I don't want to be here anymore, but I'm too afraid to die.
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I typed this into Google a year ago, my hands shaking as I questioned what I meant. I didn't want to be alive or exist anymore. But at the same time, I didn't quite want to die.
- Retrieved 30 September 2020. ^ Philip Nitschke. The Peaceful Pill Handbook. Exit International US, 2007. ISBN 0-9788788-2-5, p. 33 ^ Howard M, Hall M, Jeffrey D et al., 'Suicide by Asphyxiation due to Helium Inhalation, Am J Forensic Med Pathol 2010; accessed 12 May 2014.
- Nov 17, 2020 If your Mac is using a firmware password, the lock icon appears when you try to start up from another disk or volume, such as an external drive or macOS Recovery.Enter the firmware password to continue.
- In 2017, the latest year available, there were more than 2.8 million. This, of course, was before the coronavirus pandemic made COVID-19 one of the leading causes of death in 2020. The CDC reported.
I felt selfish as I typed it, thinking about all of the people who had been suicidal, worrying that I was being disrespectful to those who had actually lost their lives that way. I also wondered whether I was just being dramatic.
But I pressed enter anyway, desperate to find an answer for what I was feeling. To my surprise, I was met with search after search of the exact same question.
'I don't want to die, I just don't want to exist,' read one.
'I'm suicidal but I don't want to die,' read another.
And then I realized: I'm not being silly. I'm not being stupid or melodramatic or attention-seeking. There were so many other people feeling the exact same way. And for the first time, I didn't feel quite so alone.
But I still felt what I felt. I felt distant from the world and from myself; my life felt almost as though it were on autopilot.
I was aware of my existence, but I wasn't really experiencing it. It felt like I had become separate from my own self, as though a part of me was just watching my body go through the motions. Daily routines like getting up, making the bed, and working the day away felt almost mechanical. I was in a toxic relationship and heavily depressed.
My life had become repetitive and, in many ways, unbearable.
I started to imagine what people's lives would be like without me in it. I wondered what would happen after I died. I was bombarded with intrusive thoughts, suicidal feelings, urges to hurt myself, and feelings of despair.
But there was one thing contradicting that: I was scared to die.
So many questions would run through my head when I thought about actually ending my life.
What if I attempted to kill myself and it went wrong? What if it went right, but in the last few moments of my life I realized I had made a mistake and regretted it? What exactly happens after I die? What happens to the people around me? Could I do that to my family? Would people miss me?
And these questions would eventually lead me to the question, do I really want to die?
The answer, deep down, was no. And so I held on to that to keep me going, that little glimmer of uncertainty every time I thought about ending my life. If that tiny bit of unease was still there, there was a chance I'd be making the wrong decision.
There was a chance that a part of me thought that things could get better.
But it wasn't going to be easy. Things had been going downhill for a long time. I had been suffering with severe anxiety caused by PTSD for several months, which had escalated to daily panic attacks. I experienced a constant feeling of dread in my stomach, tension headaches, body tremors, and nausea.
That's when everything went numb. It was a huge turning point, going from feeling everything at once to feeling nothing at all.
And, in all honesty, I think the nothingness was worse. The nothingness, combined with the same daily routine and toxic relationship, made my life feel utterly worthless. At the end of my rope, I turned to Google. No one ever really explained how to cope with suicidal ideation, particularly when you don't really want to die.
Scrolling through post after post, I realized that actually, a lot of people understood. A lot of people knew what it was like to not want to be here anymore but not want to die.
We had all typed in the question with one expectation: answers. And answers meant we wanted to know what to do with our feelings instead of ending our lives.
And maybe, I hoped, that meant that deep down, we all wanted to hold on to see if things could get better. And that we could.
My mind had been clouded by the anxiety, despair, monotony, and a relationship that was slowly destroying me. And because I had felt so low, so numb and empty, I hadn't actually taken a step aside to really and truly look at this. To look at how things could get better if I attempted to make changes.
The reason I thought I was just existing was because I really was. I was miserable and I was stuck. But I hadn't picked apart my life to realize why.
I can't say that in one day everything changed, because it didn't. But I did start to make changes. I started to see a therapist, who helped me gain some perspective. My toxic relationship ended. I was devastated about it, but things improved so quickly as I started to exercise my independence.
Yes, I still got up every morning and made the bed, but the rest of the day would be at my hands, and slowly but surely, that started to excite me. I think a huge part of feeling as though I was just some form of existence was because my life was so predictable. Now that that had been taken away, everything seemed new and exciting.
With time, I felt like I was living again, and most importantly, that I had and have a life worth living.
But knowing that I got through this truly difficult time in my life gives me the motivation to get through any other bad moments again. It's given me the strength and determination to carry on.
