I’m the problem. My mind, my personality, how I relate to the world. Everything about me is wrong. I’m a waste of life. A waste of existence. I make things pointlessly miserable and painful for myself. It’s so fucking stupid. There could be someone here enjoying life in my place. Using the resources, the space I take up and actually making the most of it. Instead there’s just this misery I’ve created for myself. I don’t want to be this anymore. But I’m too afraid, or too attached to being this to end it. Too afraid to let go. Too attached to ideas of who I used to be, or who I could’ve been.
share your suicide story
Report Post
Please log in to report posts
14 comments
Yet again, you’ve perfectly summed up how I feel on most days. The only difference is, i’m currently trying to find out who I want to leave my stuff to when i’m no longer around. I haven’t narrowed it down yet, but I feel slightly better having answers to these questions before I… Leave.
Sounds like you’ve started the process of moving towards the exit. Whereas I’m still deeply attached to my misery.
I’ve thought of that too, there are old classmates of mine who tragically died young for one reason or another, and I think “They should be here instead of me.”
Or thinking that someone else could take my life and make it something so much better than I have.
I don’t know, I’m trying to get myself together but I’m failing at it.
We all have our moments of wanting to go back to simpler times, or thinking of where we could’ve been if x y and z. There’s a lot we have to consider than our forefathers didn’t or couldn’t. It’s never easy. The hope is to figure out some kind of place for ourselves, a niche where we can attempt to feel some level of peace.
For me, I think pretty much anyone could take my resources and make a better existence than I have. But that’s probably a reflection of how messed up my mind is.
but that’s not how it works, nothing comes rushing in to fill gaps. If you take down a lousy bridge there’s no automatic force to put up a good one……. and maybe that lousy bridge was the only way to town…. town dies, that’s not good.
It’s this whole eastern idea, of not knowing your impact. I find it true in programming also; often the most unremarkable element, the useless and silly one that you can cut for length right? Nope, doing important stuff.
Same is true of people, purpose wise. Not everyone is out there storming the gates, someone is sweeping the floors. However if the floors got dirty logistics would go to hell and wars are won on logistics. Sometimes the guy doing a menial job can have a huge impact without knowing it, like catching a flaw, or comforting someone.
You don’t know who that someone might be someday, or who they might matter to. You could change the whole world by feeding someone hungry, if that person lives and goes on to achieve stuff.
and there’s always the purpose of the bad example. Someone to aspire not to be. The world needs those. People who illustrate choices that don’t work out, who can tell their stories. It’s my fallback.
So join me, be a cautionary tale, together we’ll warn all the young folk not to adopt our foolish ways.
It’s not really about the impact on others. I have parents and a sister who’d be devastated by my loss.
It’s more about not wanting to be this miserable person, when you know life could so easily be fine if you weren’t who you are, but not being able to change.
That is such an interesting concept I’d love to explore in meta cognitive methods; To have enough seperation from self to find the self objectional is fundamentally a meta cognitive starter exercise. You have displaced the self.
But what keeps…. I don’t have the word, somewhere between curious and feeling guilty for it, cheeky sort. Befuddles my ability to tackle is the aspiration; what you know life could be if — followed by the denial and remorse of self not being able to change.
Like there’s still some fire in there. That’s not fire gone out, that’s fire denied fuel.
Stop me if I’m being dramatic.
Which is the mask, the self or the presented self? There’s parts of yourself you’ve never given voice to perhaps, or things you were made to feel ashamed of.
But I spent too much time with an Eastern religious man a few years ago, still everything comes out about unity and harmony and whatnot. I believe in them, yes, but maybe some disharmony is necessary? Though the Tao would call this a great paradox with a shake of the head.
I think he was Cherokee too, which made it even weirder. Asiatic religious circles are hard enough, but inter tribal relations?
sorry got lost in myself for a bit. But a self is a disposable thing in my mind, an instance of a program. Each day my brain boots, loads self…. but with revisions based on overnight data! The self that was died a bit when I breathed this morning. And so tonight I breath my last as this self. Updates are definitely in order.
I mean then there’s the really far extreme, which can be done I’m just not sure how. You can force a dissociative state, to protect your mind from itself. You’ll probably come out the other side different.
Imagine blacking out right now, and waking up next March. That’s what it’s like, really long nap….. only get better people to watch you nap than I got. I didn’t force it, but it came when I couldn’t stand being me anymore so bad, and suddenly I wasn’t. I wrote a new fairy story, unedited thing was so full of plotholes, it was more plotholes than story, narrative thinker’s worst nightmare.
But, it’s better than being dead. Am I allowed to say that? I’ve seen some corpses. Not many, but enough to know what a dead person looks like. When it’s your neighbor, it’s not them anymore. Even your loved one, not that long after you see they’ve departed.
and I drive past the cemetary fairly regularly lately. How absurd it feels all those graves go unvisited, and a wall of names for who goes to the wall of names?!
