not one of them ever sat down and told me not to do it. They simply did not leave. And it turns out that not leaving was the argument.

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V. Building Around the Crack

But other people's presence only kept me here. It did not teach me what to do with the life it had kept.

There was an evening, I no longer remember which year, when I sat down and made a very cold inventory of myself. No looks. A body with defects that could not be repaired. Depression. Autism. A mind that ran too fast and always ran toward the dark. And I asked a question I still think is the most important one of my life.

All right. Then I have to have something else.

Not I have to fix these things. I had spent years trying to fix them and failed completely. The right question was never how to erase them. The right question was: if they are staying permanently, what do I build around them?

I took up a martial art. Then I trained until I became an instructor in it. If this body was a defect I never chose, then at the very least I could make it a body that knew exactly what it was doing. A disciplined body. A body I no longer had to apologize for carrying.

I taught myself an instrument. Not to perform for anyone. I learned it because there were feelings inside me too large and too chaotic to have any exit, and they were eating me from within. The instrument gave them a door. On nights I could not say a single word to anyone, I could still put my hands on the keys and let it speak for me.

And I trained my logic to a point that was close to cruel. Because here is what I had realized: the mill in my head was never going to switch off. It will run until the day I die. So instead of begging it to stop, I taught it to grind something else. If I was going to overthink for the rest of my life, I would at least overthink well.

In 1907, Alfred Adler, still inside Freud's circle at the time, wrote a monograph on what he called organ inferiority. His argument was that the human mind does not lie still under a defective organ. It responds. And it can respond by converting that very deficiency into strength somewhere else. He called this compensation.

Let me say straight away that Adler is a lens, not a proof. His theory is clinical and philosophical, never validated experimentally by modern standards. I am not invoking him as a scientist. I am invoking him as a man who saw the shape of this thing a hundred years before I did.

But Adler himself drew a line, and it is that line that costs me sleep.

There is healthy compensation, where a person builds a bridge. And there is overcompensation, where a person builds a fortress. From the outside the two are indistinguishable. Both are a weak person constructing something very large. The only difference is this: a bridge is built for others to cross, and a fortress is built so no one can get in.

And I am not certain, even today, which one I built.

That is the most honest sentence I can write in this section. I am not standing here as a man who won. I am standing here as a man still looking at his own construction and wondering what it is.

What actually happened, the part with genuine scientific evidence behind it, is far simpler. In 1977, Albert Bandura published his theory of self-efficacy in Psychological Review. He identified four sources of that belief, and he was explicit about which is strongest. Not being encouraged by others. Not watching someone like you succeed. The strongest source, stronger than all the rest, is the mastery experience: you, with your own hands, doing a hard thing.

And Bandura added something that made me sit very still after I read it. That belief is built by persisting in activities that are subjectively threatening but objectively rather safe.

That is the precise definition of a dojo. And of a practice room at two in the morning.

You walk into a place where the fear is real but the danger is not. You fail there, hundreds of times, and nothing breaks. Then one day you succeed. And your brain, that brain which spent twenty years collecting evidence against you, is forced to file one new piece of evidence. This. This you can do.

Nobody told you that. You proved it. Which is exactly why it stuck.

Now I have to write the hardest part, and I will not dodge it, because dodging it would betray the very person I am writing this for.

There is a beautiful story people love to tell: that the wound is what made you grow, that what does not kill you makes you stronger. The research does not permit me to tell you that.

In 1996, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun named the concept of post-traumatic growth and built a scale to measure it. But in 2009, a team led by Patricia Frazier did something nobody had done before: they measured people before the trauma occurred, then measured them again after, rather than asking them to recall how much they had grown. The results, in Psychological Science, are brutal. What people believe they have grown bears almost no relationship to growth that can actually be measured. Worse still: perceived growth traveled alongside increased distress, while real growth traveled alongside decreased distress. Depending on the domain, only about five to twenty five percent of people showed genuine, measurable positive change.

What does that mean? It means most of us, after being knocked down, tell ourselves a story about how the blow made us grow. And that story is mostly a way of enduring, not an accurate description of anything that changed.

I am writing this for two reasons.

The first: I do not want to lie to you, not even with a beautiful lie.

The second, and it matters far more. If you are in the dark right now and you cannot feel yourself growing at all, if you look around and everyone else seems to be converting their pain into profound lessons while you are only in pain, then I need you to know: you have not failed. The data is on your side. Most people do not grow from their wounds. They merely survive them. And surviving is enough. Surviving was never the consolation prize.

The Japanese have a technique called kintsugi, joining broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold dust. People usually tell it alongside a legend about a shogun and a tea bowl, but honestly, that legend is most likely just a legend, and the famous bowl at the center of the story was in fact repaired with metal staples and never received any gold at all.

