> I'm truly sorry for all that you've been through and I hope you find comfort. Reading through your other post it seems likely to me that nothing you said or did could have made any difference.
Yeah I know, that's not really why I feel guilty, at least not exactly. I feel guilty because I noticed signs of someone who was suicidal, and explicitly chose to not do anything. Even if nothing would have changed, I still think I should have tried to do something, even if it was futile.
It feels like the universe was giving me a character test, and it feels like I failed it. I would like to think that when push comes to shove, I'd do the right thing, at least in regards to someone's life being on the line, but I guess at some fundamental level that's simply not true, or at least it wasn't in 2021.
I mean, I realize that no good comes from feeling bad about myself over it, certainly not for three years, but human psychology is pretty annoying sometimes.
Many years ago, when I was a very young man, out late one night walking home from the bar, I happened upon a man standing outside the railing of the bridge I was crossing.
Without really thinking about it, I stopped, asked him if he needed help, tried to get him talking. He did talk to me for a while, but when I looked away to try and get a passing car to call for some help, he jumped.
I told my coworkers about it the next day, and it just seemed to make them uncomfortable. I didn't feel quite right about what had happened, but I wasn't sure why.
I had had a pretty crappy youth, my mom died when I was ten years old, and that was followed by a solid decade of rough times. I was no stranger to serious depression and had, by then, consciously decided I would not kill myself, after giving it serious thought.
I called a close friend of mine and told him the story. He had also lost his mother young. He just asked me one question and I immediately understood. He asked "Why did you stop?"
I myself had decided not to take my own life, but I believed I had the right to do so. Here I was, insinuating myself into a most intense and private moment this stranger to me was having. I would not have wanted that for myself.
I don't regret stopping that night. I would however, do things differently should it happen again.
I realize that some words on your screen are unlikely to make you feel much better about it, but I hope you do.
Now the shitball who yelled "jump" out of his window as he drove by, I hope that asshole is wracked with guilt still, twenty-five years later. Probably not though, feeling bad, like you have been, is the sign of a good person.
I read your original post and almost every reasonable person would have paused, but then have written it off as dark humor by someone they didn't know that well.
The only reason you might think there were "signs" you should have caught now is because of what happened but no one could have known in advance.
From a total Internet stranger, give yourself some grace. Or what I have also heard: Judge yourself the way you would judge a good friend in the same situation. We often judge ourselves super harshly!!
> The only reason you might think there were "signs" you should have caught now is because of what happened but no one could have known in advance.
Not quite that simple. I remember sitting in my bed that night, wrestling with whether or not I should call the police or something, and I explicitly chose to do nothing because I didn't want him to think I was weird.
Maybe my mind is blowing it up worse than it was, but that's how I remember it.
One thing to also consider: generally speaking you likely had no chance in convincing him or saving him. It’s awful to feel powerless. I recently had a somewhat similar situation with a friend. I knew he was struggling. I was going to reach out to him the day he was found dead. It was under somewhat strange circumstances so it took a couple of months to get the report back on what the authorities thought happened, which turned out to be a spontaneous health issue and not any deliberate act. But when a healthy man in his 20s is found dead you rarely think “brain aneurysm” so I and other people in his life struggled to make sense of what happened.
One of the more helpful things I was told was that there is nothing you can do if someone is determined to end their life. No intervention, no amount of reaching out, nothing. And that is a powerless place to be but it also means that you not calling the police the night your acquaintance died is likely not the deciding factor in this case.
Find a way to forgive yourself. Talk about your experience. To friends, to strangers, to a therapist. EMDR is great, from what I hear but even talk therapy is a really good place to start processing. I hope you find a way out of this, one internet stranger to another.
> Maybe my mind is blowing it up worse than it was, but that's how I remember it.
This is important actually - human memory is much more fragile than most people realise; we can and regularly do invent entire episodes in our heads, to retroactively explain some fact we have later come to know, or to fit some other thing that we have misremembered.
It's entirely possible that it didn't go down exactly as you remember, but rather your feelings are sharpening the memory and exaggerating your perceived misstep.
Guilt and shame are two of the most complex and difficult to grapple with human emotions. You definitely didn't do anything wrong, but some people's brains will latch onto guilt like a vice regardless. And it can happen regardless of the rational part of the brain knowing that you didn't do anything wrong.
