I’ve found myself in conversations where the topic drifts—sometimes because of a celebrity, sometimes just an ordinary person—to suicide.
And almost inevitably someone says, “It’s so selfish.”

Every time, something inside me ignites.

Not because I want to argue.
Because I know how easy judgment is when you’ve never stood near that kind of devastation.

People see the act.
They rarely imagine the condition that comes before it.

To reach that point, a person doesn’t suddenly decide they don’t value life.
They reach a moment where the pain inside them feels larger than life itself—so constant, so consuming, that relief becomes the only visible exit.

From the outside it looks like a choice.
From the inside, it feels like escape.

We want to believe someone should have seen the signs.
That family or friends could have stopped it.

I believed that too.

My brother was sixteen.
I was fifteen—still a child myself—trying to interpret teenage moods that could just as easily have been hormones, silence, or growing pains.
Afterward, I searched every memory for clues I missed.

But grief invents responsibility where understanding didn’t yet exist.

Years later I found myself in that same dark place—a space where thoughts narrow and logic disappears.
You are not thinking about tomorrow.
You are not thinking about loved ones.
You are not weighing consequences.

Your entire mind collapses into one sensation:
Make the pain stop.

Not drugs.
Not alcohol.
Not attention.
Relief.

And when a person reaches that depth, the tragedy is not selfishness. It is suffering that has eclipsed perspective.

That is the part people struggle to accept—because acknowledging it means admitting how invisible that pain can be, even to those who care the most.

Tania J. Wilson
Author of the Secrets We Keep-Truth Has a Long Memory