Day 7675 | Day 7749 | Day 7757
Hide in your shell 'cause the world is out to bleed you for a ride.
What will you gain making your life a little longer?
For the first time I can remember, I feel that I'm a person valuable to others. I mean, I've always known it as an abstract but this is the first time I can think of that I actually believe it. I'm valuable. People enjoy my company and my opinions, a situation which I had long convinced myself out of accepting at face value. I've made a new friend and tentatively resurrected an old friendship, becoming much less reliant on my ex as my sole means of support. And while I feel guilty about the increasing distance between her and myself, I'm also certain that it is a good thing.
It's unclear what caused the change. Perhaps the last few years have given me an amount of maturity or at least some perspective on life. Perhaps it's that I've been more willing to put my trust in others and have developed the integrity to be the person I am rather than the person they want me to be. Or it could be a spontaneous remission of my depression.
And that has happened. For inexplicable reasons, my depression seems to have lessened over the last few weeks. Yet despite the recent rise in my self-worth and confidence, I've found myself the most suicidal I've been since the nadir of my depression two years ago. My friends (and I imagine most people) find it confusing and frustrating that, in the midst of an apparent recovery of spirits, I'm as driven to die as before.
Over the last few years I've found that being suicidal isn't necessarily comorbid with depression. I've been deeply depressed without being suicidal and, far more frequently, suicidal without being particularly depressed. My best guess is that this is because my suicidality isn't grounded in sadness, pain, or emotional turmoil. Instead (and perhaps I'm being uncharitable to myself here) it's generated primarily by two emotions: boredom and laziness. Most find those reasons to be repugnant and for good reason—suicide seems a gross overreaction to such banal feelings. "You've literally bored yourself to death," she said, and she's right.
I, as a boy, I believed the saying the cure for pain was love.
How would it be if you could see the world through my eyes?
The solution to that is fairly straightforward: go out and do things, have novel experiences, partake in wine, women, and song. Yet the very solutions to my problem are antithetical to the person I am. My friends believe that depression is the problem and drugs and therapy the solution. The classic situation of just needing to 'be brought out of my shell'. What they don't understand is the ludicrousness of trying to convince someone that life is worth living. It is not a belief that can be reasoned out like a mathematical proof or a philosophical argument—it is something that must be experienced. Show, don't tell.
Maybe I have a peculiar relationship with death or maybe I'm more deeply—abnormal?—than I realize but there are a great many things that I'd rather die than do. I am an animal driven by fear, weighing things by virtue of what scares me the least rather than what interests me the most. It's a bitch.