‘Killing yourself is a major commitment; it takes a kind of courage. Most people just lead lives of cowardly desperation. It’s kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.’Robert Crumb
I did not know Caroline Flack. I have no right to speak about her personal life or the circumstances of her heartbreaking death. I have no intention to do either.
 I do remember her from CBBC and TMi on a Saturday morning, heard her banter with Olly Murs in the background if The Xtra Factor was on and saw her occasionally dancing on Strictly, if my Mum or Kelly happened to have it on. 

Charming on Saturday morning television, funny and flirty with Olly, whose chemistry together was excellent, and a fantastic dancer from my limited knowledge of dancing (though Kelly is an awesome dancer, so I have a little insider information)
I do, however, have my personal experiences with mental health that make me no expert whatsoever but do provide a little insight into how, as people, we chose to view others who are suffering, struggling, or maybe just having a bad day. 
I spoke to The Samaritans once during a particularly dark period. I found them to be everything you would imagine them to be. This lady, who knew nothing about me, stayed on the phone to me for nearly an hour, just listening, suggesting, and never judging me personally alongside my considered, pathetic reasons for being passively suicidal.  
Aside from my one actual attempt, I have no desire to die at all. Despite some cockwomble, who has never met me and doesn’t know me, stating on Facebook that ‘I hate life,’ I love life, the world around me, and everyone in this existence with me. Not that there are many people in my life - aside from my beautiful turtle, Jakey, Gruff, Coley, my Mum, one of my brothers (I do have two sisters and two other brothers, but they are all arseholes) and maybe three friends - but those that are, sustain my love of life.
And that is kind of the thing. Aside from those mentioned above, no one else would give a crap if I disappeared from the face of the earth, because they do not know me. I wouldn’t be interfering with their daily life in any way if I died. And that is what you think, when you are in that place. 
‘Fuck it. Who gives a shit?’ 
Many comments have been made on social media since yesterday’s terrible news about us being so vocal about Caroline’s tragedy. We forget that so many ‘unknown’ individuals commit suicide every day, and we don’t lament their passing. 
Of course, we don’t. We don’t know them, nor do we know anything about them.
We don’t know anything about celebrities either. Nevertheless, we think we do, because we have seen them on television, read about them in a magazine and looked them up on Google.
Moreover, this is where we fail as a society and as human beings.
The Samaritans have terms that cover our over-simplification of events - “melodramatic depictions”, “speculation” or “unsubstantiated links between separate incidents”.
We watch and read about these famous individuals and draw our conclusions as to how all the reported events in their lives intersect and create a story.
We fill in the many blanks that exist in the spaces between what we don’t know and what we do - the space of what we don't know being vastly more extensive than that which we do – and we, therefore, permit ourselves to relate to them, understand them and, above all, judge them.
I know so many nosey people (my Mum, gorgeous though she is, being one of them!) who believe they have the right to know what so-and-so is doing two houses down in their street (and before some smart-arse brings up the whole ‘I’d want to know if a paedophile lived in my street’ I’m not talking about that kind of knowing what is going on in your street, so don’t bother), or what happened that night to explain so-and-so’s black eye… you could go on, but, most of the time, we know absolutely nothing at all. Not really.
We follow the ins and outs of celebrities and create our version of events that we convince ourselves to be true; we convince ourselves that Heath Ledger deliberately overdosed, that Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates took their own lives, that we knew how Chester Bennington felt before he died… and we may have ideas, thoughts, theories, or commonalities, but we state our opinions as absolutes.
Social media becomes a breeding ground for keyboard warriors spouting their personal beliefs as facts, forgoing any modicum of respect for the loss, any loss of life, and give such superficial statements such as ‘don’t be a hypocrite and claim to feel for the people who died on 9/11 if you’re not going to give the same amount of Facebook space to the people who died in Mali due to Islamist extremists’.
I agree that the loss of any life is tragic, but you cannot mourn what you do not know about.
I feel just as saddened about the death of a firefighter, Andrew Moore, from Wolverhampton as I do Caroline Flack.
