Go ahead, kill yourself

To call a man who takes his own life a criminal is the biggest crime of all, for if he hasn't the freedom to do what he wants with what is definitely his own property and no one else's, then he might as well be dead anyway.
As long as you know what it is you are leaving, then no one has the right to accuse you of insanity. There was nothing for you before you were born except plans, but it wasn't plans for you, it was plans for someone. A foetus is a nobody despite its potential.
So life is here to be left if some want it that way. You squeeze every drop of virtue from your life to see how much comes out. If there is enough to place doubt in the decision then stay put. If not, keep what little goodness there is out of it and say goodbye to yourself- risk the loss. If the pluses in your life are as rare as you calculate you won't be afraid to lose them. But existence goes on, and so which is worse? To go over the line and miss ages of pleasure and contentment that could have possibly been attained- or to go on enduring and feel even worse on not achieving them after all? It may not be enough to say that the things which make people happy will overcome depression or sadness, or whatever else makes suicide an option, because these problems may not be just poisonous additions to positive life, they may be an inherent part of the life that is lived. Perhaps even the more influential part of the whole. You know a little about what you have but nothing about what you don't. Is death a sleep of a kind? Does anyone ever come back? Maybe the nothingness after death is the same as the nothingness before birth. It is only a preceding and succeeding state from living people's perspective. But for those who have gone it's just nothing, a void not experienced. And that sounds such a secure and irresponsible place.
Some are afraid of death because they think of it only after pain, most others because they don't know what to expect. Everybody is so used to life that the opposite of it is unimaginable. But if it's a blank unconsciousness, then what's the concern? How can you worry about something you are unable to worry about? Dreams will come to you and then suddenly they don't. From that moment you're as animated and as actual as discarded carrion. The soul, which is our insurance against total oblivion, will apparently rise up to God knows where or become reincarnated in another life. But wherever it goes, it won't need a suitcase and toothbrush. When your body is gone other people will clean up your room for you, settle your bills and put you to rest with no more itchy jumpers to wear.
To leave life having no alternatives wouldn't be the same as leaving it when you do. And it is this sensation of precarious uncertainty that heightens the severity of the deed. Finding the right balance is difficult to achieve because the more you consider the place you are leaving, the less sure you are of the place you are going. You might think it necessary to overrate what you have so that you can be sure of your uncertainty in remaining, rising your condition to its limit and more, so that you get to a level where your pessimism is equal to it. And because pessimism is a good ingredient to the food that is suicide, it will begin to rot where it reaches. There needs to be that parity where hope and despair are taken to their furthest points so that you can say the choice was fairly made. To do it after a death in the family or some other personal tragedy would be too rational. Questions wouldn't really be asked. The best side of life must be seen to be of no value so that its worse side seems torturous.
Suicide is removing the floor on which everything rests. It is a personal end of the world disaster. That's what makes it so attractive an escape. The only catch is that you disappear along with the concerns that hastened your escape. Apart from a possible moment of sombre contentment, there would be no feeling of deliverance from them. For hesitators, it is the approach of the future that delays the final decision, the puzzlement of what's around the corner. There might be predictions and forecasts, but you will never really know unless you meet the next day. Each individual has had experiences like no one else alive. And it's the power in that knowledge that exemplifies the wonder of unpredictable life. The experiences may be worthless or the memories painful, but the very fact that they are yours, and the fact that you say so, instantly impresses upon you a sense of individuality, the feeling that, although the birth was out of your hands, you can do what you want with the rest.
Every man has an island for himself even if he isn't one, and sometimes people feel their own isolation. And how many more of us would kill ourselves if we had a way of seeing the impression it made on friends and enemies? To witness our own funeral and see who would turn up. Above the sound of the weeping, the orator telling all what a great person you are in death that you never seemed to be in life. You'll get friends you never knew you had and be a convenient conversation piece with no right of reply. A flattered punch bag. And when you are buried beneath the buried to come, Socialists all, they'll present you with a noble inscription across the tombstone.
But does anyone actually leave life by their own hand at peace with themselves? If a man rejects life and makes up his mind to kill himself because he is unhappy he must be better off than he was before. But that is the frustrating thing about suicide- the motive so often goes with them. There is little confusion as to the reason because it is a controversial event that cleans up its own mess; he must have been disturbed for he took his own life. But that is like saying passengers die in plane crashes because the plane hits the ground. Find the reason and you find the cause of his disturbance- and the true cause of death.
Consider for a moment the curious self-destructor. What if there existed a man who lived his life free from terrible misfortune or depression, who managed to avoid the perils of alcoholism or drugs to become a normal and contented settled human being. A man who had had just enough ups and downs in life to shape him neatly to a meaningless statistic. And what if, during one lucid, unexplained moment, he experienced the same inspiration that urged Colombus to risk his sea voyages, or the Wright Brothers to attempt flight? What if he was adventurer instead of depressive? Isn't death, or whatever's beyond it, a frontier as real as these? The catch is that if he is to discover death then he can't come back. At least not to life as we live it. And when he doesn't come back, most are narrow-minded enough to judge him disturbed where he could have been discoverer. If his attempt failed and he later confessed he really did want to find out what death would be like, or where it might lead, he would still be thought of as crazy. What is this blindness in people that causes most of them to live methodically where the rare live fully, yet instinctively impels them to judge someone insane because they may have had the insight to see no hope in their life and do something about it? They were mad apparently, while the rest of us calendar our lives away to a slower death. Suicide is at least action. It is solution, no matter how negative.
But it isn't the death that astounds; everyone dies after a short time. It is the reality that someone had the nerve to beat fate to it, to hijack their own destiny. It is someone discarding the image of comfortable security, blowing the myth that all problems can be confronted calmly, and reminding us that it can become unbearable. Whoever threw himself off a bridge thirty years ago means nothing to anyone due to the length of time passed. But the familiar face who used to mumble hello to you every Saturday morning and was found overdosed and dead two days later, is close enough to alert even the most indifferent attitude, because the life that we are breathing, enduring and living under was the same that took him down. Personal circumstances are only contrasting moves on the same board game. There was, perhaps, something we missed that he didn't.
We have to accept that suicide is a freedom of choice. No one can, or should be, forced to keep themselves safe. You can advise and encourage, but if someone wants to leave, then they will. The ones who are talked out if it only received the appropriate reply to their cry for help; they didn't swallow all the sleeping pills but just enough; they didn't cut their throat, but slashed a wrist by the door in the hope that a scarlet pool on the floor would raise the alarm. It's the ones who are gone and who meant to go that shouldn't always be considered unstable.
Politicians are always reminding us of the right to vote. They forget that some people want the right not to vote. In the game of life suiciders are simply abstainers.