I have the same type of problem. The one thing that's finally helped a little bit is allowing myself to feel the guilt (and all the emotions surrounding it) fully. Normally I try to push it down (because I don't actually have anything to feel guilty for), but suppressed emotions continue to live forever, and they will surface in your body and mind in many ways. Allowing myself to feel it gives me room to process the emotion finally.
Easier said than done, of course. You can't just turn the emotions on and off like a light switch, especially because the brain forms protective mechanisms to prevent you from feeling it. I've had some luck with IFS and somatic therapies.
I don’t know you personally, so what I say may not be relevant, but these sentences stood out to me:
> I feel guilty because I noticed signs of someone who was suicidal, and explicitly chose to not do anything.
> It feels like the universe was giving me a character test, and it feels like I failed it.
So why not choose to do something different now?
Perhaps why you feel enduringly bad is because those events disrupted your self-narrative and that never recovered. Why not create facts that support a new narrative about how failing then led to you being a better person now? — eg, volunteering.
To have a purpose and to give meaning to things are important parts of how we, as humans, process such events. At least, according to Frankl.
> So why not choose to do something different now?
I mean, sure, I haven't really had the same level of "moral character test" since then, I would like to think I'd do better now, but it's of course impossible to say.
> Why not create facts that support a new narrative about how failing then led to you being a better person now? — eg, volunteering.
I tried teaching for a few semesters primarily for emotional satisfaction reasons, and that had its moments, though that also made me realize that I am have a lot of emotional baggage that I need to work through.
At this point I have been just trying to keep myself busy with personal projects and diving deep into useless computer science theory. Fortunately, I never got into drinking or doing drugs, so all things considered reading used textbooks isn't the worst vice.
Put it this way: the next time life puts a similar decision before you, would you still "fail"? If you believe in life teaching you lessons, one way to frame it is to look past how you feel and look at the actions/decisions concerning other people you've made since then. Are they the same decisions/actions you would have made before? Or did that one particular interaction manage to change your behavior?
For what it's worth, don't do this, you also know you need to give people space and in hindsight, because of what happened, you only now think should've done something but I'm sure there were wholesome reasons why you avoided intervening in the first place.
Just as easily they didn't make the attempt and you would've thought you made the right call.
We all fuck things up. Life is really hard and complicated.
It wasn’t a character test. That’s a narrative that you are telling yourself. It was a thing that happened. In the past. Same thing with “it shouldn’t take 3 years to get over this”. Says who? It takes what it takes.
Our life is a garden, we can only tend it as best we can. The plants grow how they grow.
Let yourself grieve as you let go of old narratives and rediscover yourself and your life in each moment.
For me, narratives like this were an attempt at being a “good person” who “deserved to be loved”. I’ve slowly and painfully learned that isn’t how it works. We are all worthy of love. Love isn’t earned, it is a gift that we give and receive. I’m learning how to receive it, most importantly from myself. It’s the hardest and most beautiful thing.
I offer these words in the hope that they are helpful and to share things I’ve learned. Take them if they are, forget them if they are not.
Sending love and wishing you the best. I’ve been there. It’s hard. But time will pass, things will change, and it gets better.
> "I mean, I realize that no good comes from feeling bad about myself over it"
I have listened to a lot of Dr David Burns' podcasts[1] (and recommend them) and there is a relevant part here which I will try to explain enough to tempt you to look at it more, in the hope it helps[2]. He observed that patients came asking him to make their bad feelings go away but the more he tried, the more they held onto the bad feelings ever tighter. After years of this, he came to understand that there is good which comes from feeling bad and helping the patient see it makes them realise they don't want to get rid of the bad feelings after all, only tone down the intensity.
The crux is: what kind of person would notice someone feeling suicidal and do nothing and learn the person suicided and then not feel bad or even feel good? Someone with no compassion who doesn't care about other people's suffering, someone with no moral compass, someone who takes no responsibility, someone who doesn't value living over dying, someone who thinks their actions in the world are meaningless, someone with no agency who needs other people to solve everything for them, someone who holds themselves to very low standards, someone selfish who doesn't want to help other people, someone cruel, etc. etc. Some of these things may resonate with you and those reveal things you value and like about yourself:
- feeling guilty shows I care about other people suffering. ("is that important to you?")
