If the world wants a smile…

…then that’s what they’ll see.
I’ll paint pretty pictures on the walls around me
I’ll always be happy and make it look real.
It’s amazing how well you can hide how you feel.

I wrote that about 27 years ago, and nothing has changed. I still paint on my smile every day before walking out the door. I’ve been dealing with depression since I was 10 years old (and perhaps before that as I’m fairly certain I was sexually abused and more than certain I was physically and mentall abused)…never understanding why I feel the way I do, or how everyone else always seems like they’re enjoying themselves. Other people seem to just know how to get along with people…how to talk, how to hold conversation, how to read body language, how to know when they’re being flirted with and how to flirt back . Not me. I’ve never really had any friends. Never understood how to make them or keep them. I’ve had plenty of girlfriends in my younger days, but now I understand it was the ‘brooding bad boy’ attraction. I was a sociopath, or very nearly one if not, and simply got what I wanted, including girlfriends, by sheer force of will. As I got older that worked less and less…or perhaps I grew more of an awareness of the feelings of others…and in the process lost whatever attractiveness I had.

My first attempt at suicide was when I was 14. My dad was out of town on business, my sisters were over at friends houses for the night and my mother was out with one of her “friends”. I got into the medicine cabinet and took the last seven of some very powerful 500mg tranquilizers with a shot of whiskey. I remember as I laid down to sleep my last thought was “This will either be the best night’s sleep I ever get, or the last. Let’s find out which.” Twelve hours later I woke up to the sound of my mother banging on the bedroom door screaming for me to get my lazy ass up. I struggled to get ready for school through the grogginess, and my mother caught that something was wrong. Once I told her what I’d done her prime concern was that they’d find out at school too and that I’d ruin her reputation in the community. To spite her I went in anyway. I didn’t make it fifteen minutes into 1st period when the teacher asked me what was wrong, and ask she did so put her hand on my arm and the exclaimed that I was ice cold. She brought me to the nurse’s office, and when asked I told them exactly what I had done including the drug name and amount. She called the doctor who in turn pronounced it a miracle that I was still alive. What I had taken was enough to kill two grown men, much less a scrawny 120 pound teen like myself.

Since then I’ve been doing the research looking for a way that couldn’t fail even with “divine intervention”. I think I’ve finally found it, though a little more research is needed before I start making the final preparations.

I have wanted to die for the last 30 years… Well, almost anyway. These last two years my dad has been paying for me to see a wonderful holistic specialist who has successfully been treating the physical reasons for it all…the blood chemistry issues. For a while it was working wonderfully, but now the last year I had been feeling like I just don’t care if I live or die. And the last few months have been edging more and more back into honestly wanting death. This morning I woke up and would rather have put the barrel in my mouth than gotten out of bed, yet I did anyway. The time isn’t right yet. Too many preparations to make first.

That, and quite frankly I think I want to see if I start smoking weed again if maybe it’ll be easier to get through the days again for a little while.