I just… do. not. know.

I’m 30 now and have a family. I have a wife, a son, a house (rented), a car, a job. I still remember the very first time I wished I was dead. And I’m exhausted because 20 years later, not a day goes by when I don’t still feel like that. Sometimes it will just be a fleeting thought and sometimes it will be an entire day of wrestling with my own psyche to overpower those feelings.

I remember having those ‘wish I’d never been born’ feelings. I was about 10. I was bullied. At home, at school, in the street. I guess I was always weak somehow. Everyone else could see it in me. I would get beat up and abused by my Dad at home. I would get laughed at and sneered at by teachers and kids at school. I would get held up by kids in the street and beaten up. I always remember feeling like everything would be fine if I just didn’t exist.

When I was 12, I moved towns. I finally got to live with my Mum. Things were looking up. Only they weren’t. I didn’t change. I didn’t get beaten up at home but I was still bullied at school and on the streets. The problem wasn’t the place, it was me. Then I read a news story in the paper about how a woman had committed suicide by swallowing loads of toilet roll. She had some kind of asphyxiation and that was her out. I was 12 when I copied this. I was 12 when I first tried to kill myself.

I’ve tried several times in the 18 years since. Pills, slit wrists, drugs, alcohol, drugs again, more pills. Notice there’s nothing too permanent there. There’s no hanging, or gassing, or properly slitting wrists. Maybe I’m so weak that the idea of that permanence is enough to scare me down. But that isn’t really the point. It’s just background. It’s just evidence of ‘cries for help’ and not really being ‘for real’.

The last time was in 2008 and it was a year before I met my, now, wife. It truly was bottom and I truly intended for it to succeed. But I also drunkenly called a friend to tell her what I had done. So maybe even that wasn’t real. A lot of therapy and counselling and life happened after that. A lot changed and for the most part my life is nothing like it used to be. Apart from it still has me in it. And I still have that ‘voice’ in me. The one saying ‘you’re not worth it’, and ‘they’ll be better off without you’, and ‘this is all a joke, and you’re the punchline’.

What’s brought me here today is a series of events.
1) ATOS PIP Healthcare checkup – Yes ma’am. I do still suffer from acute clinical depression and generalised anxiety disorders. Yes ma’am I still find every single day a tremendous struggle. Yes ma’am my chest feels like my ribs are a venus flytrap crushing my heart and lungs in situ. No ma’am I don’t have a job where I can honestly say I have any real contact with human beings because I would almost certainly crumble to dust as a result of it.
2) Constant demented nightmares of my wife leaving me to fuck other men. Constant crushing dreams that I allow my son to be kidnapped, killed, tortured, raped, instead of being a good father and looking after him. Constant, nightly anxieties before even getting to close my eyes that tomorrow will be worse and I’ll be exposed as a fraud and a worthless piece of shit.
3) A colleague. Hung themselves. No one knows why. And I’m thinking, if they can do it, why don’t I?

And I just don’t know why I don’t/can’t. Whatever. Apart from if I do, then everything I think about myself, everything that tells me to do it. They will all be transferred to the people I care about and who care about me.
‘He let us down’.
‘He wasn’t man enough to deal with “life”‘.
‘My father was a waste of space’.

So everything stays inside. Everything stays in my head and everything is locked away because I’d rather fight the voices in my head, than think about the voices I would leave in other peoples heads.