Suicide

Diary of the Despondent

/ T Wayne Hicks / Leave a comment

One of my favorite bands is Breaking Benjamin. I discovered them in 2005 after a sales symposium I went to and a colleague from Pennsylvania mentioned his close to home town band had hit it big with primal screams, towering riffs, and ice-cold lyrics.

And as I grew fonder of them, one of their songs, with probably nothing to do with the subject, hit home as an anthem for the forever plugged in male attitude that I’d experienced for the vast majority of my current adult life.

“The Diary of Jane”, which officially has something to do with a movie star from the ’40s, I think, had lyrics that screamed through my head as the forever hopeful beta man who’d prayed, pined, and yes, even wept over that “perfect” girl for him, the girl that he loved that didn’t love him. The lyrics tell the tale…

“If I had to I would put myself right beside you
So let me ask you,
Would ya like that? Would ya like that?
And I don’t mind If you say
This love is the last time
So now I’ll ask,
Do ya like that? Do ya like that?

Something’s getting in the way
Something’s just about to break
I will try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
So, tell me
How it should be?

Try to find out
What makes you tick As I lie down
Sore and sick
Do ya like that, Do ya like that?
There’s a fine line
Between love and hate
And I don’t mind
Just let me say,
That I like that, I like that

Something’s getting in the way
Something’s just about to break
I will try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
As I burn another page
As I look the other way
I still try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
So tell me
How it should be?

Desperate I will crawl
Waiting for so long
No love, there’s no love
Die for anyone
What have I become?

Something’s getting in the way
Something’s just about to break
I will try to find my place
In the diary of Jane
As I burn another page
As I look the other way
I still try to find my place
In the diary of Jane”

Such was my lot in life throughout my 20’s and briefly after my divorce before I truly became knowledgeable about the ways of things.

Rationalizing Dust

As with most times in the lives of our current modern men who are lost, I call the 10 years between 18 and 27 of my life the “lost decade” simply because I felt I squandered my youth on the fruitless pursuit of true love, passing on from one female crush to the next, desperately hoping that this girl would love me. I didn’t have sex, I kissed four women, I rarely dated, hung with friends, played a shit ton of video games, and generally went from woman to woman like some damn episode of Quantum Leap, hoping that my next crush would be the one that set me free, that this love would be “the one”.

Pathetic? Sure. But when you see that many men are taking this path these days, it’s becoming more problematic seeing men, young men, believe the lies that I believed, and be balls deep in the fiction. My lost decade involved crushes on 5 girls, each who came into my life on more than one occasion, and each time, I was convinced fate, more than anything else, would show them that I was the guy for them.

But fate, or as I now prefer it, “rationalizing dust” is a losing and sometimes deadly game for men.

Fate, hope, and destiny are banners for the weak. I firmly believed, at my young age, that I only had partial control of my life, and these three magic words above were truly in control. So I lived my life on these as fuel. If I truly wanted, yearned, and pined enough for a girl, that she would be mine. I would use any sign, any small gesture, even her talking to me, as a rationalization that “this is why we’ll be together, this is fate taking the wheel.”

Absolute madness.

But the harshest truths are the ones that we refuse to accept, simply because it goes against all we think we stand for, all that we were told we believe. And we as men don’t want to believe such things, because not only does the truth not spare our feelings, it kicks the living shit out of us and then makes us get up for more. We want the feel-good story. We root for the underdog. But as you know if you’ve done any gambling, the underdog seldom wins. And consistently playing that role as a man looking for a woman will yield terrible results, not because of fate, destiny, or magic fucking words, but because of brutal, cold, real, reality.

Call it a pill. Call it whatever you want, but it’s the hardest, most real, most unfortunate truths about women that I didn’t, nay, refused to recognize in my gumdrop, lollipop, unicorn world of hopes and dreams. And these truths are what make or break men in their dealings with the opposite sex.

