I always understood why people killed themselves theoretically. I understood that you could maybe feel so bad or have so many bad things happen to you that you saw no reason to live and felt like death was your only way out. That always felt sad to me, but made a kind of sense. Now, if you ask me about specific people who I knew that killed themselves... In reverse chronological order... I had a friend kill himself many years ago and I didn't know at the time how depressed he was because we had not talked in many years before that. But I knew he was having troubles in life and was drinking a lot and when I found out he killed himself it was sad, but I understood how he must have felt. When I was a teenager, a co-worker of my father's killed himself. He had been at a company partner with his fiancee and drinking too much and caused a car accident afterwards late that night and his fiancee died in that accident. The man was lost after that and I think it was only a week or two later when he killed himself. I understood instinctively how that kind of loss and the associated guilt could make someone do that. Lastly, when I was little, a young man who was a neighbor and had a young wife, he killed himself late one night. He always seemed happy as did his wife. Apparently he was into cocaine and killed himself one night while high. I was too young to really understand that one and never knew what demons he must have been fighting to make him that sad.
Growing up, for me, I had a difficult life. We weren't poor, though we did struggle sometimes month to month. But my struggles were socially with kids at school. Being a young adult it got better in the sense of not being picked on and punched randomly, but I was still just as alone. After that, seeing people around me having romantic partners, families, I never felt I belonged in the room. I started thinking, why don't I want to kill myself? I feel horrible all the time and see no way my life will ever be good... so why didn't I want to kill myself like people I saw who did? Did they feel worse somehow than I did all the time?
So I toyed with ideas on and off for years... but never anything serious... until last year. Last year broke me... and I now understand that for me, I could tolerate a lot of pain... and I did... most of my life. I was able to take a lot of abuse and pain and setbacks and fight through them because a part of me hoped for more and believed somehow I had a chance. But now I don't. I'm broken. There is no going back. I know it only gets worse for me if I go on... and that is my breaking point. That's why I now get it. I couldn't understand why I was different, but now I do. Turns out I wasn't different, I just had a different breaking point than those others I knew. I needed to experience enough pain to go past that point.