To be or not to be

September 10, 2013
As this may be the last year of my life, I am posting this confession, if you will, to explain why I might commit suicide sometime between June-November of 2014. It’s way out there in mid to late 2014 and not now because I’m giving myself a last chance to succeed. I’m old now, I’ve had 3 health crises in the last 3 years, and my finances, while sufficient for the next 2 years, are not enough to carry me through a long retirement. At this point, given my health, depressed mental condition, and the odds of achieving a major financial reversal for myself, suicide seems like it might be the best course for me. I’d rather go out leaving some money to loved ones younger and with dreams that are alive than spending it on myself to prolong an existence that does not seem to be fulfilling any purpose other than getting me thru the day so I can sleep at night (when I’m able to sleep).
I would like to more specific regarding all the events of my life that brought me to this, but as a few of my relatives suffer from depression (imo) they might frequent this site and as family relations are dysfunctional, I’m not looking for any awkward interventions. At my advanced age, I’m looking for either validation or annihilation.  Succeed or die.
I was very sick at the age of 4 and landed in quarantine at the hospital. Though I recovered, I left emaciated and with some physical disfigurement. I was teased about this at elementary school, but it was not so bad that I couldn’t weather it.
As I grew older, I was able to get some treatment to make me appear more normal. Where things went bad for me was when my family moved to a new city. At that point, for reasons unknown to me, a group of boys began to see me as something (I’m not saying someone because to them I was an object and not a human being) to abuse and tease on a daily basis. This went on for me from the age of 14-19 with the result that my self-esteem became nonexistent. Teachers saw it going on and ignored it, I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t believe they could do anything to change it. I’ve alluded to this in several posts on this site but never set things down because the idea of suicide was never firmly set in my mind. It was just something I thought about fleetingly whenever I was low. Funny, but right now I had the thought that if I had never gone to school from 9th to 12th grade and just spent all that time in the library, my life would have been better. The emotions that well up inside of me when I think about those years are still quite intense. If I had the sort of personality that acted out, I probably would have gone berserk at some point and killed someone. However, since I internalize things, that’s not gonna happen.
These days, I’ve been depressed off and on for the last 8 months, and when it gets really bad, I am so aware of how the feeling is the same as when I was a teenager.  That numb flat feeling where you don’t want to do anything except lie down or zone out eating or watching tv and those activities don’t provide you with any pleasure. Productivity zero.
To be honest, if I saw I could live my remaining 20 or so years with a decent (and to me decent isn’t that much) standard of living, I wouldn’t be posting this. I’d be able to accept what happened to me then with a more balanced mind. But the thought of poverty changes things. Coupled with poor health, it makes things worse, and looking back at my life and how things went wrong for me so many times, I keep arriving at how my lack of self-esteem seems to be the main driver behind my failures in life.
So what will I be doing over the next 6 months or so? As soon as the pain one of my health problems (I was hit by a driver high on PCP 25 yrs of so ago and now I have a compressed nerve that causes me a lot of pain off and on. Hopefully, another few weeks it will subside), I’ll start meditating
and work at making money. If I can achieve enough of a positive mental state and/or abundance to make life look like more of opportunity and less of a dead-end, I’ll do a 180 and see where life takes me. If not, death will come as a relief.
I figure at my age, six to eleven months is a fair enough time to come to terms with the choice of voluntarily ending my life as it is a radical step and I don’t want to be impulsive about it. I’m expecting I’ll go thru the 5 stages of loss and grief on the way to making a final decision. Right now, my preferred method is using an inert gas. Ideally, I would like to have someone assist me by removing the tank and bag after my death so my relatives think it was a natural death. I’d have to figure out some way to reward someone willing to help me in this respect (that’ll make an interesting Craigslist post), but six months is a long way off. Who knows, things might just turn around for me.
Gotta go now, getting some shooting pains so I need to do my stretching exercises.
Best wishes and good luck to all (myself included)

September 17, 2013
Will be updating this periodically. Posting today because I feel down and want to mention something I’m doing that could be construed as meaningful or poignant.
I have a storage unit filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the past 20 years of my life and am using the weekends to empty it. Either giving/throwing it away or charging minimally for the items that have an obvious worth to them. If no buyers, sometimes I drop them off at the salvation army. Last weekend, a ton of dvd’s, winter and hiking boots, bedding, and lots of books. Found boxes of papers (financial, credit card solicitations, old photos) that I will shred at some point. My past life doesn’t mean anything to me now. Only the future, but for some reason I can’t see it. Finding it both liberating and sad to be getting rid of my “stuff”. I am trying at this point to clear it of everything save for a few heirlooms my relatives might want. Also found a copy of “The Peaceful Pill Handbook,” which I would advise for any geezers on this board to pick up if they contemplating their own demise. I don’t mean this as a judgement to the young people who frequently post here, but I wouldn’t advise it to anyone under the age of 50, give or take a few years. When you are young and life is beating you up, you most likely still have tons of unrealized potential and are better served by weathering, as best you can, those blows and doing your best to set goals and forge ahead with your life. It saddens me to see people in their teens, twenties, thirties, and even forties posting suicide plans here. You just don’t know what may lie ahead for you. I’ll get off the soapbox now, regarding that and will do my best not to return to it. Just wanted to put it out for the record. I know I’m not in your shoes, so I don’t know what you’re actually going through. Don’t mean to offend, just offering my perspective from later in life.
That’s enough for today.
Best wishes to all.