  • Fate is fantasy. It’s the belief that something will happen, and when fleshed against the rigidness of reality, it buckles like a belt.
  • The girls that I fell in love with never cared for me. In fact, more often than not, I was a nuisance to them. And, as the lyrics above opine, most, if not all of the time, I didn’t even register in their psyche. No pages in their diaries for me. None. Zip. Zilch.
  • Years of my life were wasted on girls who didn’t give two shits about me and never would. I should’ve done more, been more, worked on myself more. Regret is a bitch, and you can’t get those years back. “Die for anyone, What have I become?”
  • Women who did like me weren’t the ones I wanted. And the ones I wanted would never return the affections in the way I wanted.
  • Romance isn’t dead, it’s just misplaced and misused by men desperate to prove something to women who don’t care if he proves anything or not.
  • There are always other dudes. And until you can prove you have better value than the majority, there will always be other dudes. Pragmatism trumps idealism every damn time.
  • Nothing you “do” will make her like you. She’ll find an attraction to you in how much you invest in yourself
  • Women are emotional creatures. That doesn’t make them bad, in fact, it makes them the exact opposite, but you have to know what to expect, how to deal with them, and their chaotic and unpredictable patterns that seldom side with logic. Men and women really are different, but that’s a good thing.
  • Hating women for being women is misogynistic. You believe that they are operating in bad faith. And while some of them truly are, many of them don’t realize they are, nor do they care to understand if they do. Hate the game, not the player. Societal advantages for women have been around for eons and will continue because they outnumber men on this planet. Majority rules. We can still rail against these disadvantages men face, but it won’t change the big picture.

With these truths in tow, many men need to move forward to their new lives under these truths.

But many men just can’t. Hence the title of this post.

The Six D’s of a Man’s Life Realization

Photo Credit: Intellectual Takeout

I was there. I didn’t want to believe any of this. I still fought every day to believe the fairy tale, but it didn’t matter. The plug was pulled and I was out there floating. Many men will just float for decades, hoping to find that the dream really was true, many others will just continue to live their lives as if they weren’t aware and be disappointed. Still more will try to rationalize the irrational, stretching their beliefs into taffy to justify the behavior of others. And unfortunately, many won’t either unplug fully or those that do end their lives because they can’t believe that they were so wrong.

They feel they’ve wasted their lives on a narrative that wasn’t true, not even close, and rather than accept the hard work needed to pick back up, they won’t. They let go.

However, I, among many other men in this sphere that have all unplugged (yes, they all have), are living proof that there is life after death. The old you dies with all of the false knowledge you had and the new you arises equipped to deal with this new reality. It’s harsh but one thing that I can say is that you can be stronger. You can survive this new environment with renewed hope because the hope now comes not from outside forces, but from within yourself.

Self-empowerment and improvement is a cornerstone of this new reality. Faith is put into yourself which makes you more able to survive and thrive.

Here’s the six D’s I used: Denial, Disappointment, Despondency, Discovery, Drive, Domination

My message is simple. It’s never too late for you. I don’t care if you’re 20 or 80. You take responsibility for your life, your beliefs, and your knowledge at the age you do and you then grow with it. The bitter pill isn’t bitter, it’s only bitter for those that refuse to understand that the bitterness is a phase on your journey and it too will pass.

I want to show men that even after the harsh truths above, the six D’s that they go through in this process. I’m writing about this very issue in my book. The seventh D, divorce, is in some men’s lives as well as a phase of discovery.

This isn’t self-help as much as it is self-information. Men need to be aware of all of this crap because I sure as hell wasn’t and I can tell you my father nor my grandfather was either. And with masculinity under attack, the numbers of single mother households growing and the daily messages I get from men struggling, it’s only going to get worse before we can stem the tide.

We’ve lost too many good men to their own weaknesses. We can’t lose any more. The message needs to get out and it needs to get out in a big way.

Women aren’t your problem. You are. Your pining over women is wasting your resources. You’ve forfeited your life direction for a fiction. Something that you can’t control. But you can control this. You can control what you do.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do.

It will never change the fact that there will always be men that need help getting out of this morass they are currently stuck in because of society telling them what’s best for them rather than looking inside themselves. Weak men will always be a battle that needs fighting. But the real fight is getting this information to these men without it being attacked as being anti-female or misogynistic. It isn’t and never was. Male empowerment isn’t taking anything away from women, it’s sharpening the roles of each sex and playing to strengths that have been around for thousands of years and aren’t going to go away because of “feelings”.

So stop pining over a woman, deriding your despair into victimhood, and trying to justify the lies that have been told to you. Get out of your own head and get your ass to work. You’ll thank me when you get to the other side and see how fucking awesome it is.

Open your eyes and live. Your best years are ahead of you.

The Chasm

/ T Wayne Hicks / 2 Comments
Photo Credit: Suicide in Judaism

Four years ago this week, one of my good friends from college ended his life.

