So I wrote a post, actually my first post on this site entitled “Wasted Life”. It was pretty much about the story of me and my ex-girlfriend and the effect its had on my life for the last twenty years. It was a story that I felt I needed to share with somebody…anybody to show the extent that one person can have on your life when you focus all your love on them and no one else. I received some good comments from others on there when I posted it, and today I received a few other comments, which surprised me since I didn’t think anybody read back that far in the posts!
I went back and reread that post, and I feel that some of the things I wrote in it weren’t entirely clear and that was my fault since the post was mainly about that one subject which has had a major influence on my life. The biggest thing I think I misconstrued was the feeling that I am looking at suicide because of what happened with me and Diana. This is true in some respects, but not in others. So I’m going to write this post as kind of a clarification on what my true reasons are for looking to end my life.
First I’m not killing myself over a woman. As difficult as the entire situation between her and I was, the truth is I lived more of my life without her than I did with her. I’m used to it. As well as, and this is just blunt honesty, no one is worth me killing myself for them. I loved Diana, but she isn’t worth my life. One thing I should have included in the first post was that I shouldn’t refer to myself as being in love with, or loving Diana. Because I don’t. I remember loving her, but I don’t feel it inside myself anymore, and that is the true problem. So let me explain…
First some background about myself.
I was never abused growing up.
I was never bullied.
I have never self harmed myself.
I’ve only had one episode where I was going to kill myself in the past, see previous post.
I don’t sit around all day in inner pain.
I don’t beat myself up over the way things have gone in my life.
Ok, now that that’s been said, many would probably ask why do you want to die then?
It begins and ends with who I am. I have a dissociative disorder called depersonalization. The result of this is that I don’t feel like I actually live my own life. It seems that all the things that happen in my life, good or bad, happen to someone else and I just observe it. Its difficult to put into words so that others can understand. I know the things I want in life, the things I lived for, worked for, struggled for. But they don’t impact me. According to the therapists I’ve seen, not only do I have depersonalization, but I also show strong inclinations towards psychopathic tendencies due to my lack of emotion about anything in my life anymore. Although, I suspect its actually one or the other, and not both. But the bottom line is this when you hear someone talk about being empty or hollow, that is exactly what I am. I do not care about myself, other people, or situations I find myself in. I simply exist. I have no ambitions because I can’t make myself care about gaining anything. I realize when I lose things, and I know how I should feel, but I just don’t. I’ve written several posts on here about my relationship with Diana and the love I had for her. What I’m writing about is what I remember feeling, or what I know I should still feel for her. I can put things into words, and say all the right things but I don’t feel it.
This is not limited to just relationships. This is what I go through about every aspect of my life. The simple truth is I’m tired of existing this way. I’m tired of waking up and wanting to be able to feel something about anything, or anyone. I’m tired of not interacting with people because its not worth it to make friends because I forget them if they are out of contact for any length of time. I have a friend that I’ve been friends with for 26 years, and I haven’t seen or talked to him in almost 3 years, except for when he texts me, because I forget he’s even alive. I don’t call people, I don’t stop by for visits. I’ve lived in my house for over a year, and not one single family member has ever been inside for more than 5 minutes. I quit my job over a month ago, and I don’t care about finding another one. I have no money, and I don’t care. I have no special someone, and I don’t care. But I wish I did. That is why I want to die. Because I’ve taken all the meds, I’ve seen counselors, I’ve tried doing new things to try to kickstart myself inside, and it just doesn’t work. I won’t ever change, and this isn’t a life worth living. I want to close my eyes, and know I won’t have to wake up to this again…
And I don’t care.
12 comments
Yeah sorry, that may have been me you’re referring to who read your posts and interpreted as if you were saying the relationship was your main problem. I understand now that it isn’t.
Upon reading your new post here, the irony strikes me that one society’s mental disorders are another society’s vision of what we should strive to be. All of these things that get chalked up to “depersonalization disorder” etc remind me of what other cultures involving things like Buddhism actually think of as positive qualities. Not to be attached to this life. Not to be swayed and effected emotionally by the things that happen. Some people out there are emotional and spend time believing that to become enlightened would be to defeat their emotions. Others are here expressing a lack of emotion and drive and feeling that they are broken because of it. Seems like how humanity works, people at point A would like to be at point B, and those at point B think point A is the answer to their problems.
