A great heaviness set upon my heart when I heard the news, of the boy who hanged himself, the boy whose sister attends class at the centre that I teach. I don’t know how old he was. But he was too young.

How do you counsel a person who has suicide on their mind? Many of us tell them to think twice about their actions, to think about all the hurt they would cause those they leave behind. Sometimes, that may be the worst thing to do. Those who take their life prematurely often want to teach the rest of us a lesson, to make us regret not giving them the attention, and love, and respect they deserved.

We all like to be missed. We like to know that a void is left in our absence. This urge to deprive the world of what we are worth… I believe it is in all of us. It is a method we sometimes employ to make known to others our value, in a “you don’t know what you have until you lose it” sort of way. In the case of this boy who died… he was worth a lot to many people, but he could have been worth more.

This question entered my mind the other day. What would I have told him were he to have shared his plans for suicide with me? I think I would have told him to think of his siblings, of his friends, of his family, and I would have reminded him that that are people who count on him and look up to him. And that by taking his own life he would let a lot of people down. And I would say to him that there is nothing heroic in suicide, unless he were taking his life to save that of another. And had he shared with me that he had not a friend in the world who cared for him, I would have told him that he did now, in the person talking to him.

I’ve learned never to pass judgment on others from where you are standing. Stand in their shoes. If you can do that, albeit for a passing moment, I believe you will find that not much separates us from those whose deeds we do not condone. People are sometimes robbed of their immediate reason for living, and find themselves in a place so dark and deep that it appears Godless. Sometimes the wall of pain that has formed around them makes it impossible for the words of others to get through, to bring healing. We save the ones we can. For the rest, we can only pray that God shows mercy on them, that he weighs their situation and takes their frame of mind into consideration. I don’t condone suicide. But I can see how some may get lost on this path. Each day, we should pray that God does not bring us to the test, that He delivers us from evil, and that should we one day be tested, that we have on us the full armour of God.

I spent the morning constructing a cupboard door for my garden tools. After attaching the door to the frame of the cupboard, I realised that it was a hair too big (a very thick strand of hair), and I proceeded to chisel it down to size.

In the midst of pecking at the door, the chisel tore through a strip of wood a little more easily than I had anticipated, and the angled edge of the chisel ran itself on the top of my hand, on the fleshy part between my thumb and index.

When I’ve had a cut in the past, I normally dashed frantically to the tap and ran water over it. And with the same urgency of a war medic treating a bomb shrapnel wound, I would have nervously shrugged a strip of band aid out of its sleeve, peeled off the non-stick white pieces, and sealed the gash before I lost consciousness.

Today was different. I felt an uncharacteristic calmness as blood trickled down my hand. To my surprise, watching my life blood flow out of me emerged as a refreshing sensation, and I felt alive. Running through my head at the time was how corpse-like it would feel if I cut myself and did not bleed. So bleeding, once a scary affair, all of a sudden was comforting.

Weirdly, I was also mildly entertained as blots of red started to spread outwards over the thin cover of sawdust on the palm of my hand. The patterns that formed reminded me of the Rorschach ink blots that psychologists use to interpret personality types.

About a decade back, I read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, a brilliantly written book detailing the author’s paralysing journey through mental illness and depression.

Many of Elizabeth’s accounts were scarily lurid, and I distinctly remember a part of the book where she explained that a more effective way to slit your wrist was not to slash crosswise like they do in movies, but to make an incision length wise along the vein so that the rupture is irreparable and the bleeding more intense.

Another detail she went into was how she drew amusement from drawing lines on her body with a razor blade.

Reflecting upon my recollections of the book, it crossed my mind that today’s blood fascination could be a pre-cursor to something more serious. But delving deeper into it, I recognised that I’ve always been a very experiential person, and it was probably the enticement of novelty I was attracted to, an unfamiliarity that made the experience unique enough to be enjoyable.

Regardless, I hope this will not be an indulgence that lodges itself in my black book of pleasures. Well, I doubt it will. Especially now that the newness has been breached.

But just in case, my blood type is O.