He was having a huge custody dispute with his ex-wife after she cheated on him with one of his friends. He was fighting for visitation rights for his two kids after he and his ex got into a fight and he was arrested and slapped with a restraining order. He had struggled for over a year with the divorce proceedings, losing his cool time and time again and seeing less and less of his kids.

So, the great equalizer, so he thought, was breaking in to his ex-wife’s apartment on a cold December Sunday and blowing his brains out in her dining room.

I can’t be sure of why he acted with such horrendous judgement. I can’t be sure that he was tired of the process and had no where to turn. He was alone, fighting for his kids, and getting kicked and punched in a metaphorical sense by the courts and his ex, so it seems plausible. He was looking for a symbolic gesture, the ultimate “fuck you” to his ex. I can’t put myself in his situation, although I’ve seen similar things happen to men, but I can’t possible fathom what he was thinking that terrible Sunday.

The story that seems to stick from his family and friends is that he was going to “make an example to his ex”.

What ended up happening was nothing like he planned.

His ex, after the initial shock, quietly called the police, had them clean up the mess, fake mourned with the kids, and resumed her life. Everything this horribly symbolic gesture he thought was supposed to get out of her, regret, sadness, misery, being lost, pining for him to come back, didn’t transpire. She cashed the life insurance check, went to the funeral, and then went on with her life.

That’s cold shit. But it’s also fucking reality.

The bottom line in this sad situation is that the only people affected by his selfish act were his kids, who don’t have a dad anymore, and his family, who are without a brother, uncle, and son.

The harsh truth: His ex didn’t give a flying fuck about his death.

His family has suffered for years this time of year because he decided to make a life ending decision. Instead of a holiday filled with happy times with him, his family mourns every year over the loss of this man.

And there lies the crux of why men are doing these terrible things to themselves.

Suicide in the United States is quickly becoming an epidemic. 7 out of 10 suicides are men. These men are similar in mindset to my friend. They feel they have to struggle with life’s problems alone, lest they be ridiculed and made to feel inferior for not dealing with their problems “like a man”. These men don’t go to therapy, as they think it makes them look weak, won’t solve their problems, or is a taboo brought down by other men who “have their lives together.” Society in general wants men to grow up and deal with their problems, but they give them absolutely no road map on how to accomplish that.

I’m sure, never in his wildest fantasies about his suicide, would he have imagined his ex coming in, taking a mop and bucket to his mess, wiping the walls with a wash cloth, and moving on with her life. Raw, isn’t it? It’s a messed up situation that he was hoping would end in his ex crying on his remains. But his story, just like all the others, ends the same. He’s not here anymore by his own hand. A selfish act intended to make a huge point ends up only costing some drywall, carpet, and bleach.

The chasm, or the breach that he was looking into, was one of symbolism, pain, hardship, and hopelessness that many men face everyday. But the issue here that I’m getting at is what they think they are doing by sacrificing their lives for some unknown principle, belief, or slight against someone, doesn’t even affect that person most of the time.

Men who feel they have no where to turn will often take their own lives because they lack any sort of out for their overwhelming feelings of depression. Many don’t want to go to therapy, join a men’s group, or talk to a religious leader because they fear they will look weak, be ridiculed, or have their dirty laundry aired to the congregation during Sunday brunch.

So they double down on doing the things they were doing that weren’t working to get out of the hole they’re in. Their feelings of potential embarrassment about being “broken” or needing help override their very real need to seek out professional or group help.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Help

As I write this, I think about my own denial about getting help for my issues, until I actually broke down and went to a therapist. While therapy is STILL to this day looked down upon as being weak for men to do by society, it was the greatest thing that I have ever done. Not only did it help me get out of a tailspin of a marriage, it also got me my life back. It got me through the depression and rock bottom parts of my divorce where I was contemplating doing the same damn thing my friend did 4 years ago.

I got help, and I’m here today to tell men once again that getting help from someone, any one, will save your lives. But you have to reach out. Trust me, the help is there. I’ve found a men’s fraternity that has given me new life and more help than I could ever imagine. These new fraternities or men’s groups have the potential to help men so much. Therapy and talking to a neutral party can help a man get out the shit that’s weighing him down and making him suffer. The times are changing, but men’s problems are still the same. There are many outlets for you to grow and get better, but it starts with you getting over the idea that you, yourself, can get out of this mess. If you could, you wouldn’t be in it any more.

