Would have I jumped?

Previously: If all else fails…

Good and bad things happened after that day when I almost ended everything on that bridge. More bad things than good things, unfortunately. Was it worth continuing my life? If I had seen into my future, would have I jumped instead?

I was 30 years old, I had no college degree and I had left college again. I also had left my job and my professional background was so mixed and confusing that it would be hard to get a decent job again… I didn’t really leave that bridge alive because I trusted I still could be successful, in fact I had no idea of what would happen, I thought I would simply end up killing myself a few weeks later after confirming that there was no hope for me. At first I felt depressed, I didn’t have much ideas, but I decided to move back to a city where I have already lived before, a city that I didn’t like much, but where there would be more opportunities for me — actually, the same city of that bridge.

It would take a while for me to get back to a college due to the dates regarding the selection process and the terms. And since I didn’t feel I needed to prepare myself for the exams, I spent most of my free time working — I admit that I am sort of workaholic — I started to work as a freelancer in some projects from my previous boss and from there I got some other clients. To my surprise, I was soon earning much more than what I earned on my last job and at least financially everything was pretty good again.

Up to that point there was nothing special about my plan: resume college, start working in a job related to the degree I was pursuing, get the diploma and then try to leave the country. That was pretty much what I had in mind. However, one year later, when I was about to go back to classes, I faced a big setback: due to some unbelievably absurd bureaucratic reasons, the university wanted me to start the course as a freshman, taking classes that I had already taken. I won’t go into details to show how absurd and how disconnected from reality their reasoning was, what matters is that this was something that hit me very hard. It would unnecessarily delay my graduation in two years. Fuck! It was already disturbing the fact that I was going to get my degree so late in life, and now they wanted me to waste two more years! This really hit me like a train…

I tried to go to classes in the beginning, but I felt miserable there. I felt like I only had a bit of sand in my life’s hourglass, and that I was sitting and watching it being wasted. Perhaps I should have jumped from that bridge because I would only keep struggling in life after all.

I got so depressed that I felt numb. I would wake up, take hours to leave bed, eat whatever was more easily available in the fridge, go to the computer, make a Herculean effort to work the least necessary to do not lose any client, and go back to bed wishing not to wake up anymore. I only didn’t have the idea of doing something to kill myself because all I wanted was to do nothing at all, everything was a chore.

It took me more than a month to get out of that almost vegetative state, and what helped me was a trip. I knew that traveling was one of the things I most enjoyed in life, and since I was able to work from anywhere, I decided to spend some days visiting a country that I still didn’t know. As expected, the trip was great and even though I didn’t feel alive and kicking, I came back from my quasi-dead state.

By then, more than one year and a half had passed since the bridge, and there I was, about to restart my life for the nth time.

When will I stop beginning?
When will I stop surviving?
When will I start living?

I had dreams, I had plans, I had potential, I had courage, but my time is vanishing. It’s becoming too late for me to do the things I wanted. I am sorry if you are older than me and if this is going to offend you or if this is going to make you feel like killing yourself, but don’t fool yourself, you can’t apply the saying “it’s never too late” for everything in life. There are things that I wanted to do that I can’t anymore simply because time passed by and I lost the chance. I’m afraid that it’s still going to take me a few years to get out of the mess my life is and go from struggling to living, and by then I will be getting close to my forties. I would look back and see that the best part of life, or at least that part where humans are able to reach their full potential, had gone to waste. My body would already be in a decay process, and if I couldn’t accomplish anything up to now, what could I possibly expect of the future if not a mediocre existence?

Would have I jumped?

Next: My life is just an image of a rollercoaster anyway