• Bullet Point Ballet

I read this today and it got me thinking about suicide. Warning, if you’re prone to being sad about things - that’s a sad story I linked to.

I can get sad, but I read it anyway. Some people ride roller coasters to feel alive. I read stories like that one.

I have never been suicidal. I’ve always imagined that level of depression to be a few rungs below mine, like a wide, black chasm that people don’t get out of.

But I guess some people do. They survive their suicide attempts and never go back. Yet there are still more people who survive, only to fall back into the chasm again.

I understand suicide. I’ve felt hopeless and unloved. While I never got very close to the very bottom, I saw it and I had no trouble imagining myself getting helpless enough to try it. I wasn’t one of the poor souls jumping in, but they all reminded me of me.

My therapist has a sign in his office: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

To people thinking about suicide, remember that. Your brain is playing tricks on you. It will set you off on a spiral that goes deep, so deep you might even consider killing yourself. Along the way to that horrible end, you’ll have thoughts like “nobody loves me” and “my life is meaningless” and “I have nothing to live for.” These are all lies that a depressed mind tells itself.

Depression functions a bit like cancer - it’s your own body turned against you. Big chunks of you turn black and start trying to drag you down into the worst pain and suffering you’ve ever felt.

Just like there’s no single cure for cancer, there’s nothing that will cure your depression. Fixing you will be a process led by experts and doctors who will try different medicines and therapies. If one thing doesn’t work, they’ll try something else. As long as you’re still alive, they will never stop trying to save you.

But unlike cancer, your survival rate is 100%.

If you never try to kill yourself, depression can never kill you.

I don’t hit those depths very often anymore. Nobody’s love saved me. No amount of acceptance from the world turned my mind around. No meaning of life shone its light on me. Nobody reached down and pulled me out of it. I crawled out.

I had help - my family, my mother, my friends, my doctors - but it was all up to me. If I hadn’t done it for myself, nobody else would have been able to.

When you realize that life is worth living on its own terms, with no expectations or demands, beautiful things can happen.

The following is a guide to using Twitter without annoying people. Note that even the author of the below outrageous screed breaks these rules on a regular basis. These are guidelines, not rules.

DO NOT tweet an endless stream of the pointless details of your mundane existence
- only tweet a Foursquare check-in if you have something interesting to say about it
- a few tweets about your mundane existence are fine. More than a few a day is pushing it.
- an easy way to tell whether a tweet fits the criteria of a pointless, mundane detail: would you care if a stranger told you the same thing? No? It’s pointless.

DO NOT tweet a question that could be easily answered by a Google search.

DO NOT use Twitter ONLY to promote your work.

DO NOT RT the following:
- a tweet that praises you
- a #ff tweet that mentions you
- a tweet with “this” as your only editorial
- anything that says “please RT”
- a news story that is more than one day old

photographs
- filters do not make you artistic
- nobody wants to see another photograph of you, what you’re eating or your pet

video
- hold your phone sideways, not vertically

LIVE TWEETING
- use a #hashtag (this provides context and allows users to mute/ignore you)
- say something interesting, not just exclamations
- avoid spoilers

None of the above DO NOTS apply to tweets that include humorous or interesting aspects.