In the past two weeks, two people we know committed suicide.  The Church that I was brought up in used to refuse funerals for such souls.  Thankfully, so much has changed, including compassion, love and support for the family of the deceased.  What hasn’t changed, however, is that people you and I have known somehow find themselves at a place in their life where ending it seems to be the only solution.  As a life coach, I rarely speak to the level of emotional duress or psychological pain- that’s for professionals, but even they cannot always reach someone.

So what can we do?  Besides love and support as I already mentioned, not judge.  As Ryan Holiday said in a recent podcast, we have no idea what people are going through.  As an example, he mentioned “the tragic and premature death of Chadwick Boseman, [whereby] pictures showed him to be alarmingly thin and haggard. In comments sections and meme accounts, people joked at the effects of a few months of quarantine. Others called him Crack Panther, implying that drugs were to blame for his radical change in appearance.  Of course, we now know why he looked that way. He was dying of stage four colon cancer. He had only a few more days to live.”

We have no idea what most people are going through- the neighbor who puts on extra weight; the zoom mate you’ve been working with over the past year starts making error after error. The angry driver.   Even the Karen who is melting down at Target captured by iPhone.

Who knows what private struggles people are going through, what kind of pain they are bearing or unable to bear.  The truth is that we have the option of having no opinion. 

If you know someone struggling with life and they reach out to you, by all means help them in any way you can.  Otherwise, let’s all mind our business.  Our criticism helps no one, nor does pointing out faults or highlighting failures.   The truth is that we have the option of having no opinion.