Day 7619 | Day 7675 | Day 7749
"You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson."
Three years ago I sat down and decided to lay down some groundwork for my life. My girlfriend had just broken up with me and my plans to use college as an opportunity to remake myself had proven overly-optimistic at best so I was looking for something solid to form a basis of belief from. In the end, I settled on three basic assumptions which have remained mostly unchanged: I would kill myself by the end of college, I would not find lasting happiness in anything, and I would die having never made a significant emotional connection with someone else. While reflective of the stereotypical teenage angst that I was experiencing at the time, these assumptions have held true with minimal ad hoc alterations. As the months turned into years, they became de facto goals as the reality of depression gave way to the identity of depression.
A few months ago I decided to try to change, to break out of the mindset that has incapacitated me for so long. I went to parties, befriended new people, was gregarious and optimistic. There were speed bumps and awkward moments but I viewed these as 'learning experiences', using them to inform my future behavior. Others began to see the change in me, made unsolicited observations that I seemed happier. So I gave up.
'Why?' is the question. Because the energy input to maintain that forward momentum was enormous and I was becoming a person I do not believe I actually wanted to be. But more importantly it wasn't addressing the underlying problem—I don't desire death out of self-loathing or as a release from pain, I'm just disinterested in life. Being a different person was only a means to the end of finding something that would impel me to go on, not a solution in and of itself, and it failed at leading me to that.
There's a chorus of 'Don't give up' and 'it gets better'. Statements exhorting you to share their faith in the future, faith that the law of large numbers will average out a life experience by balancing happiness with unhappiness, the belief that life has objective moral value and it is good—the proof is left as an exercise to the reader. Because what else do you say to someone who denies your basic premise?
I'm in the middle of a long preamble, perhaps lasting years. Sure feels like Act V though.