Just Keep Pushing? I Think Not

As a child, and indeed as a teenager, and even now, I’m mostly a loner. I never really sought out the company of other people, for whatever reason; and having a disability that carries lots of myths that people actually believe hasn’t really helped with friends. In elementary school, I quite clearly remember being lumped in with a group of people with learning disabilities, with the premise that I could make friends with other “disabled” people. Being nine or so, it didn’t bug me much; indeed at the time it did seem like a nice gesture. But, as I said, I’m a loner, so nothing ever came of it.

If I never played with friends, then, what the hell did I do? Well, I played guitar and played around on the computer, mostly. At the age of ten I could play guitar better than a lot of adults (it’s not my ego; I’ve seriously been told that by adult guitarists). After awhile, though, the instrument wasn’t as fun as it once was (for whatever reason), and so, as I said, I turned to the computer. And mostly, on the computer, I read books. Seems like an awfully strange way to use a computer, but most of the stuff I was reading was computer-related (programming, security, etc), and I could read them no other way, for a variety of reasons (none of which I shall discuss here).

By high school, I was so familiar with all sorts of assistive technology that I ended up becoming bored with that, too. And so I went back to music, joining marching band, percussion, etc. It was great, because marching band is both a highly individualized and a team sport (yes, it’s a sport, damn it!) so rehearsals were pretty much “every man for himself,” for the most part. The best way to describe it is, if one person fucks up, it can look really bad; the best way to remedy that is for everyone to practice on their own – together. It sounds pretty nonsensical to those who haven’t participated in the activity, so just take my word for it.

Around sophomore year, I realized I was depressed, and probably had been for a long while. That probably sounds really fucking weird – how the hell do you not know you’re depressed? But I suppose I’m an example of how that’s possible. Things just didn’t interest me anymore. Rehearsals, once exciting, now dragged on endlessly. Schoolwork was boring, etc. And my disability was making it pretty much impossible to be independent – not because of the disability itself, but because of the lack of training to overcome it. I can cook, and get out and about; but things need to be adapted, and I didn’t (still don’t) have the skills to do those things independently. And that was (still is) frustrating beyond comprehension.

Anyway, I trucked on. I went to a college prep program after sophomore year, during the summer, and met some interesting people. One girl in particular was just…I can’t even describe it. Interesting? Fun? We have a lot of shit in common, at least: similar interests in reading, similar personalities…and it doesn’t really take a genius to figure out what happened. It was an interesting fourteen months (we were friends for about a year before we got together, I’ll tell you that. The end was not only a surprise/shock; it was hurtful. It’s only been three months since (not even), and I still feel like someone ran me over with a bus and flattened me like a fucking pancake. All this shit was happening in the first semester of college, and ontop of learning my campus (I still don’t know it), I had to actually, you know, be presentable. Study for exams, and actually act interested; and there wasn’t even marching band or anything to take my mind off of this shit. If possible, I dug myself into an even deeper hole of depression. And that is where I remain, because really I don’t know what there is to do. Maybe it sounds pathetic, or cliche, or any number of other things, but I just don’t give a fuck anymore. I tried to get the training I needed to not have to rely on 50 other people to help me get around…and I ended up not getting the training. I tried focusing on other things to get my mind off of my complete despair, but nothing has worked. I’m done trying; it’s gone on long enough. I don’t believe in heaven or hell; and I don’t have a gun, unfortunately. I do have a bed sheet and something to tie it to, and it’s one of those really long ones, so it shouldn’t be hard to create a noose to end this thing. As I said, I don’t believe in heaven or hell; rather, I believe that when you die, you simply stop existing. You’re just…Gone. I don’t particularly care about the horrific agony I may (or may not) experience – the current agony is probably many many times greater, so with that, I bid farewell. To my family, to those I got to know, to those on this site, and anyone else. Time to go.