STEPHEN FRY

Greentree, I've been thinking along the same lines lately. The thought of someone else's suicide horrifies me. My own certainly doesn't.

You know the score with them, as you say, and that makes it all the more painful.

Why is that though? Why such double standards between what we'd do ourselves and what we expect (or don't want) other people to do? Yeah, i know, cos we all think we're crap and worthless but other people aren't.
And then you have no right to try and stop anyone else taking their life, cos you know damn well you wouldn't listen if it was you.

Yeah, i think you're right. Selfishness does have something to do with it. Not wanting to be without the other person. I guess there's also an element of knowing that the other person isn't thinking rationally when they want to end it. Cos looking back after i've been there, i know i wasn't 100% rational. And i think only when you've been in that situation, can you understand it. Which as tito says, when you know the score with them, makes it all the more painful.

Absolutely, I always used to say his life must have been unbearable blah blah but i truely had no idea until a long time later when it happened to me.

It's impossible to bring what we know, and how we feel together a lot of the time though isn't it

Yeah.... it makes me wonder. I think it is irrational thinking, but then at the time it seems like the most rational decision ever. And looking at someone who is in an impossible situation, and they can't see a way out, and actually, looking at it yourself (from your 'rational outsider' point of view), you have to admit it looks pretty rough....... maybe there is a point to be made.

You are so right, crystalize - bringing together what we know and what we feel is so hard.

It'd be enough just to move to a foreign country where no one knew me. If I could escape from and be forgotten by everyone who'd ever met me, then that would be enough. If I could earn a decent living somehow, without the nastiness, vindictiveness and greasy plotting of other people.

What I hate is the feeling of futility. There are always people sniggering and plotting to fuck things up for me, and I'm basically powerless to prevent them. Everything that I try to achieve is turned against me. I am a joke of a human being.

I have the running away fantasy frequently. I'd go somewhere remote, like the highlands of scotland, and live on my own, no contact with people apart from the odd shop keeper. Would be bliss. In my head.

(Sara Maitland has done just that, but for diff reasons. Hers is the pursuit of silence. 'The book of silence' tells her story.)

You ok wildfire?