Up till now

OK, so I’ve been away for a bit. Today is my first real day back in the office. And I was dreading it like any other day.

It’s been a while since I posted here. Last time I posted some stuff about earlier this year when my parents were separating and I was still living at home.

A lot happened since then. Overall, it’s been a pretty bizarre year.

It was shortly after I posted my last post that things got really bad at home and I couldn’t stay there anymore. For a couple of weeks, all I had was a bag full of clothes. I’d show up to work during the day, and try to make plans to crash at a friend’s place in the evening. Finding rental houses online and ringing up the person in charge and applying when I can during the day.

I spent the nights couchsurfing. I spent some nights at my girlfriend, Alice’s place, though because of her odd work\study lifestyle, that wasn’t always easy. The third day was a Wednesday. That night I went over my best friend, Beck’s place. We were close, like adoptive siblings almost. Her parents joking called me “son” they saw me so often. I’d been hoping they might rent me a room, but they told me that they couldn’t. Beck let me stay over for the night, though in the spare room of her granny flat behind the house where she stayed. Her boyfriend came over and she asked me to have a threesome with them. I was a little shocked. I mean, sexual propositions are not exactly uncommon for me, but I guess I expected better from my best friend when I was in a vulnerable position when she knew I had a girlfriend and everything. Obviously, I declined. Didn’t stop them, though.

Feeling really uncomfortable, I moved into the next room. I cut myself a few times. A row of straight lines, like the neck of a guitar. I went to sleep on the matress on the floor, then.

Working during the day was hard, I had this really strong impression that my boss thought I was a burden on the company or something. She tells me this every so often, which makes walking around the office kind of awkward around her.

That night, I stayed at Alice’s place. She noticed the cuts on my arms. She said she didn’t understand what would make someone do something like that to themselves. She said she didn’t want to be with someone she couldn’t trust not to hurt themselves. She didn’t want to be with someone who had these problems. I died inside. All a wanted to do was walk away and keep on walking forever. I felt trapped in alienation. She wouldn’t let me leave, though. She dropped me off at the train station the next morning.

Friday. I still went to work. I probably wouldn’t have been there if there was anywhere else I could have been. I couldn’t focus. I just spent the day staring blankly at my monitor and occasionally going into the bathroom to cry.

Spent the night at a friend’s house. Alice rang. Apparently, she didn’t mean she wanted to break up with me the previous night. She never really understood me. All that time. I wanted to show her how a person can feel the way I felt. But she couldn’t understand. All she really saw was a problem. That’s the way it felt to me at the time.

I spent most of the next week at her place. She also looked up places for me to stay. Eventually, I found home in a rental room in an apartment in the city. With one of Alice’s friends. Really nice place with a pool and a gym.

From there, things started looking up again, but the depression never really left me.

The last time I saw my mother was at her birthday. My dad sent her a gift, but she wouldn’t see him. She was determined that he was the root of all the problems in her life.

I got back from a relaxing trip in Vietnam (where I met Alice’s family for the first time). Came back from holiday to get called into a meeting with my boss and the HR director where she told me that the week of work I did before I left was almost completely useless. I was flabbergasted. Not only had I tried really hard that week, I’d stayed back almost every day till around 8pm to work on that project. She then promptly followed this up with telling me that the “confused” look on my face was “unprofessional”.

I was glad to get site work after that. ANYTHING to be away from the office. When I came back, they seconded me to another company, where I was so much more relaxed because my boss there treated me like a human being.
The week after my birthday, I found out that my parents were working out asset settlement, which meant the divorce was really going ahead. My mother had apparently been telling everyone who would listen that my dad beat her and that she was in fear of her life every moment she was with him during their (nearly thirty years of marriage). Total hysterical bullshit. She apparently took to lying like explosive diorreah.

That same week, a week after Beck didn’t respond to my birthday invitation and didn’t turn up anyway, I got a phone call from her boyfriend’s brother (whom I had never met) saying that he’s pissed I tried to kill his brother and drown Beck in a pool, and that he knows everything about me and he’s going to hunt me down and kill me. (Though he seemed to think I was taiwanese, and living in a different part of town and also he got my name wrong) He told me never to try contacting them again.