And despite the way I was feeling at the time, I'm so glad I Googled that question. I'm so glad I realized I wasn't alone. And I'm so glad I trusted that unease when it came to the idea of taking my own life. Because that unease led me to living a life I'm actually happy to be living.
What I want you to know — especially if, like me, you found yourself here through a Google search or a headline that caught your attention at the right time — is this: No matter how lonely or awful you feel, please know that you're not alone.
I'm not going to tell you it isn't a horrible, scary feeling. I know that better than most. But I promise you things can and often do get better. You just have to hold on to that doubt, however small it might be. That doubt is there for a reason: There's an important part of you that knows your life isn't over yet.
And speaking from experience, I can assure you that small, nagging feeling is telling you the truth. There's a future you who will be so glad you listened.
Hattie Gladwell is a mental health journalist, author, and advocate. She writes about mental illness in hopes of diminishing the stigma and to encourage others to speak out.
It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year's iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software—my boss's boss—abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. 'I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn't know about it. You'll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.'
The next day, the receptionist called to tell me that two men were waiting in the lobby. I went downstairs to meet Paul and Matthew, the engineers who would actually build this custom iPod. I'd love to say they wore dark glasses and trench coats and were glancing in window reflections to make sure they hadn't been tailed, but they were perfectly normal thirty-something engineers. I signed them in, and we went to a conference room to talk.
They didn't actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod's disk in a way that couldn't be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.
They'd do all the work. My job was to provide any help they needed from Apple.
I learned that an official at the Department of Energy had contacted Apple's senior vice president of Hardware, requesting the company's help in making custom modified iPods. The senior VP passed the request down to the vice president of the iPod Division, who delegated it to the director of iPod Software, who came to see me. My boss was told I was working on a special project and not to ask questions.
Background
I was the second software engineer hired for the iPod project when it started in 2001. Apple Marketing hadn't yet come up with the name iPod; the product was known by the code name P68. The first software engineer later became the director of iPod Software, the guy who gave me this special assignment. I wrote the iPod's file system and later the SQLite database that tracked all the songs. Over time, I worked on almost every part of the iPod software, except the audio codecs that converted MP3 and AAC files into audio.
(Those audio codecs were written by two engineers with advanced degrees from Berkeley and Stanford. When they weren't teasing each other about which school was better, they were writing mathematical audio code that I was scared to touch. You would no more let a regular engineer mess with code like that than you'd let a bike mechanic rebuild the transmission in a Porsche. They had an occasional poker game I played in. The only reason I didn't lose all my money was that one of them enjoyed his vodka.)
Compiling the iPod operating system from source code, loading it onto an iPod, and testing and debugging it was a fairly complex process. When a new engineer started, we typically gave them a week to learn all this before we assigned them any actual tasks.
The iPod operating system wasn't based on another Apple operating system like Classic Mac OS or Darwin, the underlying Unix core of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The original iPod hardware was based on a reference platform Apple bought from a company called Portal Player. Portal Player had also provided the lower levels of the iPod OS, including power management, disk drivers, and the realtime kernel (which Portal Player had licensed from another company called Quadros). Apple bought the higher levels of the iPod OS from Pixo, a company started a few years earlier by ex-Apple engineers trying to write a general-purpose cell phone operating system to sell to mobile phone companies like Nokia and Ericsson. Pixo code handled the user interface, Unicode text handling (important for localization), memory management, and event processing. Of course, Apple engineers modified all this code, and over time, rewrote much of it.
iPod OS was written in C++. Since it didn't support third-party apps, there was no external documentation on how it worked.
Finally, the iPod team developed on Windows computers. Apple didn't have working ARM developer tools yet, because this was before the iPhone shipped. The iPod team used ARM developer tools from ARM Ltd., which ran only on Windows and Linux.
My job was to get Paul and Matthew up and running on a new operating system they'd never seen before, much less developed for.
Getting Started
I requisitioned an empty office for Paul and Matthew in our building. I had IS&T (Apple's IT department) reroute the Ethernet drops in that office so they connected only to the public Internet, outside Apple's firewall, preventing them from accessing Apple's internal network. Apple's Wi-Fi network always connects outside the firewall. Even inside Apple buildings, if you're using Wi-Fi, you need a VPN to get past Apple's firewall. This wasn't a collaboration with Bechtel with a contract and payment; it was Apple doing a favor under the table for the Department of Energy. But access for that favor went only so far. Beat people with a stick mac os.
Needless to say, Paul and Matthew weren't allowed to access our source code server directly. Instead, I gave them a copy of the current source code on a DVD and explained it couldn't leave the building. Ultimately, they were allowed to keep the modified copy of the iPod OS they built, but not the source code for it.