You come from dirt, you go back to being dirt the whole Hakuna Matata circle of life. The middle parts supposed to be the good bit though, isn’t it? I mean then you go back and tell the other dirt about the stuff you saw, well mostly through microplastics.
I’ll stop it….. this is about to launch into a Lorax fable and none of us have the endurance for that.
I suppose I’d say I have enough distance to occasionally take a step back from the self and try to see it more clearly, without ever really being able to live outside it in the day to day. Ultimately, my physical reality is what drives me – my impulses, desires etc. Reason is the slave of the passions. There is absolutely “fire” still there, but the perceived inability to act on it in a satisfactory way repeatedly forces me back in on myself, looking for a solution that doesn’t exist.
I don’t believe there’s such thing as a “true” or “authentic self”. I believe the mind is a ball of conflicting and competing interests, which for most people is socially modulated into something that appears vaguely coherent. Though there are absolutely parts of myself that I hide from others (and even from myself most of the time.) There are also surely aspects of myself that I’m not even capable of perceiving, but obviously I can’t think about them.
I suppose there’s the “sense of self”, the experience of being an individual with seemingly coherent properties. Which presumably is a function of the brain (or some part of the brain.) But the characteristics that comprise it are constantly in flux, though obviously there are familiar patterns. I think it’s not so much dying and being reborn, as constantly flickering in and out. The “I” experience has no actual substance of it’s own – it finds itself inhabiting a shifting whirlpool of impulses and sensations from moment to moment, though usually with the comfortable conviction that all is just as it was before.
Assuming that “being dead” is an absence rather than an experience, I suppose it depends on what your life comprised of and how much value you placed in that. I think there’s certainly circumstances where “not being” is preferable, though it’s hard for me to identify all of them.
Possibly the crucial question is “what’s it like being dirt?” Or bacteria. Or grass. Or graveworms. Or birds. Or energy. And is it better than what my brain is doing to itself right now? Seemingly no way of knowing though.
The middle part is indeed supposed to be the good bit, and I think it easily can be, if you have a few decent advantages and a brain that’s not sabotaging itself too much. The first 9 years of my life… pretty good. Would recommend. Would visit again. The next decade… touch and go. Could’ve gone either way. Everything since then… pretty pointless. Skip to the end.
So, like I said, start working on dissociating. Now a day later I realize there’s no reason you have to turn it off. Once you learn it as a skill, YOU have to decide to come back out, or not. The part of you that is you is no longer present, you disappear in your own head.
Never thought I’d be telling someone how TO do it. Anything mood altering helps, staying up a few days, sleep a few days straight, anything atypical that makes you feel less human.
The one time I did it completely, I stopped questioning myself, doubting. Somehow I turned that off. Any fantastic things I thought of; sure, why not, things are weird enough already. So I detached from reality and became very very silly.
I think I’ve made it clear to all the power brokers in my life that my hand is on that lever. I know how to become nothing at all, and I’ll do it.
Hell of a threat. It seems to work……
I’ll admit deep down, all I ever really knew how to do was frighten people. I’m always looking for their fear, for their soft spot. Empathy was a side effect. I wouldn’t be that deep in people’s business if I wasn’t deeply threatened.
I don’t really understand how you’d be able to control something like that, in order to still function, work, appear normal in conversation etc? How do you detach from reality while simultaneously forcing yourself to sit at a computer for 10 hours, making yourself concentrate on scrutinising highly tedious text for errors? I think I need my capacity to question, to think analytically, in order to survive.
idk. It’s possible for two problems to coexist simultaneously, and I think the world is pretty problematic too.
It sounds like a lot of your pain is self inflicted. You’re punishing yourself. I wish you wouldn’t do that, there’s enough pain in the world as is.
Sure, this world is messed up in all kinds of ways. But in terms of my current experience, the issues are all self-created. Nobody is forcing me to feel this way or act this way.
It is self-inflicted, but it’s not all just punishing myself. It’s fixating on things that can’t be, things I can’t change. It’s getting caught up in how alone & isolated I feel. How estranged & alienated I feel from everyone. It’s the unjustified anger & resentment I feel towards everyone, against the universe, for allowing me to become this.
And I don’t know how to stop feeling like this, or thinking like this, or relating to the world this way. I don’t know how to cope with it. I get to the point pretty much every night where I want an out, and there’s no out, except sleeping pills (which leave me drowsy and depressed the next day.)
Sleeping pills are the worst. I used to rely on them but you’re right, they leave you more depressed the next day. I suspect they fuck you up in other ways mentally too. I think I had really distorted perception when I was using them every day. I switched to cannabis instead. Less side effects the day after.
Do you ever try to make friends? Or find a support group?
Yeah, I’ve heard there’s a link between them and increased risk of dementia, and I wouldn’t be surprised, given the way they make you feel. But when that’s the only way I know to temporarily escape the feelings, that’s what I do.
No, I don’t try to make friends. I know I should, but the prospect terrifies me. Social avoidance is one of my key issues – I’m terrified of rejection. Plus there’s a lot about myself that I can’t be open about.