Worn down

You don’t have to be sorry. No one’s pain is worth more than anybody else’s. Think of Michael Jackson – do you think anybody in the whole world would say he was a happy man? And yet he was incredibly wealthy, incredibly appreciated for his talents, theoretically was living the dream. But it was never enough – his face was a painfully public (and literal) example of the torment of a man who never felt good enough. (No, I’m not a fan, it’s just a really obvious example.) Because he was rich and famous, was his pain somehow ‘less important’ than that of a crippled beggar?

My story is somewhat similar to yours, I guess that’s why I find myself here on this blog.

Part of me knows that I don’t actually want to die; I just want the pain to stop. I want to be appreciated for what I do (I’m a musician) in the ways that everyone else who ‘matters’ in the world gets appreciated: With money. Not lots and lots of money, but enough to have a house of my own, to not live hand-to-mouth. I too know that I am ‘good’ at what I do, but it’s not enough. As you say, there’s something missing – the sense that if people *truly* valued you that much, they’d frickin’ pay you what you’re worth. Capitalism is a horrible, soul-sucking beast. It eats us up and spits us out.

For me suicide is like a safety valve, an emergency exit: If things truly get that bad, I know I don’t have to stick around. I don’t have just suffer, endlessly, miserably. I can leave; check out; pull the plug.

In a way it’s comforting, it keeps me from taking the ultimate step.

Early last year I had a series of panic attacks from the stress of the kinds of things you describe – no future, no hope, getting older, should have ‘had it together’ by now, so many others with lives, families, futures, children, jobs, etc, getting ahead while I drift away behind like some failed, burn-out cinder. Seeing people half my age with all the things I always dreamed of, why not me? What’s wrong with me?

The panic attacks woke me up. I literally thought I was dying of a heart attack for about three nights in a row. I have no health insurance; no friends to come over and hold my hand; I finally called my youngest brother in a panic and left a long, garbly message on his phone machine. He tried to help, in that he called the next day and listened for a while, but as I talked I realized I was ANGRY, really angry, at the unfairness of it all. And I became angry with him; and accused him of not helping me, of not seeing how much I was struggling. Of having so much while I had so little, but never sharing any of his excess. Of his promising over and over again to help me buy a house, but never coming through. Kind of like Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football.

Anyway, got sidetracked there – the point was, as I thought my heart was literally going to explode from panic and terror, I realized I didn’t want to die. I went outside at three in the morning and breathed the cold night air and found my mind fastening onto every little detail. I wanted to LIVE. I just needed the pain to stop, and the devastating fear.

I’m sorry to say that I haven’t found an answer to many of the problems that were so pressing – I’m still broke, still struggling, still don’t have the close friend or life partner that I long for.

But I’ve cut my family out of my life – I realized that, when the chips were down, they simply weren’t there for me. Over and over and over again. This was what was killing me – the sense of continually having to go it alone, of having no one there to mind my back. Of knowing for sure that if I fell, no one would catch me. There’s much more to that realization than a single sentence can capture (it took me many years and much hard work to finally decide to walk away from my family like that), but that’s the gist of it.

I truly believe, now, that relationships are the most important thing. Whatever energy I have, I spend on trying to nurture the good ones, the ones that make me feel valued and worthwhile and appreciated. And it is WORK. But when it works, it’s what keeps me going.

But I still have bad days, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here. It’s a tightrope walk, so easy to fall off.

I don’t know if any of that helped, for me it’s helpful just to know that there are others who are struggling too, someone to talk to, to tell your story to.

One other thought, it’s that old thing about depression being ‘anger turned inward’. I find that it really helps when I can focus on the sense of unfairness and get really ANGRY about it. There’s another line about, you know you’re progressing when your feelings change from suicide to homicide… the point being not that you’re going to go out and kill someone, but that the angry energy gets turned outward onto the _source_ of the pain, the root causes, rather than ripping your own guts out with self-hatred or whatever.

I’m not totally sure how that helps, except that the anger can be used as a sort of ‘compass’ to help point you toward what you really want, rather than allowing yourself to be conned into doing/saying/being things you aren’t and don’t want to be.

And no, I don’t believe in the Secret, I think it’s a load of crap. I think unfair things happen to people all the time, every minute of every day. It sucks. But I also know that the unfairness of other humans is _not_ the same thing as the random, act-of-god unfairness of say, a hurricane or an earthquake or something. We have no control over natural disasters, but we _can_ choose our friends. The unfairness of other people is a _choice_. People who behave this way are not your friends and should be cut out of your life post haste, without a backward glance.

At the moment I’m looking for friends who have similar life stories – not because I want to hang with down-and-outers (and I don’t really see myself that way, to tell the truth), but because I’ve realized that I’m just torturing myself when I hang out with ‘friends’ who’ve had better luck than I’ve had. I just end up feeling resentful and angry. Much better to find people who I can actually relate to. That’s the theory, anyway. People on the same rung of the ladder who might actually be able to help each other out. Because going it alone is the real killer.

I don’t know if any of that helped. I hope it helped you some just to write out your story and know that somebody is reading it.