Complexities

I was assigned a short writing piece to describe an event in my life that made me who I am today. This story is true, and while it ends on a hopeful note, this doesn’t mean that I still don’t have apathetic feelings, it’s just that now I have a way of dealing with them. I found this site as I was typing in questions into google, hoping beyond hope that I’d find something worthwhile. I did. An online community of people that are all struggling. I hope you enjoy this and forget your troubles if for just a short while.

I’ve found that life is complex, and even the most simple thing, such as a plank of wood, is, when looked at closely enough, as complex as a society, or our bodies, minds, even the relationships between old friends. I live for these observations. To look more deeply into a poem, to look at a flower and not just appreciate the beauty of it, but also the beauty of how it functions, down to the smallest molecule. It is the complexities of life that allow me to live day by day and cope with the overwhelming onslaught of apathy, or maybe a better way to put it would be existentialism, or possibly “the modern condition.”

I was a very happy, well known, and well like child. I was always an outstanding student, a passionate athlete, and a very hard worker. Then I met my first (and thus far only) love. At first she was simply a fancy: cute, intelligent, charming, passionate, and driven to change the worlds in a way that I’d never seen anyone have such a desire to do. I think that’s why I loved her; her desire and want to make the world a better place. I was the happiest I’d ever been when I was with her. But with all great loves there is also great pain. And one day, without cause, she told me she didn’t want to be with me. It was such a shock, I couldn’t breathe, my vision tunneled, my heart shattered.

The next three years were a spiraling depression. I tried to make sense of it at first, why? I kept asking myself. Was it the way I acted? Something I said? What drove her to this sudden rejection of my love towards her? These questions rattled in my brain every day, all day, making every single one a “little eternity” as I began to call my day to day existence. That boy that was a passionate athlete, good student, a hard worker was no longer there. One night my mother asked, “Where is my happy Alex?” I simple was there. I isolated myself from my friends, quit playing all of my sports (save hockey), and didn’t give any thought, nor effort in my school work.

As time passed, and I became more and more depressed, I tried expressing myself to my parents, to my brothers, but I felt that they didn’t take me seriously. My older brother, having difficulties of his own, wasn’t there for me, and my younger brother, didn’t understand. My father, to put it nicely, would “encourage” me with “kind” words, and my mother also had issues that she needed to deal with. I tried and tried to look for ways of dealing with my problems. Eventually I began to do what my older brother did to deal with his problems. I began smoking. Every day, all day I would be high, so as to try to forget the pain, but with every high there is a low, and every low got lower and lower till I began to develop anxiety and paranoia along with my depression.

It eventually got to the point where I was unable to continue, my body reacted with such revulsion towards smoking weed. I would begin to have aches and pains, hyper sensitivity, my nose would begin to fill with mucus, my throat would close, and my eyes would water. Finally, I stopped trying to smoke away my problems and face them. It didn’t go very well. I couldn’t get out of bed for a week, not because of a withdrawal, no nothing of the sort; I didn’t have the will to even get up, save to drink and go the bathroom, and maybe eat. I spent this week in a limbo of sleep and awake, doing neither and both at the same time. Finally, smelling of sweat, tears, and the rancid stench of self pity, I got up and took a shower, the first act for what felt like the passing of a year. It was a start, but I still had my crucible ahead of me.

It all came to a climax one winter night. Having thought about suicide for several months, I decided to do something about it. It was a cold night, the wind tore at me, and so I put on thick wool pants, layered myself with a hoodie, and a flannel, tossed on my ever present cap, and tied on my steel toed boots. I took my first step outside to a resounding crunch, the snow frozen over by the cold. I inhaled, smelling the crisp air and letting it fill my lungs. I dug my hands quickly into my wool pants, taking refuge from the southerly breeze. My hand found my cigarette pack, and after several attempts to light it with a match, I finally succeeded. The walk wasn’t very far. The trees reflected the light from the street lamps, Christmas trees in their own right. I get to the bridge, where if the season were summer, I might be jumping off for joy, but not tonight, tonight my jump will be more malevolent. My hands touch the steel railing as I climb over. They stay there, steadying me as I look over the edge into the abyssal cold waters beneath me. I hear the gurgle of the water, and imagine the sound my steel toes would make breaking through that calm, rushing surface.   I bend my knees, release my grip on the railing, but before I enter into my plunge from this world, I ask myself, “What will tomorrow be like?” My curiosity distracts me, draws me away from the frothy end, of screaming in water, of bursting lungs. My hands touch the steel rail again. I exhale, and inhale, air filling where water was meant.

It took me several months to refine my outlook on life, to see the complexity, and therefore beauty of life. But it was that night, when curiosity drew me away from the edge, where my hands held on to that cold steel rail, where my steel toed boots weren’t my anchors to the riverbed, it was that night that life began again.

My poem of that night, so you might understand the way I felt:

By My Own Hand

Sorrow envelopes as the mind wanders,
A deeper pit of dispair,
A spiral staircase of confusion.

As the mind ceases,
And the heart is weighed,
Escape appeals more,
The soul yearns for and rejects simultaneously.

Sorrow sighs,
Confusion is muddled,
Cowardice. Apathy…