Everyone makes painful, frustrating, aggravating experiences. But the question is – are there also some wonderful experiences to look forward to, that make it worth to put up with the bad ones? You can’t define the value of either experiences by logic (neither positive, nor negative). Perhaps, it’s even not possible to describe them in such a way, that people, who didn’t experience them, truly understand them. I believe, the most powerful positive experiences are built upon the feeling of affinity, belonging to this world. It’s not something that can be learned or forced upon oneself or another person.
If anything you touch feels distant, alien at best,
any place you try to bond with annoys or bores you more than soothe,
any person you meet means so little to you, that you’re just glad to not be tied to them (or regret if you are) –
what is the point to go on?
It’s like you draw cards from a seemingly endless deck: If you lose, something bad happens to you (randomly, mostly just small things). But if you win, nothing happens at all.
Once you played this game long enough with the same result, you don’t feel like drawing any more cards. At some point you’re wondering already – was it ever different? You don’t really remember anymore, or don’t even want to remember…
I can’t say, that this description matches my situation 100% yet, but sadly more and more as years go by…
And it’s not just the emptiness itself: In absence of love, deep sympathy, dreams, etc. – there’s nothing to mend old wounds, nothing to distract tiny critters living in the darkest corners of your heart from eating you alive.
Does it make sense to stay here just because “suicide is <bad>” (replace “bad” by any condemning or insulting word), while slowly losing sanity, turning more and more into a living dead, barely recognizing yourself anymore?
4 comments
BrightShadow,
This is a very thoughtful post. I believe – as I always have – that it comes down to hope. If you feel things are hopeless and will never improve, then this understandably can cause a person to feel as if living is pointless and painful.
I like what you said about positive experiences being connected to a feeling of belonging in the world. I think, at the end of the day, that is what everyone wants.
L4Y
(L4Y@cogeco.ca)
I love how beautifully you described your pondersome thoughts.
Hmm, it is truly important when we reach that point where we have to stop drawing all these cards and think “Why should I keep doing this? What if I continue doing this and I just end up wasting my efforts? Is it pointless?” Doubting our goal to keep on hoping for that one good deck of cards to appear in our hands.
It’s quite important because we took the time to stop and consider our other options; to give up our quest for meaning/happiness/love/etc. or to keep doing this even though we’re aware that things can go wrong again. Or perhaps run off course from your path in life and go do something different or risky that could possibly ignite passion back into you. (Sometimes when I feel dead, I go do something that would make me feel alive like cliff dive with friends or paint until I lose too much sleep) I think it makes sense for you to be here, who else could best understand people who feel like ‘the living dead’ besides those who have already seen death in the face.
I’m sorry you feel like this. This post reminds me of myself a lot. But what L4Y said is true. In the absence of happy, fulfilling experiences, many people continue to go on with life because they have hope.
Thank you everyone for your kind replies!
Just to empathize one thing:
Living without much (any) hope / chances etc., way below 0 line is bad enough, but by far the worst thing IMO is when you change into something, that your past self would be disgusted at – if you past and your future self could meet. Preventing this is akin to killing yourself to prevent a capture by an enemy. Even not pro-choice people are often sympathetic of suicides by people anticipating severe brain damage. I would extend it to the cases when no brain damage occurs, yet you feel a horrible change happening and you’re sure, that nothing can be done about it.