a person i know is suicidal

[tinygoblin]

hey all, i'm in a difficult situation right now. i know a girl from school , we had a class together and met twice outside of class to talk and stuff, since we got along quite well. she told me about the massive transhobic harassement she faced in uni which made it unable to continue her studies. i listened to her and was horrorfied and offered my support in helping her move and going with her to a helpdesk for violence against women (both of my offerings could not be met since i couldn't make it one time and she already had support for the other thing). she was also really involved in uni politics and i kinda rolled along with her since i liked her and wanted her to like me. but i was not particularly interested in the uni politics but never had the guts to say so directly, simply not contacting her since we had a slight disagreement about politics. i just wasn't so interested. over the course of the year we did not have contact but i heard from other people that she asked for support and had folks who supported her. three weeks ago i was contacted by a person who asked me if i could contact her, since two folks feared for her life due to her mental health situation and wanted to know if she was still alive if she would answer a message. i was not really thrilled since i did not want contact with her again, but i offered to do it since they seemed so desperate and had no other means of contact. i texted her with some silly question, after a talk with a friend i chose to tell her the truth and we texted a bit. i asked if she had concrete support needs and she said no, nothing works and she does not even know what i have expected offering support, since i haven't done anything in the year for her. she wrote me an extremly long message saying if my support was genuine i should make her able to pay for meds, that she can sleep and i should do this and that. otherwise i'm just like the other people who want to see her dead and don't care, and just check in on her without doing anything. she also wrote about different situations i have not been in and lumped me together with people who said horrorble things towards her. she also said that everyone is scared of her anger and stigmatizes it. i know that texting her was weird and not being there for here more last year, simply because i was uncomfortable, is not very nice, but this message and the intensity of her emotions really scared me. i am scared that i am stigmatizng her emotions but it's just a lot and when i thought of support i though about making food or making a call for her. i did not state that directly and after these messages was not sure if i still wanted to. she wrote a couple more messages the same night which are as intense, stating that she is suicidal, listing the horrorbil dehumanizing things people have said to her and saying nobody cares about her and she can prove this to me. after i talked to different friends about this i chose to text her that i will disengage from this conversation and i wish her very well and blocked her.

i am unsure if this is the right thing to do. i fucked up since i did not really think through initially and i might have hurt her again, offering support and then not doing anything. since she is suicidal im also scared that it is my fault that she will kill herself since i haven't done anything. i know that i'm capable of supporting friends through hard times but she is not my friend. i could torelate very harsh words from a friend if they come from despair, but i could not deal with them since there's no trust between us.

is it okay what i did? i am glad that i cut contact but i am also not okay with being a bystander. it makes me feel really guilty for being judged for my choice and i am therefore unsure if it was the right one, since it's not okay to ignore violence. i don't know if i am making this all about me and should get my shit together, tolerate the intensity of her emotions and do support. (this is not possible anymore i think, and i also think it would have been very hard since she was already feeling let down and stuff by me). but my friends said it's okay if i chose not to, one other said i should do it if i really want to and not make this about me.

[Jacob]

Hi Tinygoblin!

I'm sorry this came in just before our direct-service break and it's been a couple of days before we could respond.

I just want to start by giving you some words of encouragement for sticking with the boundaries you set for this friendship. I do not agree at all with the friend who was encouraging you to reach out to this person.

They may be in distress, but I don't think you're making anything "about you" by leaving them without your additional support, right now. Inserting yourself into the situation might just as easily be described as making it "about you"... but I don't think that's a helpful framing or a valid criticism. Your boundaries are about you, that's the point of boundaries.

There's no way of knowing right now whether you re-entering their life would make things better or worse, and if you did and they seemed to recover, you still wouldn't know if that recovery would have happened anyway or not... It would also be very likely you'd be drawn back into the kind of dynamic that you spent a considerable amount of energy getting out of the first time. Not least because what she was asking of you when she responded to you before was extremely manipulative, and demanded so much from you to "prove" yourself, that I can't see how anything healthy could come from that.

It can be so hurtful to be put in the position of having to choose to put your wellbeing ahead of what an unhealthy friendship is demanding of you, but it sounds like you already did that work, and I'm so sorry you ever needed to. It can be painful to loose that friendship, which includes losing the ways we might have been able to help that friend before trust was broken and the friendship, or potential friendship, had to end.

It sounds like this person's struggle has been a very visible one, which would be why it made its way back to you the way it has, but it sounds like there are people and resources they could reach out to for help if they choose to, but they are sabotaging any well meaning attempts with these loyalty tests and demands for money etc.

I'd put it to you, that many of us struggle in a much less perceptible way, so if what you're hearing is making you think about being there for the people you care about, I'd consider maybe reaching out to other folks you haven't spoken to for a long time, but where there wasn't the kind of painful ending that this this situation had.

I also don't think it'd be a problem to reach out to folks around the person, instead of the person directly, to see if they need any support, especially given how manipulative they have been, if that's something you feel you'd be able and willing to give.

All-in-all though, I'm sorry you're having to experience this. I don't think you're responsible for what happens next, and the ways your existing sense of loss, might be extended to ways this person might hurt themselves.

I've been unfortunate enough to learn that folks I lost contact with, or had to cut contact with have died tragically, have made attempts on their own lives, have hurt themselves or even just continued to suffer the way they did when we were in each-other's lives. It's difficult not to question what we might have done differently but we have to remember we are responsible for own well-being, as much as if not more than anyone else's, and that we are allowed to feel loss and sadness, and ask for support, even when we have been the one who had to "be the grown-up" and set boundaries.

Even if ending that friendship was your choice, it doesn't mean it was a happy choice, or that you aren't deserving of the love and care which this person was demanding from you, in such an unhealthy way.