“How Nice To Feel Nothing, and Still Get Full Credit For Being Alive.”

That’s a quote from one of my all time favourite novels, Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. I have plans to get the book’s mantra, ‘so it goes’, tattooed somewhere on my body.

Which, is kind of at odds with posting on a suicide website, isn’t it?

I don’t actually know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know if I’m depressed – I’ve never gone to a doctor or a counseller. I think about suicide on a near-daily basis; not in some abstract way, but with regards to methodologies, and having a suicide note on my laptop which I regularly update to correspond with the messages I want conveyed at any given time. I don’t really know why I’m unhappy, I just am. I always have been. I’m not sure if it’s because of a chemical imbalance in my brain, if it’s just the way I was born, or just because I don’t really want to be here. There are things here that I like, things and people that I love. There are things I would love to see and do, but all of it is stuff I don’t believe was really meant for me, and the things I want I don’t have any way of getting. Sometimes, I don’t even care.

I guess I had a fairly regular life – grew up with an alcoholic father constantly losing his temper at my mother, and terrifying me in the process that he would hurt her. I also have a brother I love dearly. I was bullied in school, went through phases of hiding in the bathroom at lunchtime – but I also went through many years of having good friends and good laughs. Those times are harder to remember.

I am a virgin. Very few people know that, and it’s not because I haven’t been presented with the opportunity. It’s because if I get close to doing it, it freaks me out – I don’t trust people, not to hurt me, not to leave me. I don’t trust people to tell them I am a virgin. The fact that I comfort eat and am overweight does not help. I don’t care enough to do anything about it. This is not why I am depressed, this is just a side effect of it.

I went to university, spent three semi-lonely years being the odd one out, but loving the content of my utterly useless course. I graduated, people applauded, I didn’t care. Three years later, I have not found a single job. These days, I hardly even look for one. I don’t care enough. I have an interview for an intership in a week and a half. I would like to get it. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t. Three years is a long time, and it’s an unfillable gap in my CV which feels me with shame and a feeling of being pathetic, useless, and unwanted. I have a feeling people don’t want to employ me because I’m overweight and socially awkward. In the current economic climate, they have a big enough pool of desperate graduates to be able to be prejudiced like that.

For the last two years, while I have lived beside a river, I have often contemplated drowing myself. I can’t swim, you see, and the reason I haven’t already killed myself is that I am a coward. I hate pain, I fear it, and I do not want to die painfully. If I went into that river, unable to swim, the current would do the job. I haven’t done it because I see death as a failsafe. Despite the nights of tossing and turning, anxiety and panic attacks, intense anger and endless sessions of crying I often suffer, I’m determined to survive until I see no other possible option. Instead I wrote a short story in the third person about walking into that river and letting it take me. I put it on deviantart, where I am a well known cartoon fan-artist. Nobody knows it is about me, and I find that kind of funny.

Today I discovered this website, and the helium hood method of suicide. I have watched two videos, one on how to construct a hood, and one which explains how to use it and why it works. I have decided this will be my method of suicide, if I ever need it.

I have one tattoo, a line from a song, which I got in a moment of rare glee and strength, as a reminder to myself that I have, and can, feel that way. I am currently planning two more tattoos, ‘So it goes’, and ‘miles to go’, from a Robert Frost poem. Both represent acceptance of death as an inviting and very real and inevitable thing, but also remind me that there are other things besides it. If I get this internship, I will get them, to remind me to keep going. If I don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Sorry this post is so long. If you’ve bothered to read it, thank you.