What is true, and to my mind far more beautiful, is this: a culture went to the trouble of developing an entire technique, with lacquer and gold dust and months of curing, for the sole purpose of making the break the most visible thing on the object. Not to hide it. To fill it with the most precious material they had.

But please do not forget this part, because it is what every lovely saying about kintsugi leaves out. That bowl did not become whole again. It is still a broken bowl. The crack is still there, only now it catches the light. Handle it carelessly and it will break again along exactly the same line.

I did not heal my depression. It is still here, today, while I type these words. I did not cure my autism, and there was nothing there to cure. My body is the same body. The mill in my head is still running.

I only filled the cracks with gold, and learned to carry the bowl more carefully.

I healed nothing. I only learned to build around it. And perhaps that is the only thing a human being ever truly manages to do.

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VI. The Next Moment

The page is no longer blank.

I am still in that chair, the plant is still on the table, and outside the window the sky has begun to turn the pale grey of the last hours before dawn. That voice is still in my head. It did not disappear. It never will. But this time I finished writing before it could win.

I want to say a few things to you plainly, in the simplest language I have.

I am not going to promise you that things will get better. I do not know your life. I do not know what you are carrying, and I will not stand here and declare that it will lighten. Viktor Frankl, who walked out of a concentration camp, wrote that happiness cannot be pursued. It can only ensue. I trust him more than anyone who has ever promised me a brighter future.

But there are three things I know for certain, and I am giving them to you.

First: you do not have to be worth staying for in order to stay.

The thought that everyone would be better off without you, the arithmetic you have run in your head a thousand times, the ledger you believe records everything you owe the world, none of that is a hard truth you have bravely faced. It is a symptom. It has a name in the literature. It has been measured. And what it measures has never once been your worth. The only thing it measures is how loudly the illness is speaking in your voice.

You are not standing before a court. You are running a fever, and the fever has learned to imitate you.

Second: you are not a bother to anyone.

I know what you are thinking. I know because I thought exactly the same thing for twenty years. That my problem is not serious enough. That other people have their own lives. That calling someone now would burden them with something they never signed up to carry. That there are people out there suffering far more than me and they are not complaining.

I need you to know that this is not your tact. It is one of the most widely documented barriers in the world. In the World Health Organization's large-scale mental health surveys, spanning more than twenty countries, the most common reason people with a diagnosable disorder never sought help was not money, and not the absence of a doctor. The most common reason was that they judged their own problem not serious enough to deserve help.

Millions of people on this planet are sitting silently in the dark for the same reason you are. And it is the wrong reason.

You are keeping a ledger of debts that no one else is reading. Nobody is counting. That ledger was written by the illness, and it was written alone.

Third: you do not have to win. You only have to stay one more day.

I am not asking you to rise. I am not asking you to take up a martial art, learn an instrument, build something magnificent out of your own wreckage. It took me many years and I still do not know whether I built a bridge or a fortress.

I am only asking you to be here tomorrow morning. That is all. That is the entire assignment.

Because here is what I, a man who walked very close to that line, can tell you with absolute certainty: you have no way of knowing who is standing inside your ripple. For twenty years I believed I was a net loss to this world, while people I barely paid attention to were quietly keeping me alive by doing nothing at all except refusing to leave. They did not know. They still do not.

And neither do you. Right now, while you are certain your existence means nothing, it is entirely possible that someone is standing in a ripple you made and never saw. That is not a comfort I invented to make you feel better. It is what happened to me, and it took me twenty years to find out.

In part one of this series, I mentioned that after the night I rode a colleague home through the empty streets of Saigon, I sat down and wrote a song. I said it in a single sentence and moved on. For five essays I have ended every piece with that same lyric, and everyone has read it as a line of poetry.

Now I can tell you what it actually is.

The instrument that wrote that line is the instrument I taught myself, because I needed a door for the things eating me from inside. And that line was never poetry.

It is the prayer of a man who was not sure he wanted to see the next morning.

For five essays, night after night, I have been asking for the same single thing without daring to name it. Today I will name it.

Let me still be here when it gets light. And let that light be gentle with me.

The child who made that terrible calculation is still inside me. He still speaks up, on the worst nights. I no longer argue with him, because I know I will lose. I just lead him over to the table, show him the plant, and tell him about the people who stopped by. And then I say to him, very quietly:

Look. Look how many people kept you here without ever knowing it. And look, they are still coming.

Tomorrow, when the sun rises, I will still be here. As I have always been here. As I have chosen to stay, day after day, for all these years, including every single day I did not want to.

Quietly hoping for a brighter morning, a gentler sun.

You do not have to be worth staying for in order to stay. You only have to stay. And one day you will be the person someone else stops for, and you will never know that you kept them here.