I knew neither but became aware of both. I feel so sad for the loved ones they leave behind with all the unanswered questions such a death brings – did they not know they were loved? Why didn’t they come to me to talk? Why did they feel that there was no way out of the darkness that they saw their death as the only option?
We don’t know. How could we?
No one else outside of Kelly has the slightest idea why I wanted to die on 26th December 2016, and even Kelly won’t know exactly how I felt. No one knows me better than Kelly Joanne McCaffrey, but even she would claim not to know 100% how I felt.
I didn’t tell anyone I was going to do it. I came in drunk and all sorts of fucked up, went to the kitchen drawer, took a knife, and started cutting away. If the sharp implements hadn’t have been moved earlier that evening by Kelly, due to some prescient sense she experienced, and if I hadn’t have been left with the ones from Ikea that won’t cut shit, I may not be writing these words you are reading.
We don’t know what someone deserves, why they deserve it, or what happened in a particular circumstance. And if we don’t, we should shut the fuck up and keep our toxic, hateful and cowardly opinions to ourselves.
Don’t hide behind a keyboard and spout filth and hate. Don’t do it in person either.
Just don’t do it, period.
We have no right to over-simplify another’s life, simply because we think we know better or experienced something similar before.
Two journeys to the same destination will not be the same experience for both individuals. 
I read today of a lady called Efrat Tseelon, a cultural theorist from Leeds University who created the term “impossible space” to describe the irreconcilable demands placed upon women. 
Efrat Tseelon described an impossible creature given space and no space at all. A creature who is offered a position while being simultaneously denied it. Of a creature who bodies a thing and its opposite at the same time.
This creature being a woman, she goes on to say how they are a paradox and can never truly embrace the roles available and expected of her.
Gravitate towards them, and she is supporting an ideology that defines her the way others saw her in the first place. Deny the roles, and she denies herself opportunities that would otherwise have been available to her.
History uses Pandora to present this example of the impossible space. Created by Hephaistus to punish us for accepting Prometheus’s gift of fire stolen from the gods, she was endowed with all possible gifts and dangerous qualities. 
Beauty was a cunning device, her lack of sense of consequence, a weakness, her curiosity, a path towards sin. She was unable to resist opening a forbidden box and released all of mankind’s ills and lack of morality into the world, trapping hope inside in her hurry to close it. 
Efrat states that unable or unwilling to confront the complexity and humanity of the whole of what makes a woman, we reduce her to a set of easily digestible meanings. Ergo, when someone dies, we convince ourselves it is because of one of the personal opinions and facts that we concocted about them.
Did beautiful, talented, troubled, adored Caroline Flack believe taking her own life was her only option because of social media, the press, public scrutiny, her employer’s lack of support for her mental health, problems in her love life…?
We don’t know. We weren’t there. We didn’t know her, or Lewis Burton. We don’t know anything, so we shouldn’t state as fact that it was this, that, or that we shouldn’t feel sorry for her and mourn her because she did so-and-so. 
We know nothing. Our personal experiences of domestic violence, given, received, or witnessed, are just that – personal. They do not give us the right to make a judgement on someone else because we are not them, and we not involved.
I grew up surrounded by domestic violence, as did many others. However, my experiences do not give me any insight into someone else’s. How could they?
There are often many, multi-factorial reasons why someone gets into a place where there is no light, only desolation.
Laura Whitmore said it, as so many have before, in so many ways.
Be kind. 
Consider everyone around us, and how we may make them feel with our words, our actions, our sensibilities, and beliefs. Let us ensure mental health; all facets of mental health, are treated with the same amount of respect.
Let’s treat people as if we may never see them again and decide that, if that is the case, the last thing they think of us is not hateful and judgemental. Let us all believe we were loved, even for a moment, however fleeting. 
Life is intricate, with too many recurring figures, almost as though it were Pythagoras’s theorem made manifest. 
If life is too complicated for us to understand truly, so is suicide.
Why?
Because humans are complex too.