Apple didn't provide them any hardware or software tools. I gave them the specs for the Windows computers they needed, along with the ARM compiler and JTAG debugger. They bought retail iPods to work on, several dozen at least, possibly many more.
As with all Apple buildings, everyone had to present an Apple badge to the badge reader to unlock the door and enter the iPod building. Only employees cleared for our building were allowed in. On each floor, there was another locked door and badge reader, and only people cleared for that floor were allowed in.
So every day, Paul and Matthew called me from the lobby since they didn't have Apple badges. I signed them in as guests and escorted them to their office. Eventually, I arranged to get them vendor badges, as if they were selling Apple coffee or memory chips, so I didn't have to sign them in daily. I was a programmer, not a babysitter.
Top Men
Paul and Matthew were smart—top men, even—and with a little help, they were up and running pretty quickly. I showed them how to set up the development tools, build a copy of the operating system from source, and load it into the iPod. We made some temporary changes to the user interface, so we could see that their build was actually running. I showed them how to use the JTAG hardware debugger, which was rather finicky. They dove into their work.
As they learned their way around the system, they explained what they wanted to do, at least in broad strokes. They had added special hardware to the iPod, which generated data they wanted to record secretly. They were careful to make sure I never saw the hardware, and I never did.
We discussed the best way to hide the data they recorded. As a disk engineer, I suggested they make another partition on the disk to store their data. That way, even if someone plugged the modified iPod into a Mac or PC, iTunes would treat it as a normal iPod, and it would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. They liked that, and a hidden partition it was.
Next, they wanted a simple way to start and stop recording. We picked the deepest preferences menu path and added an innocuous-sounding menu to the end. I helped them hook this up inside the code, which was rather non-obvious. In all other respects, the device functioned as a normal iPod.
At the time, the latest iPod was the fifth-generation iPod, better known as the 'iPod with video.' It was relatively easy to pop open the case and close it again without leaving obvious marks, unlike the iPod nano models that became popular shortly after. Plus, the fifth-generation iPod had a 60 GB disk, so there was plenty of room to have lots of songs and still record extra data. And it was the last iPod for which Apple didn't digitally sign the operating system.
That was important because it made the fifth-generation iPod somewhat hackable. Hobbyists enjoyed getting Linux to run on iPods, which was hard to do without the special knowledge and tools Apple possessed. We on the iPod engineering team were impressed. But Apple corporate didn't like it. Starting with the iPod nano, the operating system was signed with a digital signature to block the Linux hackers (and others). The boot ROM checked the digital signature before loading the operating system; if it didn't match, it wouldn't boot.
I don't think Paul and Matthew ever asked Apple about signing their custom operating system build so it would run on the iPod nano. I'm pretty sure Apple would have refused. The larger fifth-generation iPod was better suited to their purposes anyway.
After a few months of on-again, off-again work in their requisitioned office, Paul and Matthew finished integrating their custom hardware into the iPod and wrapped up the project. They moved their computers and debugging hardware back to Bechtel's office in Santa Barbara. They returned the latest DVD with Apple source code to me, along with their Apple vendor badges. They said goodbye, and I never saw them again. The DVD sat on a shelf in my office for years, until I finally tossed it while cleaning up.
What Were They Doing?
The Department of Energy is huge. Its 2005 budget was $24.3 billion. It's responsible for the US nuclear weapons and nuclear power programs, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was part of the Manhattan Project. As the DOE's budget request says:
The FY 2005 budget proposes $9.0 billion to meet defense-related objectives. The budget request maintains commitments to the nuclear deterrence requirements of the Administration's Nuclear Posture Review and continues to fund an aggressive strategy to mitigate the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
My guess is that Paul and Matthew were building something like a stealth Geiger counter. Something that DOE agents could use without furtively hiding it. Something that looked innocuous, that played music, and functioned exactly like a normal iPod. You could walk around a city, casually listening to your tunes, while recording evidence of radioactivity—scanning for smuggled or stolen uranium, for instance, or evidence of a dirty bomb development program—with no chance that the press or public would get wind of what was happening. Like all other electronic gadgets, Geiger counters have gotten smaller and cheaper, and I was amused to run across the Radiation Alert Monitor 200, which looks an awful lot like a classic iPod.
Whenever I asked Paul and Matthew what they were building, they changed the subject and started arguing about where to go for lunch. Standard geeks.
The Custom iPod That Never Existed
2020 Ways To Die Mac Os 11
2020 Ways To Die Mac Os 11
Only four people at Apple knew about this secret project. Me, the director of iPod Software, the vice president of the iPod Division, and the senior vice president of Hardware. None of us still work at Apple. There was no paper trail. All communication was in person.
If you asked Apple about the custom iPod project and got past the stock 'No comment,' the PR people would tell you honestly that Apple has no record of any such project.
But now you know.