Ten Thousand Fires – Square Pegs in Round Holes

My best friend and I always had a complex yet close intellectual relationship since we met when I was around 4 years old. It’s been almost 20 years since, so you could say that he’s like my brother…much more than any of my actual siblings.

When one fast mind meets another fast mind, things often spiral to unusual heights that aren’t typically seen in one person; in this instance, I am speaking of the abstract. For some time, he was somewhat intellectually dominating…being what seemed like a much more stoic type during my teenage years, while I was a complete mess, screwed up by depression and utter denial of basic emotional needs.

Things would change. Violently.

I’ve always been introspective, at least during the last 6-7 years of my life, which feels like most of it anyway. However, I feel as though I may have underestimated the innate personality characteristics I was born with and/or developed at a very young age. These characteristics obviously did not cause the situation I am currently in, but have been a consistency throughout my entire life, appearing in various forms no matter how hard I have tried to suppress them.

He would always be calm, rational…like a robot, or someone who was hurting inside horribly but was damn good at hiding it. At the time, I didn’t know that the truth was neither. While I flew into rages and breakdowns, he calmly consoled me and coached me on doing the ‘right thing for the situation, regardless of who deserved what’.

This mantra stuck, and I inherited much of his cold rationalist thinking. However, his life has been defined more by introversion, lack of expectations about the world, lack of intensity, and other more ‘subdued’ traits. When I took on these intellectual traits of his, it was like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole. It didn’t work. But I didn’t realize it. The reason it didn’t work is because for one reason or another, I embody the following traits:

-Highly Social
-Aggressive
-Violent
-Expressive
-Hyper-perceptive or ’empathetic’ or ‘absorbant’
-High Emotional Needs

The cold, literal view of things that otherwise were very dark completely clashed with my volatile emotional side. This is of course because nihilistic and other literalness viewpoints, even the ones that don’t assign a negative or positive value, are not emotionally satisfying. I had run my entire life on zero fuel; I had never had my emotional needs met in the slightest nor had a connection, and the natural reaction was to suppress it because obviously these were intolerable feelings and they didn’t seem ‘rational’. At the time this was all happening, I made a flip from depression to existential depression; the latter of which was infinitely worse. But at the time, I was more naive and it felt like an adequate escape. I slowly realized I was wrong since I was able to be honest with myself, and saw a collapse coming from months away. With a complex ‘web-like’ way of seeing the world where everything wrong was seen exactly for what it was with no mental shield whatsoever, probably as a result of trying purposefully to pry apart my own mind, those small wrong things made lightning web connections to everything else that was wrong, forming a powerful adverse reaction to the world in general. But the paradox is I couldn’t withdraw form the world and be content…my high aggression and sociability ‘indexes’ prevented that from being an option. So for awhile (this was the last year of high school), I made half assed attempts to connect with people who had absolutely zero clue about any of this complex mess I was being drowned in, while growing increasingly frustrated. Between the running on empty and seeing things in an extremely emotionally unsatisfying manner; something that may have worked for my best friend but was toxic to me, I collapsed and made my only suicide attempt. In my state of rage and tension I was too shaky to think straight and pull it off, but I managed to put the whole set-up away and never speak of it again for years. Nobody found out and I never went to the hospital to be treated like a stupid child again, rather than the older adult I had become.

Afterwards, I took after him, I suppressed everything. It was automatic. I didn’t know what to do, and when you have that level of anguish combined with running on absolutely no emotional fuel, you just act. It was either death, or the death of my ‘spirit’. I was too de-realized and shell-shocked to make another attempt, so I became incredibly numb and ridden with inertia. He never understood why I was so furious at things he saw as just ‘is’. In addition to the above emotional factors, I think I also had more expectations since I had higher emotional needs and no barrier. I became lost in my own mind and those needs spiraled into infinity. I no longer could live out the remainder of my life in the world as it exists today. Clearly, while it was the only thing I knew how to do at the time, suppression was not an ideal solution by a long shot. You can’t suppress a bomb. Or a volcano. Well maybe you can make a volcano seethe instead of explode violently, but that takes a lot of control and years of careful management. Which is what happened. Eventually this whole house of cards started unravelling, and that was when I realized that I had tried to jam a square peg into a round hole. A bonfire burning inside does not match up well with an intellectual mindset that is very grey, nihilistic, and ‘things just are as they are’. When seeing something wrong, my emotional side would have a visceral reaction and connect a million dots to other wrong things, screaming, while my logical side would try (somewhat successfully) to suppress it. It became completely automatic. I often can’t have a breakdown or weep unless I force that barrier off, and if I don’t, the cost is paid by living as a miserable ball of tension.

As for unravelling, I used to have little ‘blips’ in the numbness where I’d absolutely erupt for about an hour after ~6 months, and then be calm and numb again. Those got gradually more frequent and longer until a critical mass, which I am at now.

Accepting the possibility of death was the only way for me to stay sane in many situations, since not doing so was the equivalent of saying “I’m trapped like a cornered rat, and I can do absolutely nothing but this torturous option and this torturous option”. And so I did, if anything, to extend what I had left. But my true conscience feels as though I have lived way past my time, and that it’s time to enter the abyss or possibly walk with god. As an ancient man whose corpse has already rotted, despite a deceitful youthful appearance. Not entirely as an escape from the pain any more. To view the mysteries of the universe first hand; more first hand than any scientist possibly. And while my best friend can’t say he feels that way, he does understand at least. To go beyond the mundane, and into the magical. I have never made another suicide attempt since because I seek a way that is foolproof; I do not want to be stopped or rendered a vegetable. It is something that commands….finality in the person that truly wants to pass into eternity. I will also note that my high level of ‘fight’ has made it difficult for me to actually transition out of this world. Very difficult. Because there is a more ‘child-like’ side of me that sees this all as surreal, how did this happen, even though I completely understand why. That things were supposed to be…very different.

But they are not.

If people really see something like this as a ‘cry for help’ or an ‘irrational person who needs to be institutionalized’, then they are insufferable fools. As a rational person, I view this as exercising my right to the lesser of two evils, or rather choosing between a horrible evil, a less horrible evil, and (at a minimum) a zero. Denying people the right to do what they want with their own bodies – be this drugs, death, as long as they are rational, is barbaric and no better than segregation or restrictions on freedom of speech. I am not seeking help, but simply telling my story as I see it – no, as we see it. Even four years ago while I was numb, I knew that I just wanted to get into a relationship with a girl only to die together….even the most ideal person conceivable. I knew that if I had an easily accessible way, I wouldve done it any time. But inertia overpowered me. Now, that inertia is somewhat less, and I have accepted or even embraced these things. I lied to myself, I tried to hide myself, but in the end, no amount of stifling could suppress the ten thousand fires.