Seems to me every form of behavior is not categorized as some type of disorder these days, so I don’t put too much stock into what the mental health profession has to say about things. All that matters is how you feel. If you’re not content feeling this way, if you lack emotions but wish that you had them, it’s your prerogative to say that you are unhappy that way. Anyone else’s definition of what it means is kind of irrelevant.
I’ve experienced some of the same things in my life. I have had a similar living situation, living alone and hardly ever having anyone else over here, not even family. Lost my last job over a year ago and haven’t felt like finding one. A general lack of ambition or purpose. I just sit here every day.
In my case I suspect it’s just a defense mechanism. Life never seemed to go the way I wanted it to no matter how hard I tried. So now I’ve stopped caring or trying. It doesn’t bother me in any big way like it sounds it’s effecting you though. I’d hate to say I’m content with my life, just that I’ve also lost the ability or interest in judging whether I am empty, unhappy, unmotivated, etc. I care so little that I stopped worrying or asking myself if I care.
So I guess it’s good to hear that your problems aren’t all about this one person you had feelings for, but I’m not sure what advice to give about the rest of it. Clearly you had to be capable of emotion at some point in order to have lived out those years of your life that you previously told in your story. Perhaps it’s a similar mechanism being triggered in you, so many years of carrying passionately about something/somebody, making life decisions that you thought were going to lead to happiness, all roads always ended up leading to pain and disappointment, maybe it’s a defense mechanism that you are feeling unattached from things now. Or if you’re unlike me and you take the mental health profession more seriously, maybe you agree with contributing it to a “mental disorder”. In which case I’m sure there’s some sort of medication they’d be happy to throw in your lap if you said you were willing to try some. Actually I just scrolled back up and see that you refer to already having tried meds too.
I’m not sure how to help. We’re similar, yet different. I too am living an empty life but have lost the ability to care that it’s empty. Every once in a while I’ll watch a documentary about a public figure or read a certain story and feel a mix of jealousy and pain that my life story is basically blank, but other than that it doesn’t bother me too much. It probably did upset me more in previous years. But I’ve been living this way for a while now, I guess I’ve just gotten used to it. I live in my apartment and look out my windows a few times a day. That’s about it. Can’t say that it brings me joy or pain either way. It just is.
For me it has even developed into an apathy towards suicide. I don’t really care about that either. People tell me it’s horrible and selfish, so fine, I’ll sit here and do this instead, I guess. Even suicide requires energy and motivation, two things which I don’t have. And if I were able to stir up any energy and motivation, I might try to put them towards something more productive than suicide. Although that reminds me of how they say suicides actually occur in manic stages for that very reason, being in a depressed “low” will usually rob people from the ability to kill themselves; it’s the energetic “manic high” where they might finally manage to do it. But yeah, even suicide is currently off my list because I lack the drive that it would take to do that. If I could press a simple button and escape into an endless sleep, I’d probably go for that, I sleep as much as I can to avoid this life anyway. But considering no suicide methods at my disposal are that simple, I’m in no hurry to figure that out either.
