I find your comparison of me with your family to be extremely insulting, as you know nothing about my life.
The mistake I made, which in your eyes makes me as good as a bunch of right-wing misers, was to 1) suggest a key aspect of what my own therapy was based around, and 2) share with you what _I_ found was something useful in improving my "suffering".
However, you decided to take it as yet another sign of how people are judging you (Jon Kabat-Zinn has a lot to say about non-judgementalness too, and that was another key aspect of my therapy), missing the fact that you are judging others, and in particular in the course of this interaction, me.
I do not have the resilience, capacity, or training to deal with such judgements.
I think that you can read my first response in many different ways. You chose one perspective, and perhaps, in the future you may choose to read it in other ways. Apart from that response, in which I gave you what I felt were the most valuable things I had to offer to anyone, I have nothing else to give you.
I'll leave you with a quote from J. Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living":
> Acceptance does not mean that you have to like everything or that you have to take a passive attitude toward everything and abandon your principles and values. It does not mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they “have to be.” It does not mean that you should stop trying to break free of your own self-destructive habits or to give up on your desire to change and grow, or that you should tolerate injustice, for instance, or avoid getting involved in changing the world around you because it is the way it is and therefore hopeless.
> Acceptance as we are speaking of it simply means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life, no matter what is happening. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when you have a clear picture of what is actually happening than when your vision is clouded by your mind’s self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudices.
I have been in your situation, and I have had certain privileges you do not have which helped me. So, I do not want to tell you: "just do XYZ and you'll be better". In fact, I agree with you that suicidal tendencies are not due to mental health issues; rather, they are due to deep societal injustices. Since I can't fix those, I can't truly help you. There is a reason why indigenous communities are particularly hard hit by suicide...
I am also not going to try and convince you to not go through with it. That would be selfish on my part. I don't want to have to deal with the hard truth that someone chose to stop existing because of the shittiness of this world.
I am however, going to ask you to reconsider what meditation is. I don't care about any of the religious crap around it, and I am also not going to reduce it to "sitting down and breathing deeply". "Meditation" must happen in every moment. I think about meditation as a sort of self-awareness which provides acceptance, and through acceptance, resilience.
I recommend reading Jon Kabat Zinn's "Where You Go, There You Are".
I had an allergic reaction to the idea of acceptance when I first came across it: things like "opium of the masses" came to mind. This is not that sort of acceptance. This is the sort of acceptance that provides internal stability when there is no source of external stability; it is the sort of acceptance that lets go of the disappointment and frustration, and then frees mental power to consider: "what now?". It's the acceptance that provides resilience which leads to improvements in social justice (and social justice starts with small, everyday victories: moments, individuals, and then society). Or the sort of acceptance that provides the freedom to explore things you would have been too scared to explore otherwise ("a person who has nothing to lose...").
In this vein, I think mathematics is an amazing way to spend time. Not only does it not deal with people, but it also helped me see a...largeness...to the world that I find hard to describe. I suggest starting from here: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/FMSD/
In a sense, you're free. You're free of the "chains" of life. Breathe deep, not because you're meditating, but because you should relax: the chains of life no longer bind you. Let your mind roam now, as it is meant to roam. Build palaces of systematic ideas, which lead to results that are surprising and enjoyable. Explore the world around you: forget about space, but instead consider the amazing orchestra of chaos that is biology. How the hell does a cell work? Layers upon layers of beauty that is hidden because of the shit of our human world...
Or...pick something else to study that isn't what _this_ stranger cares about. Devote yourself to it. Do not let yourself be disappointed with the boring, care only about the exciting. Let the excitement of finding the amazing fuel your devotion.
Dare I say: "don't end the freedom you have earned by going through this pain early; use it, before you end it"?