I attempted suicide about six years ago. Unfortunately for me at the time, it apparently doesn’t matter if you take Ibuprofen by the dozens, you will feel nothing but sick the next day. Sick, but breathing. I was suprised I woke up the next day – sleep felt like slipping away from life, there were no dreams. There was a feeling, for a time, that I was dead and conscious of it. In time, I grew to resent what I had nearly done to my family. I’m depressive by nature, and the fact that, physically speaking, I’m as ugly as one can imagine, didn’t help at all – horribly sunken, very high forehead, big nose, long head, underweight for a guy and nothing seems to help – every characteristic of a human being is skewed in me. I look around at the population and gauge the probability that I would have turned out this way. It’s so retchedly small that the first character would be a decimal point. I wonder, why couldn’t I just have turned out normal? What would have been so wrong in being average? This is not just self-perception, but what I see when I objectively look at myself. In my old school yearbooks, I’d been unnaturally cut out of group photos to be replaced with school logos. In other photos of myself, I assumed that I looked a certain way because the I was in motion, or it was at an unnatural angle, or the camera must be malfunctioning, because there is no way a human being should look like that. It sounds vain of me to say all this, but it’s all I have left to pick apart when everything else is gone. There was a time when I had a personality to compensate for all of my horrible flaws. Once upon a time, there was even some intelligence there to offset everything – or at least, there was perceived intelligence. People assumed that I simply wasn’t trying my best in school, or that I was so above it all that I was bored, because of how I had demonstrated my abilities so many times before. I assumed so at the time as well, almost wearing it as a badge of honor. How much things have changed.
If only I had thought about these things beforehand, maybe I wouldn’t have ruined my life, thinking I was better than I actually am. I ran my girlfriend off – someone the likes of which I could never, ever get again. I can hardly pull myself out of bed in the morning. I haven’t gone into work for the past week because I can’t even go out in public. Everything inside of me is being torn and re-torn every moment I’m awake. I can’t think of anything else, except for how everything I am, from the ground up, disgusts me. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself, but some horrible replacement – someone who exists in body only to make me suffer in mind.
Very few times have I ever told anyone about the way I feel at times like this, and the friends I had to save me in years past are nowhere to be found. I know I won’t be able to complete university – I don’t have the intelligence that I once did, and the crushing vacuum in my lungs, the near-vomit in my throat, the racing pulse whenever someone even glances at me when I can venture out, all distract me, make me give up on myself. Every second I am awake, I know I am nothing, and will become less.
I wish I had succeeded those six years ago. By now, my family would have recovered. By now, I would be gone and nothing, and they would have suffered, but they would be happy now. I am not an only child. This family could survive. But I could never do it now. I could never hurt them like that – no matter who I am, what I am, or what I think of myself, I could never kill them inside like I am dead right now. But oh, how I wish that I had already been over and done with it.
It is the worst thing in the world to pray for death every second of being awake. I wish an accident, something, would spare the good people who are always taken, and take me instead. At least then, my family couldn’t blame themselves. I would be gone and they could grieve as one would normally grieve. And then it would be over, and the world would keep turning.
And yet, given all this, I want to say to everyone who does want to commit suicide, to STOP – to THINK about it – and in the end, hopefully, to NOT do it. It’s so hypocritical to think thi way after everything I’ve said, but this is simply how I feel about myself. When I see people say they’re ugly, I look at them, and know they’re not ugly like I am ugly. When they say they hurt, I know they do, but I see bright futures ahead for them. I wish they could simply feel better, to see the good in themselves that other people do. For myself, there is no good to see, and no one to see it. But you, you all are different.
I’m not sure what this place is supposed to be. But I hope everyone else here is safe. Myself, I don’t think I could ever try to take my life again. But I hope, and I pray, that God will do it for me.