This was going to be another Mac in Exile post complaining about Fedora and their inability to keep my Nvidia card operating correctly, but after Bill Zeller's suicide, I had to write this instead.

At the end of the day yesterday, I read an article on Gizmodo (The Agonizing Last Words of Programmer Bill Zeller) that touched me and made me read it all the way through. Bill Zeller was a programmer and a geek and a fatally depressed person. He took his own life because he couldn't deal with what he called 'the darkness' any longer. His story is not unique, but it has gained wide coverage on the Internet since he is a bit of a celebrity here. I've saved his suicide note along with hundreds of other people. You should read it. It's long. It's painful. It's hard to deal with.

Below, I'm going to highlight some of the things that stood out for me.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life.

Clearly, this is a more extreme case of sexual abuse than you usually hear about. But that's kind of my point. You don't hear about most cases of sexual abuse. The victim often continues on with their life as though nothing happened. They expect that they'll get over it eventually. They rarely do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There's no future here. The darkness will always be with me.
...
Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn't matter because I couldn't be alone with her.
...
I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don't care about their word or what they've promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in particular, I guess it's just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows.

By this point in the reading I was thinking that maybe he could have talked to a therapist before going to the extreme of killing himself. Maybe cognitive behavioral therapy or mood-altering drugs or a combination or even talk therapy could have helped him out of his funk. But I know as someone who once thought about suicide, that when you're that depressed, you won't believe there's another way out. You won't believe that other people have felt that way, gotten help, and continued on.

You can see the effect that our society, our scandal-powered youth, and our rape culture directly effected his decisions. He had no reason to believe that people would view him as someone who had had horrible things done to him. He believed that he would be seen as damaged goods...'contaminated' and unworthy.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I'm capable of.

I think it's safe to assume that he's talking about killing the person who did this to him. If it was me, I might think that this would somehow undo the damage that I'd suffered but I would know that wasn't true. I'd know that it wouldn't fix anything and would only make me feel better for a short while, like the alcohol did. After I'd executed my abuser, I would still feel the pain and the 'darkness' and there would be one less glimmer of hope for getting rid of it. On top of that, I would feel the remorse and guilt of having taken another person's life.

I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am.

Rape victims rarely report their rape to the police. In fact, 74% of completed and attempted sexual assaults against females were not reported to the police. (source) and the statistics for men are even worse because of the belief that men are the rapists, not the raped. Also, the closer the relationship between the victim and the offender, the greater the likelihood that rape or sexual assault would go unreported.

His statements here are literally a textbook explanation for not reporting rape because of "Shame, embarrassment, or desire to keep the assault a private matter. Humiliation or fear of the perpetrator or other individual's perceptions. Fear of not being believed" (Du Mont, J., K.L. Miller, and T.L. Myhr. "The Role of 'Real Rape' and 'Real Victim' Stereotypes in the Police Reporting Practices of Sexually Assaulted Women." Violence Against Women 9(4)(April 2003): 466–486. Retrieved from the DOJ website.)

I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do.My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

On a personal note, this is basically why I'm alive today and I think why a lot of people who would otherwise have killed themselves have lived long enough to get past their problems. The fear of being a permanently-injured-failure-who-can't-even-commit-suicide-correctly-and-everyone-knows-it pretty powerful.

I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead--one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don't understand that good and decent people exist all around us, "saved" or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

I know that a lot of people out there are going to say "well...he wasn't a Christian, he broke the laws of the Bible, it's no surprise he committed the sin of suicide." I reject that notion the same way his Christian parents rejected him.

Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what's been going on in my life.

This feeling of wanting normalcy is par for the course for humans. Something bad happened and if you ignore it, maybe it will go away. It won't. We need to confront it and put it in the open. It's painful and sometimes hurtful, but the conversation needs to happen. This is even more the case with rape victims. Bill Zeller stayed quiet about it for 23+ years before finally killing himself. That's the wrong way to go through life.

I've seen some people saying that Bill Zeller was a coward for taking his own life and not 'manning up' or whatever. This is a huge problem with our society. Bill Zeller was raped. He took his own life. In my eyes, the rapist effectively murdered him.

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