You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

Indeed, at times it's best to shut up.

Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.

... I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.