Comment by tombert

The weird part to me (and a lot of people) is that I barely knew the guy. I had exchanged a few messages, we joked around a bit, and arranged to meet. This wasn't a close friend killing himself, this was effectively a Z-list celebrity that I liked.

What bothers me more than the actual suicide (though that's very sad too) is the fact that I chose to do nothing. I saw signs, I debated doing something, and I prioritized meeting my man-crush more than trying to do the right thing. I know that me doing something wouldn't have changed anything, I have no idea what I would even do. It just bothers me that I actively decided to not do anything.

Everyone thinks they're a good person, and everyone thinks they'll do the right thing when it matters. I certainly thought that, and ultimately I guess that's not strictly true, or at least it wasn't in 2021. I let being a coward and selfish stop me from trying to help someone, and in my mind it stopped me from doing the right thing.

I don't really believe in anything supernatural, but it feels like this was some kind of important cosmic test that I failed. Metaphorically speaking.

And I think at this point, I overcompensate; I treat people as surrogates to try and assuage some of the guilt that I have over that. If something bad happens, I can at least tell myself that I did what I could.

I realize that this kind of thinking is not healthy for me. Guilt isn't inherently bad, it's important to have guilt to learn from your mistakes and to make yourself as good of a person as you can be, but carrying this kind of guilt for someone I barely knew and aggressively trying to "fix it" by over-helping everyone is probably bad for my mental health.

At this point, and I'm a little embarrassed it took me until my 30's to reach this conclusion, but I've started living by the motto of "don't let being a coward stop you from doing the right thing". Taken to the extreme I'm not sure that's healthy either.