I have known many people who have chosen to take their lives. Usually the reasons were financial, but not always. Alcoholism, chemical imbalances in the brain, eating disorders…despair comes dressed in many different costumes. Always I grieved for the time spent alone grappling with the decision and then arriving at the conclusion that killing themselves was the best solution to whatever problems faced them.
Always I asked myself what created such fragility in some and not others. What was it about the human spirit that could be so broken in some of us? Why couldn’t we all have the same resilience in the face of the pain life can bring?
For me, the human spirit is like an intricately woven spider’s web. A web is a beautiful creation that can withstand gale winds and huge insects flying into it without any sign of fragility. It is also something that can be destroyed by one flick of a wrist, all the beauty and strength obliterated. A web has it’s breaking point.
And apparently so do some of us.