I don’t know how to succinctly describe my relationship with suicidal thoughts and feelings. “Subtle” seems a good fit. Or “passive”.
I don’t lie on my bed listening to music thinking how I should go and end it all immediately.
I do, however, lie there thinking how I could happily just die. How dying would be such a relief. I think about the fact I have no real desire to continue living, to keep feeling the despairingly low lows that I experience fairly frequently.
I think about how I could happily go driving a little too fast along the country lanes and just crash. About how easy it could be, how I’d have one last bit of real fun doing that, and how I then wouldn’t have to feel hopelessness and bleak nothingness and emptiness any longer. I wouldn’t have to pretend to everybody that really I’m okay, just struggling to focus a bit and with a lot on my mind. I wouldn’t have to keep it secret that I think about dying with scary frequency. It wouldn’t matter that several times a week I think about how sweet death would be, because I wouldn’t have to think at all any more.

But I don’t plan for it, and ultimately I don’t go out and try to crash my car. I’ve gone driving faster than is sensible, but mostly to feel alive again. To feel something like joy, just for a few small moments. More importantly, it’s a feeling of joy I control, that I create. Not a feeling of joy that comes by way of validation from another person, by attention or a connection with a friend.