only love will save me

I tried to kill myself last month.  I had wanted to kill myself for several years now, but it wasn’t until last month that I found the intense suicidal drive to plan an almost certainly lethal attempt.  It took around 15 days to go from the decision to getting to a place where I could actually do it.  But when I got there, with my handgun and my suicide notes, I just couldn’t do it.  I tried so hard to pull the trigger, but I wasn’t psychologically prepared to kill myself.  I’d still rather be dead than alive, but I just don’t have the psychological self-discipline to inflict lethal violence on myself yet.

I ran back to civilization very disappointed in myself but hopeful that maybe things can turn around.  Since then, my life has taken a serious turn for the worse, and now things are worse than they’ve ever been.  I want to be dead so badly, but I’m not prepared to kill myself.

But since I’m not ready to kill myself yet (and I’m taking some measures to address that), I figured that I’m going to give life another chance in the meantime.  One benefit of my “near suicide event” is that it’s clarified a lot of things in my head.  Before, the concept of killing myself and why I was so unhappy with life was very abstract.  Now, they are more concrete.

Only love will make me want to live; that is, finding someone to love and to love me back.  I’ve been a semi-loner for most of my life.  I’ve had friends throughout and some of them have been close, but I let them drift away and now all I have are acquaintances or distanced friends.  No family at all.  Until my early 20’s, I thought that I was perfectly happy being alone.  I saw how miserable and unhappy my biological parents were and I thought, “No, not for me.”  But then something happened — maybe it was damnable maternal instincts/biology kicking in — and I suddenly, for the first time in my life, felt very, very lonely.  For awhile, I denied it, but recent events have made it clear that I have to face it directly, else, I will die.

The core, mutually exclusive choice in my life is this: find love and companionship or kill myself.

I won’t accept this life forever.  Something has to give here.

I’m not giving up on the suicide route, but I’m not going to give up on life yet either.  I’ve decided, starting now, that I’m going to do everything I can to fix my life.  No more self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, no more self-pity, no more doing nothing about feeling lonely or denying that it’s a problem or fearing rejection or anything like that.  I fear killing myself much, much more than a rejection experience or two, and knowing that helps.  It’s going to be an uphill battle and maybe it won’t work out, in which case I’d have to kill myself.

I’m going all in this one last time, with everything that I’ve got left.  Wish me luck!