So, ultimately, I can keep on rambling but that doesn’t disguise the fact that I don’t really have any advice for you. It’s good that you’re not just in mourning over one person who screwed up a good chunk of your life; but instead you’re experiencing a broader, more generalized problem. Although I’m kind of perplexed that it bothers you since, as I described above, my lack of caring also applies to an inability to care about how empty my life is. So obviously you still care on some level, because you care about how empty things feel. You’re conscious enough to recognize that this isn’t what you want your life to be. It makes you feel pain, and pain is a motivator, sometimes the strongest one, the only one that can bring about any action. Humans can look past a lot of things as long as they’re still comfortable. You’re not comfortable. Emotional pain is a force that is meant to motivate us towards action. Loneliness is a painful emotion that attempts to drive us to make friends, hunger is a pain that tells us to search for food, etc. If you lacked the ability to care about anything, it wouldn’t exactly be registering with you that you live alone and hardly see another soul in your house most of the time. You’d be whistling a tune and not caring about how alone you feel. So it seems like some part of your ability to care is still firing just fine. So if you care enough to hate your life the way it is now, it would seem it can’t be too many steps away to reach a point where you will care enough to try to do something to change it. Your options are to live this way and hate it, to live this way and learn to accept it, attempt to change your life, or end it. I’ve reached the potentially unhealthy point that I’ve just gotten used to it. Thinking about certain friends that I never hear from anymore might stir up a momentary bit of pain, but it doesn’t last long. Then I just go back to watching TV and rotting away. Perhaps it would be best to act while your brain is still telling you “something isn’t right here, and I don’t like it”. But if you feel the only way out to end it, that choice is always on the table too. But it seems to me you’ve created a paradox with this claim of no longer caring about things anymore. Because someone who doesn’t care whether things are bad or good doesn’t seem like a likely candidate to kill themselves. So you care, yet you don’t. You care enough to recognize that you’re unhappy, but perhaps lack the potent kind of caring that would get you out of bed in the morning and tell yourself “I should try to make some new friends”. In which case I can understand why you would feel stuck and frustrated. Perhaps in time you will eventually land on either side of the fence; either it’ll hurt enough that you’ll feel motivated to seek improvements, or you’ll stop caring about it adjust to an empty life, or end it.
Sometimes staring emptiness in the face is the only way past it. Does anything in this world truly take away the emptiness, or is it all just an illusion anyway? Would a new job truly fulfill you? Or a new love? If they would, then those seem like things worth pursuing. It’s not an unsolvable problem if you can think of things that might make you feel better, it just becomes a matter of pursuing them. I keep rambling just because of the paradoxical nature of your post. For instance, you lost a job a month ago, and you “don’t care about finding another one”. That wording confuses me. Do you care that you don’t have a job, or not? If you dislike not having a job, then it would seem you do care about finding another one. And if you really don’t care about finding another one, then it seems like it wouldn’t be causing you pain in the first place. You’re “tired of interacting with people”, which makes it seem like having a lack of contact with people would actually be what you prefer, not a negative, if interaction tires you out. You’ve stated that your lack of emotions and desires is troubling you, which basically means you are feeling emotions about it. You have no money, and you don’t care, so what’s the problem? As you’ve described it, feeling negative about your life doesn’t enter into the chain of command until you start to care-that-you-don’t-care. It’s not a lack of certain things that bothers you according to you, it’s the fact that it doesn’t bothers you that bothers you. So just… stop caring? It sounds like the concerns about the way things are going don’t originate from you (because you’ve said you don’t care), perhaps just from comparison to normal society or what we are told is supposed to make us happy. Not caring about money, jobs, and relationships sounds like a perfect recipe for a content person, except when you add on the layer of disliking the fact that you don’t care. So either commit to caring or not caring. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that you don’t care about these things, you might just be burnt out. Or if you can’t accept the fact that you’ve become a person who doesn’t care… force yourself to. Fake it until it comes back. Start looking for a job and for someone to date.
