I’m surrounded by passivity inside. Just a constant, “What if?”, “You could just…”, “If only I weren’t a coward, I’d…”.
Tonight it was “what if I owned a gun”. Spent my walk home imagining being gone in an instant. Dissociating myself out of existence. Imagining taking a gun to my head. Imagining pulling the trigger. Omitting the pain- wishful thinking, really- and imagining no longer existing. Imagining the peace of being gone. Being dead.
You know, I haven’t been here in a while. There were a couple of years where I forgot about this place in a good way, and then a couple of years where I simply was too in it to think about anything and still hadn’t remembered, and then some years of therapy for those years, but I don’t think I’ve ever really fully left here. Does anyone? I want to hope for it, I’ve seen it for others. And honestly, do I want to leave? It’s comforting, in a way, being back. Being able to spill my darkest thoughts without judgement or material concern.
I don’t want to be here. Alive.
I’m tired. I hate myself. I can’t see the good that others tell me they see. I don’t feel I deserve to be alive. There’s no tangible, clear reason for it, I just don’t deserve to be here (my anxiety could give you a laundry list, but it is my anxiety speaking). It would be so much better if I just didn’t exist.
And that’s the thing. Call back to my cowardice. For all that I don’t want to exist- and trust me, it’s an entire daily cacophony in my head of “better off dead”- for the actual life of me, I can’t do it. I can’t pull the trigger- metaphorically or literally. It’s exhausting. Wanting to die but not wanting to put in the work to get it done. I have a stack of invitations for a dinner party in front of me, right now, that I’ve been putting off sending out, just because I don’t want to exist- and sending them means I have to exist in a couple weeks.
I keep switching between not wanting to “exist” and not wanting to be “alive”, and honestly? I think there’s a difference when I use one or the other. Not wanting to exist is an intangible, soft, non-decisive, cowardly wishful thinking. Not wanting to be alive is a more tangible, violent, and visceral thought. They both have the same end goal, but one requires no work or pain or necessarily even the real world in order to imagine, while the other is despairing and painful and real to think about. Tonight started with a lot of easy thoughts of nonexistence. Not that it makes it less real. But there was a definite shift in the tone of my thoughts when I started considering the real world process of actually shooting myself in the head. It was at that point that the unbidden thought of “this is why I don’t own a gun” popped in. Because truthfully, I’ve never been able to follow through before, but the ease of loading a gun, pointing, and shooting makes the possibility of a snap second decision a reality-were I to let myself have access to a gun.
It would just be so easy.