The chasm that many men face is too daunting, too difficult, too dark to try and traverse. So they give up and fall in. What they don’t see, what they never see, is the bridge just off in the distance, or the chasm closing a few miles down, or the path down the chasm that takes them to the other side with a little bit of work. Their vantage point is one of hopelessness, only seeing where they are standing at that point in time, looking down at their feet and the endless below. They can’t see, or perhaps don’t want to see, the whole picture because it doesn’t fit in their narration of how their life tragically ends. They put an emphatic period on their story by falling into the chasm without even stopping to think who it will affect, how, and why.

She Doesn’t Care

This brings me to the other issue of this blog post, that of the why. Many, many men commit suicide over a woman in their life. They see that she’s cheated on them, so just like my friend, their great equalizer is supposed to be a tragic death throe as their ex dives at them in horror at what they’ve done.

Let me be blunt guys.

The only women that you’re hurting when you pull the trigger are the women in your family. They’ve lost a son because he couldn’t get over a girl who easily got over him. Your sacrifice doesn’t mean SHIT to any girl that you feel it will. Your ex-wife or girlfriend doesn’t care about you killing yourself because of her. She’s already rid of you and all you’ve done is pointlessly, selfishly, ended your life to see what she’ll do.

You won’t fucking see it because you’ll be DEAD.

Many men don’t think any of this through when jaded by a lover or ex.

They just pull the trigger.

The pain of your loss won’t be felt by anyone except those that love you. You are selfishly stealing years away from them because you can’t handle the fact that a woman cheated on you, or left you. This is where you precisely need to “man up”.

Go to therapy, unplug and take control of your life instead of letting a woman with no interest make you do terrible things to yourself.

Crossing the Chasm

I miss my friend. I miss him every day. I miss him even more now knowing that I didn’t reach out like I should have, but even if I had, I don’t think he would’ve taken my help. What can men do to help? What can men do who are struggling? How can they cross the chasm?

I will recommend to men exactly what I did.

First, recognize you have a problem and you can’t solve said problem without help. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to reach out if you’re struggling. How will you overcome obstacles if you don’t have help?

I think of it like my Spartan career. When I trifecta’d in 2016, I needed a team of people to help me overcome obstacles. Sure, the ones I did alone made me feel like a bad ass, but still, I needed help with a wall, the rope climb, or a traverse wall, I had to have another man help me out. No shame in admitting that, nor is there shame in accepting the help. I still got my medal and my t-shirt, and I did it with teamwork. The same goes the other way. You can help others who need it by reaching out and asking them how they truly are, how their life is going, and where their hangups are.

Men have to realize that ANY chasm is not an impossible task. There are bridges, other people, and choke points that will get you across. You just have to believe. Just like lack of belief is strong in determining if a man will take his own life, the reverse can help save it. If a man knows there are ways out of his situation, he will be more willing to trudge on and fight. It’s when that belief doesn’t exist that he will spiral down into telling himself it’s hopeless.

It’s not hopeless, gentlemen.

It’s never hopeless.

I’m a shining example of what can be done if you truly reach out for help. I’ve only gained in my masculinity and my manhood by asking other men to help me achieve things in my own life.

Guys, if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide and depression in your life, the first thing you have to do is recognize the problem. The second thing you need to do is seek help from either a therapist, religious leader, or a men’s group of like minded men. The third? Action.

These things alone will help pull you from the chasm and get your life back on track. But be prepared to understand that it’s still on YOU and that you must take these steps to get your life back. The men can help you on the path, but you still have to take the steps to make it happen. Accountability and tough love are in for you, because you aren’t special, your problems are the problems of many other men, and a greater man can overcome these problems with relative ease compared to you.

You can’t just float and hope the wind blows. You still have to take positive, real ACTION for your life to get better. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it will always be. But the sooner you take action to pull yourself away from the chasm, the quicker your life will become a special work of art that has meaning to you again.

Guys, suicide and depression are real problems. I’m not going to pretend they don’t exist. But you have to reach out and get help. You have to accept you have a problem, you have to accept that you need help, and you have to accept the action needed to be taken by you to get past this.

Don’t be a statistic like my friend. I miss him every day. His family misses him. He took his life because of issues he couldn’t get over. He didn’t ask for help. He is no longer here. Please, please reach out for help.

My DM’s are always open on Twitter. My email is bubonicplague7@gmail.com. Reach out for help. I’m here for you.