Posted by HyperFocus on February 21, 2009, at 10:07:38
This post contains musings and fantasies of suicide so if you might be affected by this you should tread cautiously.
There is a novel by Cormac McCarthy titled "Suttre". At one point the protagonist is travelling with a rural nomad family who are desparately poor and endured much hardship. At the end of one chapter the family is sheltering from a terrible storm under a cliff when a piece of the cliff breaks off and lands on the sleeping family. The eldest daughter is killed. The father takes his dauther's shattered body and runs directly into the driving rain and wind and goes down on his knees and pleads:
"Please God don't let me have to carry this burden. I already carry all that I can bear and I can't bear anymore."
The chapter concludes with Suttre remarking that unfortunately there is no lower bound for human suffering and man will have to bear it no matter how heavy it is as long as he is alive.I don't think I can carry this burden anymore. I think if I have a ready means to end it I should. This is an upgrade from how I normally feel where I think about it but then dismiss it. I actually am further down the path where it becomes a viable solution. The reason is that after ten years I am stuck in the exact same place with the exact same feelings. Today I had an important meeting to discuss my thesis. I didn't go. I don't know what's going to happen now. I am going through a very bad patch where the meds seem to be exacerbating the depression. I can barely get off my bedI coud not bear the stress of going outside and going to talk to other people. And then I remembered this was exactly the scenario right before I dropped out of uni ten years ago. 10 years ago I could not graduate because I could not bear the depression and anxiety and I also could not organize to do my thesis. I'm not going anywhere. I keep thinking and cajoling myself that I feel better but the fact is I don't. This is not living it is a slow and painful death.
I have this black hole in my soul. Every year I've been alive it has grown and grown as it sucks everything good out of my life. I've lost twenty years of my life to illness. And for what reason or what purpose? For all my adolescent and adult life people have been putting me down in the worst way. Made fun of me, stomped on my feelings, called me different names, took advantage of me. I suffered from really classic interpersonal bullying - people who are supposed to be your friends but use you to prop up their own deficient self-esteem as they reduce yours. Of course having had little exposure to adversity until I turned tweleve I did not know I had to resist - even if it meant simply not accepting what someone says about me as the truth. So unable to find any resistance I simply incorprated these things into my persona as true. A major part of my vulnerability is my inability to comprehend just the motivation for the act itself. It has always seemed inconceivable to me that someone get derive anything out of putting somebody down. I have never in my life believed or could rationalize hurting somebody just to get an ego boost or whatever it is one gets. For better or worse I gre up innocent of the evil that people do. It is the utter pointlessness of it that I cannot come to terms with.
I never asked or wanted much out of life. Seriously all I wanted to due was read, study science, play the piano and mess around with computers. And have a few friends. Before I became seriously ill I spent a lot of time by myslef, not becuase I had to but because I wanted to. I used to play ball in my yard by myself and enjoyed it quite much. Never in my life do I recall ever putting anybody down or feeling the need to deliberately hurt someone. In elementary school, the kids who might be the victims of group bullying so prevalent in young kids then - I used to defend them. It is inconceivable that one person could wound another just for the hell of it. Probably the worst part is that the people who hurt me so badly have all gone on to have happy fulfilled lives - did their masters degrees or whatever, married, have children. Meanwhile I'm still here fighting stuck in one place and can barely get out of my bed every day. so crippled am I with depression and anxiety. So I begin to ask myself where is the justice in this world? How is it that the people responsible for destroying my life prosper while I suffer? The answer it seems is that I'm the one that's wrong and I deserve what I have got.
I seem to have all the symptoms of PTSD. The flashbacks, difficulty concentrating, depression, anxiety, thoughts of revenge. I was attacked when I was in school, and later on where I lived. I could not escape from the situation. My body and mind are traumatised as if I have lived through a war. I don't think now that I am made for this earth. I'm just some hyper-sensitive hyper-recollective hyper-concentrating freak. Things that happened to me 10, 15 years ago I have full and vivid recall and of course experience the pain just as fresh again. I had a lot of potential and gifts but what started off as a blessing turned into a curse. I don't think I will be able to overcome the trauma I suffered at the hands of other people. I know you might say don't give up but it's been twenty years and I gave it a got shot - I remember as early as 14 thinking that I had the never say day attititue and that I needed to live my life how I wanted it and not what other people said to me. That was sixteen years ago. But it didn't work out. And I don't think I can do it anymore. Nobody should have to suffer like this for so long. The only thing never say die has done for me is prolonged the pain. My mind is crippled, and my abilities stunted. All the desire I had for achieving something is burned out of me.
The most frightning thing to me is the thought that I am caught in a sequence of events which have a predetermined end. It's as if you could peer into the mind of a victim of suicide - if you wanted to see what life was like for that person then this is what it would be like. Events over the course of thirty years conspire to make my suicide hardly surprising to anyone. I can see that suicide is the logical termination of my life.
When I was in elementary scool, seems like a thousand centuries ago, I had few worries. One of my favorite memories was with one of my friends. Myself and a bunch of other kids used to take extra lessons at the teacher's house and then usually parents would pick us up. Two of us used to wait for a while together as we were always the last to be picked up. I don't remember what initially started it but we used to get into these crazy pillow fights. It seemed so silly but there we were every afternoon going at it laughing our heads off. I mean we were nine or ten and we didn't have any idea of what could happen between girls and boys. At some point she transferred out to another school. Our teacher wanted us to give her a gift before leaving and she wanted someone to do the giving so I volunteered. So the day I got her gift and gave her a kiss on the cheek . Of cousre every body was like Weeeeeooooo but I didn't care. I was so unselfconscious then. I was top of my class, I had a lot of friends and 1 really good friend - we were inseparable. Then I went to high school and things changed.
The only things that I can do right now are passive things - mainly looking at films or listening to music. I love music I really do. When I was much younger I used to listen to songs on the radio and record them one after the other so I had a sort of mixtape. If things had turned out differently I might have been a musician or a music producer. Sometimes at lunch I used to sneak onto the school auditorium stage and lift the cover to the keyboard and just pluck at notes. About two years ago I bought a keyboard but it has spent most of it's life unused on the floor. I love books also but my ability to read and enjoy them has been greatly diminshed. Back in the day when SAT was out of 1600 I got 800/800 on the language part. Creative activities like writing or programming are out of the question.I seemed to have a lot to say when I started this but the emotional fire seems to have cooled. I have lost the ability to cry for quite a number of years but appparently writing is also another way to relieve emotional stress. It took me a couple of days to write this; even just replying to PB posts is difficult for me because I seem unable to focus exclusively on a stream of thought for very long. I don't know where I'm going with this so I might as well stop. I don't have a conclusion or resolution. All I know is that I'm hurting really badly and I'm really at rock-bottom and there is a new edge to my thinking that is starting to frighten me.
poster:HyperFocus
thread:881471
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090213/msgs/881471.html