Sorry for the headache-inducing comment. I got stuck in a mental loop of my own circular logic…
@Thousandcuts- That was quite the long response! I had to actually read it twice to get all the pertinent points, lol. Anyway, one of the things I think maybe got a little side tracked is the idea that, I don’t feel anything about anything at all, and that the lack of emotional response is a choice. I guess that’s where it is hard to really communicate what it is like. I think it comes down to the degrees that people feel their emotions. You have everything from extreme empathic people, who feel everything very acutely, to extreme psychopathic people, those with a complete lack of empathy for others. The interesting thing is that there is no one at all who truly has no emotions. Even your most truest psychopaths still have feelings, but they are all inner based. They still have wants and desires. That’s why a lot of psychopaths and sociopaths end up as serial killers, they are looking for the things that invoke that “rush” of emotions. I’m glad to say I don’t have that leaning. I’m not interested in harming anyone. For me the inner frustration really comes from the fact that I wasn’t born this way. When I first started to experience this, I looked at it like you do. What a great thing not to care! I was protected from having to deal with things, I could just do what I wanted and not feel the consequences, but unfortunately, after twenty years, I do understand the consequences. I do remember what its like to be in love, to laugh because things were funny, and not because I’m supposed to laugh at a joke. To feel sad when someone dies, to feel remorse if I hurt someone. To take comfort in other people. That is the rush I want in my life, to feel the things normally that others do, even the pain. To be able to have stable, healthy relationships with my family, friends, a girlfriend, etc… I’ve spent twenty years trying to find something that will do that for me. As far as choosing to care or not to care. That’s just it, its not a choice. I know what I want in my mind, I just am incapable of making the rest of me feel it. That’s where the end comes in. I’m tired of the struggle to feel. To change anything that would take away this detachment from my own life that I have. Saying I’m going to commit suicide is like my saying I’m going to get the mail. It doesn’t make me sad, happy, angry, or anything. I could say I’m going to keep living, it would invoke the same response. Either way it doesn’t change me emotionally. I guess where I’ve gotten to now is, I’ve given the living for change a good long try and it won’t or can’t change.
Anyway, I feel I’m getting off track myself a bit. I guess my point is its not just cut and dry, choose to do this, or not choose to do this, its perhaps that lack of choice that bothers me the most. So I guess the best way I can sum it up is with a circular statement of my own.
I care that I don’t care because I want to care, I just can’t.
I know that doesn’t make any sense.
@durmmy: Wow, i so get you. I just recently had a bad break up with a person I was in love with and probably still am, I just don’t feel it. I don’t care about myself or anyone else, people annoy me so I pull away. I’m not at your level of apathy but i feel a taste of it and it sucks so bad. I want to feel even if it means that I cry in bed for days, but I want to feel. Sometimes I will cry but its like theres no real emotion to it.
@alina_01 I hope you can let yourself feel the pain of that breakup, and grieve. As bad as it is to say, you need that pain. That’s how you will be able to move on. I think for me, all this started BECAUSE I wouldn’t let myself grieve. I continued to fight, and in the process, my mind in an effort to protect itself from that constant push of grief stripped everything else away from me. If you cry, let yourself cry. There is emotion behind it. You’re feeling the loss even if you don’t realize it. In the end that’s a good thing. I wish I had cried. It took sixteen years for me to shed a tear over that loss of Diana. Extreme prolonged grieving. By the time I did, it meant nothing. I cried for the memory of what I lost, not the actual loss itself. So please, please, please…cry. It will hurt now so you don’t hurt later.
Durmmy, if you could bottle your ability not to feel, you’d be a billionaire. At least I believe so. Don’t take this as me minimizing your feelings and experiences please, but I’ve been looking for years for something to erode my emotions. When you wrote, “Because I’ve taken all the meds, I’ve seen counselors, I’ve tried doing new things to try to kickstart myself inside, and it just doesn’t work. I won’t ever change, and this isn’t a life worth living. I want to close my eyes, and know I won’t have to wake up to this again…” I felt I could totally relate because I’m utterly determined to die (but ironing out the instant and painless parts, and dealing with one relative), and like you, after long, long thought I’ve determined “this isn’t a life worth living.”
But I got there from the other side of the coin. I feel far, far too much. I wish I could get a sexual lobotomy from a surgeon, and at the same time destroy the emotion centers in my brain. Then I wouldn’t crave any intimacy from anyone. Of course, then I wouldn’t know what the hell I’d be living for. If I don’t feel, and I can’t reason that I have some grand responsibility, then why be?
I liked your comment a lot. And even though I don’t know how I could get to where you are (no feelings), I’ll be fantasizing about it up ’til the end. That you can honestly say about all this, “And I don’t care,” earns you massive kudos from me (not that you’d care, but I’m just sayin’.)
