Suicide and Abortion
There are many things I think about while lying awake at night listening to the dog snore and the wind rattle the house. This is one of them.
Layers of the Onion
When I was homeless in England, suicides in the homeless community were a common event. Usually, the preferred method of suicide was drug overdose, but there were also an alcoholic who went swimming in January and a woman who walked out directly in front of a bus. I tried a couple of times while I was in England but botched the attempts.
Perhaps because I was American or sober or for whatever reason, I became the confessor for many of the homeless in the Bath-Glastonbury area. In order to survive in that life, you have to act tough and cocky and say things like, “There are a lot of advantages to being homeless.”
But, under one or two layers, there’s a lot of suffering, confusion and fear. Although they were all highly individual characters, there was always one thing in common — they weren’t wanted as kids. No matter is they were given up for adoption, or were an accidental pregnancy or were told they were wanted and then neglected and abused, they were not wanted as kids or as adults.
And usually would come the same statements. “I wish I had never been born. Why didn’t my folks get an abortion when they had the chance? It sure would’ve saved everyone a lot of bother.”
Never Born
Nature has ways of balancing out overpopulation or threats of overpopulation. Perhaps depression is one of them, which develops when a child is born who wasn’t wanted. They then wind up having a miserable life and keep trying to off themselves until they eventually succeed.
Except for those who manage to cope with their depression through empathy with others. Perhaps then they manage to teach others how to cope and that helps non-depressed folks better adapt to post-traumatic stress disorder or being abused and then the species becomes stronger — and learns birth control.
Anyway, I still wonder why I survived being homeless and many others didn’t.
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