These past few days I’ve been letting myself remember more of who I was before this last one two punch of soul draining carnage. One thing that keeps coming up is what might have been. There were women who I might have married (or in one case stayed married to) and at the time I was courting them, it appeared to me that spending my life with them would be peace and honey forever. In the present I wonder if it really would have been. I was young, and hopeful, and now I’m less young, and disillusioned.
I don’t think any of them could have saved me. It seems that nothing could have, but that’s another strange cognitive effect; once things happen, it appears that everything else leading up to it caused it, even if it didn’t. It’s why leading up to completing a goal I can be riddled with self doubt, but following completion I’m bothered that I didn’t do more.
I’m disassociating, or at least that what I thought was going on. I sit in the stillness, not wanting to do anything, lacking desire and willpower to do any more than sit. Sometimes I distract myself with music or shows, but that’s just a pretext to allow me to sit, and get rid of time en masse. Supposedly, disassociation is a bad thing. I was reading a book on mental health outcomes and it discussed how that level of disconnection often leads to injury or death,
then my thought; “A man can only dream.” I did a little self harm this past week, more than I’ve done in awhile. I very seriously flirted with death.
I keep saying that I don’t want to recover, as if it was a place I arrived by intention. Yet, it might be more accurate to say I have lost the willpower to recover. It appears perfectly obvious that given sufficient motivation and resources, I could return to function, perhaps even better than before the crash. How? For what purpose? It is my observation that GIVEN the apparent expense of being alive or awake, no purpose is meaningful enough to raise the energy/funds/effort.
I am a boat adrift in a tiny pond, run aground on all sides, and with no open water in sight. My option right now is to rot, to wait for nature to catch up with my philosophic decline. It’s probably sad, to someone, must be given their apparent concern that I not die….. It is what it is. I tried for 34 years, my entire life, to grasp for some purpose or use with enough draw to keep me going. My understanding is that isn’t how the economy works.
The economy demands others adapt to what IT needs, which appears quite easy for the neurotypical. I can’t do it. I take my extensive training in things that are utterly unprofitable as an insult to the very concept of consciousness. When I drop out, it is with hatred for that which was denied; thriving, purpose, rewards, social acclaim.
Right now I want to outrun expectation, and abandon the shallow world into which I was born. Death seems more practical and accessible. Further, it occurs to me that I could escape the cage I’m in only to discover a different cage which must be escaped. So even in my desires, I struggle to find a point, the idea that I’m wasting my time and effort dominates.
1 comment
These are great points. This one rings especially true in my case: “I keep saying that I don’t want to recover, as if it was a place I arrived by intention. Yet, it might be more accurate to say I have lost the willpower to recover.”
Exactly. It drives me up a wall when someone says “you have to WANT to get better” as if that’s their excuse for giving up on you. We all desperately want to get better, but when you’ve run out of strength there’s nothing you can do. So recovery stops being an active pursuit, and instead we shift into waiting for a rescue. Your analogy of a boat run aground is perfect. Once we lose our willpower, we’re stranded.
Maybe that’s where antidepressants are supposed to help. Or even recreational drugs used responsibly. Maybe they can give us a temporary artificial belief in a meaningful purpose, and with that we can charge up our batteries again.
Doubtful though. I’ve never heard of meds that can accomplish such a feat, at least not when you’re this far down the hole. So we rot and think of missed opportunities (the past) because there sure isn’t much of a future to think about. Could someone in the past have saved us? I’m inclined to think not, because if they couldn’t save us back then when there was still hope, then they’d be no match for what we’ve now become. Still, it can be a nice diversion to imagine that there was once a chance.