I know there are a lot of people on this site that would like to “feel” like I do, and to some degree that’s a good thing. You’re right there are two sides to the coin. You absolutely can feel too much, and you can also feel too little though. Its the knowing you should feel something and not feeling able to that gets me.
” I guess where I’ve gotten to now is, I’ve given the living for change a good long try and it won’t or can’t change.”
LOVE IT!
That is the truth too. I began to ask myself “How many decades does it take for something to change?” that’s when I just realized its not, and since I don’t like living like this, its time to exit stage left.
Dude, I don’t know how old you are, but if we’d gone to school together you’d have been one of my heroes. Ironically, you couldn’t even have appreciated having a groupie!
So, I wanna know a lot more about this. I want to learn how your therapists derived these two diagnoses. I don’t but stock in psychocrappy, but I’d love to be in the room, invisible, listening to what you said over time that got the world’s most useless PhD to determine that you’re psychopathic or suffer from an even more exotic “disorder.” Care to share more?
And I really want to know, even to experience it vicariously, what it’s like to sit at home for weeks on end not caring that you’re alone. I’m literally dying from loneliness. I’d give my right arm to cut out the ability to feel loneliness.
Man. I didn’t even know there were people like you. Why aren’t you teaching classes at community centers around the world? Seriously–I’m sure people like me would even put you up so you wouldn’t have to worry about room and board!
I’m 37, well I’ll be 38 on Monday, so close enough for government work. I think the first diagnosis of depersonalization comes from how I relate things when I would talk to them. When I talk about myself or my life, its like I’m reading a book to a kid. I talk like I’m telling a story that is about someone else. There is an overwhelming sense of detachment when I talk about my story to counselors that they all pick up on. No emotional attachment to the events of my life. As for the psychopathy tests, those can be pretty standardized but there are a few that measure someones emotional responses that dig a little deeper. On average of the 5 or so tests I’ve taken I range from about 87% to 93% psychopathic in my responses to those test questions.
As for what its like to sit home for weeks not caring I’m alone, I guess the best way I can answer that is that I just don’t even realize it. It doesn’t matter to me if people are there or not. I don’t feel the lonliness, I just register that I’m alone. Like its just a statement of fact. Even when I’m with people, it doesn’t change that. I just register the fact that there are people there. Only then, I do realize that I have to say the right things, or do certain things so that they don’t see the nothing inside me. I am a master at faking a persona that is not who I really am, to a point. The more people spend time around me, the more they see that I don’t feel anything, and its not something they can relate to.
37, huh? Yungun! 😉 Thanks for elaborating. What’s really got me excited is whether one can learn to be a lot more like you. Do you think it’s teachable? Practicable? Any chance you can become my Sensei?
I was thinking about all those tests and labels, WGAFF (who gives a flying…)? Screw them. So you don’t fit their expectations of what you should be, how you should respond. BS (to them). When a sociopath is sadistically killing enemies in the field during wartime, he’s a hero. But when he’s antisocial back at home once the war he’s been instrumental in winning (and which has secured people’s “freedoms”) is over–when he does exhibit the kinds of emotions everybody else wants him to, he’s a monster. Talk about social engineering–as if people were cattle or cogs they could fit into the machine as they conceive of it.
Now why can’t I find people like you around me? OK, I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but really. I went to college. And I thought people my age would be more like you, resistant to the mold *they* try to squeeze us into. But, nope. Those kids were facsimiles of their parents–bankers, lawyers, and future CEOs.
So, can you teach me? Or is it just a gift you have–like being one of the X-Men, with their super-powered abilities?
I got it! We’ll call you Dontgiveashit-Man! Or how ’bout Featherinthewind-Man?! (OK, too “Serenity.”)
I’m pretty sure its not teachable. I wouldn’t advocate it if it was anyway. Don’t glamourize it too much. While it might be nice for someone who is dealing with a lot of shit in their heads to not feel the bad things, the flip side is that you don’t feel the good things either. Life passes you by, and you don’t participate in it other than in a strictly peripheral sense. I’m not sure about that last part of your comment, I hope you’re not making fun of it, but it definitely isn’t superhero shit or some mystical power. There’s nothing cool about it.