This was odd. I was like wtf? How did this happen? So I rang Beck several times and got no answer. He texted me saying “stop calling beck ****”
He called me again, and I answered seeing as he obviously had Beck’s phone nearby, and he told me a few very personal things I told Beck in confidence (like he knew about my contemplating to hang myself earlier this year, and he urged me to do it and make the world a better place).

I rang up her sister (who was also one of my best friends) and asked her to find out what was going on and was Beck okay. The next day, she came by my place and told me that Beck said she “feels threatened by me”. Looking back on it now, I can’t help wondering whether spreading vitriolic rumours was her way of getting back at me for not fucking her, but at the time, it felt a lot more personal than that. She clearly wasn’t much of a friend, and I knew that right then, but I had just lost the only person with whom I could share all of my secrets along with the conviction that such friends really existed.

As she was leaving, I kissed her, Beck’s sister, on the cheek. I thanked her for being such a good friend.

Blushing she asked if I was making a pass at her. I told her that’s a complication both our lives could do without. I knew what I was doing. That was a goodbye kiss. I didn’t want to give Beck the satisfaction of knowing she moved me to suicide, but I couldn’t be bothered waiting for the rest of my life to run its pathetic pointless course.

The next day, when I couldn’t bear sitting at work any longer, I asked for the rest of the day off. When I got home, I took 8 or more lorazepam with half a bottle of vodka, tied a belt in my wardrobe put the buckled section around my neck like a noose and waited to pass out. I had written a note, but only half giving a shit, it was just a piece of paper with the words “I’m tired” and my name signed underneath. I don’t really know what happened next. Obviously, it didn’t work. The last thing I remember was thowing up in my wastepaper bin.

When I woke up on my bed, the first thought through my head was “how am I still here?”.

I druggedly walked out of my room, where ethanol scented vomit covered my chair, the floor, parts of my sheets and my clothing and my flatmate told me that she and my girlfriend’s housemate had found me unconscious on the floor of my room. They called an ambulance, but cancelled it when I became slightly responsive to them.

I don’t think they ever realised it was a suicide attempt. I’d thrown up on the note, and I must have slipped out of the belt somehow which they didn’t see hanging in my wardrobe.

Alice picked me up later that day and we went out to dinner. She asked me about the bruises on my neck and I told her without hesitating that I had tried to hang myself. I was still coming off all the benzodiazepines I had taken durng the attempt and that’s probably one of the only things I remember about the rest of that day.

Alice was scared. Really scared, I know. She made me to promise not to do it again, but as anyone with real depression knows, that’s not really a promise you can make.

I couldn’t stand the smell of vodka for weeks. Even the smell of things that reminded me of vodka like mouthwash or toothpaste would make me want to be sick.

Things calmed down over the next few months, and I felt better about everything. I haven’t needed friends like Beck since I left highschool. I certainly don’t want them now. Then my secondment ended and I was back in the office again.

My world snapped back into black and white. And a couple of weeks, after days of coming into work to sit at my desk and bury my face in my hands, I left work early again. This time I took less pills and just wanted to let oxygen deprivation knock me out.

I was choking phlegm onto the floor listening to Mecca by K’Naan with my earphones jammed in my ears when one of my friends called me after I cancelled lunch on him telling me to come downstairs and meet him anyway. That’s really the last thing I remember before returning to reality in the emergency ward of hospital with an IV stuck in my arm and my family (minus my mother) and Alice next to me. The closest thing my mother had to contacting me happened then. She rang the hospital, telling them my suicidal behaviour was my father’s fault. The nurse told me that after listening to my mother on the phone, she didn’t think it would be good for me to have contact with her at that time. I had to agree.

I spent two weeks in mental hospital for that. They changed my medication. And, for a short while, I was happy.

Today, is my first real day back. Yesterday, my boss lectured me about not being “grown up” enough because I didn’t have a medical certificate with me when she called me into a meeting she was an hour and a half late for. I was past caring. I pointed out her hypocrisy and was halfway towards telling her I was too busy not dying to give half a shit about whether I’d need to get a medical certificate for it, when I calmed down and collected myself again. I’m sick of this place. I know there are other jobs I can do and I know I can be happy, even if it means taking time off work and changing my meds up again. I couldn’t care less if she had fired me right then. I was practically begging her to.

I’m not going to stay here. I know happiness is out there, somewhere. I just need to find it.