I’ve never jumped from the third floor of any building. Neither have I survived it. When I heard that a childhood friend had died from such a jump, I recalled the conversations we used to have about jumping, crouching then rolling to avoid injury upon impact. This was mostly after watching Chinese movies. The fact that we buried him means either the movies lied about the three steps or he didn’t want to keep living. Who could blame him, he was just 23.
A frustrated employee jumped off the fifteenth floor of his office to his death. He didn’t fully make it to the ground. Only his lower half did. The rest was collected from a signage on the 5th. Work is stressful, and so is responsibility. But that’s not why he jumped. He jumped not because his love for work was diminishing, but because a woman, the love of his life, was leaving him. She had not even gotten out of his office door when she heard the screaming. You can imagine the sight she saw when she got to the ground floor. You can imagine her thoughts. You can imagine the sense of guilt she felt. You can imagine.
A man once lost a testicle while jumping over a gate. A spike on the top of the gate ripped into his short, into his dangling scrotum and came out clean with his testicle and a section of his vas deferens. He didn’t feel a thing. He only saw blood, and stares of bewilderment from his friends who were filming the stunt. One vomited, another winced. One told him not to look down, another rushed to his side. He fainted at the sight of his testicle hanging from that spike.
There is a video of a man on top a train that had just pulled into a station. He was visibly stressed without his shirt. A crowd had gathered trying to implore him to get down. He was trying, clearly, but something was holding him back. Bottled pressure? Fear? Who knows, it could have been he wasn’t even aware of how he’d gotten to that height in the first place. Things weren’t clearly adding up. In his confused state, among the incessant shouting and pleas, the noise and surrounding heat, he reached over his head. No one told him there were electric lines waiting for his touch. No one told him the bite of an electric current brought an invisible fire to it. A fire that turned him into a dark charred being within seconds. That exploded his insides. That ended his life.
We’ve all lost something to jumping. A testicle, a friend, a tooth, cereal, and to those wondering, a heart beat. The worst comes from those who jump into conclusions. To them, evidence is in their first impression. To them understanding is excusing. To them, knowledge is falsehood or fabrication. To them, reality is fiction. Relationships have been ruined this way. Death has been hastened, summoned in earnest. More often than not, our stubbornness to the plight of others is the deadliest leap we make. Our dissociation from the suffering of others leads to them suffering in silence. It kills not just their spirit, but them too.
Listen. Listen to others. Talk. Talk about more than just success. Discuss failure. Explore the process of regrouping. Be less judgemental. Depression is real. Help someone, save a life. That story about a man losing his testicle isn’t about depression, it’s real though.
TODO 