- regretting my choice to do nothing shows I am introspective, reflective, striving to do better. ("is that something you value?")
- wishing I had tried shows I value being helpful instead of selfish. ("and do you value that?")
- feeling that it's a bit my fault shows I want to take responsibility for my behaviour and don't shirk it and seek to blame everyone else. ("is that a trait you respect in others and want in yourself?")
- etc. for each of those things (and more).
OK if you can magically stop feeling bad at the push of a button, but the monkeypaw cost is that you become the uncaring, nihilistic, selfish, lazy, ignorer-of-suffering, who never reflects, lives on autopilot, never wants to do better... do you push the button? After finding some positive sides of your specific feelings which are things you specifically care about, you stop wanting to get rid of the feelings and grok that the good which comes from negative feelings is them protecting traits you value and want to keep[3]. Having negative feelings is not the problem, having them dialled up to 11 is the problem. You want to keep the feelings around as the guiding angel on your shoulder, just less intense. More of Dr Burns' work is on the therapy methods to make that change and dial the intensity down to a level you think would be a reminder, a guide, not a tormentor, but the insight in seeing principles you really do value hiding in the silver lining is sometimes enough to relax the feelings by itself.
> "It feels like the universe was giving me a character test, and it feels like I failed it. I would like to think that when push comes to shove, I'd do the right thing, at least in regards to someone's life being on the line, but I guess at some fundamental level that's simply not true, or at least it wasn't in 2021."
We aren't born perfect, and then fail the tests so the universe can laugh at us failing. We are born sinners and the test-driven-development helps us develop. It wasn't true in 2021 and the bad feeling is trying to be an adjustement which makes it more likely to be true from then on, but stuck on hard-lock. You're wishing to get rid of the bad feeling, the more you push it away the more it gets louder to try and make you hear it. Be guided by it, agree with it, then it's job is done and it can quieten down.
[2] (Please excuse me being lecturing; it's all I know how to write. It has a nice 'understanding and debugging a system' feel which I like and keep hoping will resonate on HN)
[3] """During this phase, the therapist, paradoxically, does NOT try to “help” the patient, but instead assumes the voice of the patient’s subconscious resistance, helping the patient suddenly “see” why she or he actually should NOT change. Paradoxically, the moment the patient “gets it,” there will be an illumination, and the patient will suddenly lose his or her resistance and become way more open and collaborative. This what makes the rapid recovery in TEAM-CBT possible. The patient also discovers, paradoxically, that his or her symptoms, like depression, hopelessness, and feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, or rage, are NOT the expression of what is wrong with him or her, like a “mental disorder” or “chemical imbalance in the brain--but the manifestation of what is right with him or her."""
> Yeah I know, that's not really why I feel guilty, at least not exactly. I feel guilty because I noticed signs of someone who was suicidal, and explicitly chose to not do anything. Even if nothing would have changed, I still think I should have tried to do something, even if it was futile.
I understand; I have some similar regrets although perhaps not on the same scale. You held yourself to a certain standard, so you're disappointed in yourself that you didn't reach it.
I suppose this is the difference between knowing the path and walking the path - in theory we all know how we want to react in such a situation but when the time comes, the reality is often not exactly what we imagined and so we are still unprepared and make a choice that we come to regret. I think it's like any disaster - you'll get it wrong the first few times, no matter how prepared you think you are.
Thin consolation I know; like I said, I hope you can come to terms with it.
Yeah I know, that's not really why I feel guilty, at least not exactly. I feel guilty because I noticed signs of someone who was suicidal, and explicitly chose to not do anything. Even if nothing would have changed, I still think I should have tried to do something, even if it was futile.
It feels like the universe was giving me a character test, and it feels like I failed it. I would like to think that when push comes to shove, I'd do the right thing, at least in regards to someone's life being on the line, but I guess at some fundamental level that's simply not true, or at least it wasn't in 2021.
I mean, I realize that no good comes from feeling bad about myself over it, certainly not for three years, but human psychology is pretty annoying sometimes.