Back here again

I used to post here when I was a teenager, and now I’m in my late twenties, so. The more things change, etc. Sorry if any of this is out of place. I haven’t gone reading around.

On the one hand, even just making a new account here made me remember the problems I used to be dealing with, and I’m at least doing much better than I was the last time I was around in, like, all of those old areas. On the other hand, it’s bleak and soul crushing in a way that I can’t put into words that instead of being able to enjoy my life, I’ve been so beaten down by completely different issues that I’m back to thinking, man, I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s probably worse this way, actually. It feels like I dug myself out of a cave-in to be crushed by a piano.

And I want to be clear, this isn’t what would happen to anyone reading this, necessarily. There are people in my circumstances and worse that crawled away and are doing fine. That’s another part of what makes this so bleak. It’s nothing that I did. It’s nothing that I could have done better. It’s sheer bad luck, over and over again. I feel like I’m cursed. I’m not religious or superstitious— at this point I’m still really starting to believe that the universe or god or life itself or something is trying to tell me to give up already, and it’s getting annoyed that I haven’t gotten the message.

The first time I thought that I shouldn’t be alive, I was, I dunno, 5 or 6. It just hit me. I remember looking around and thinking, this isn’t what living is supposed to be. This is wrong. I must be doing something wrong. I first tried to kill myself when I was 9, after a similar moment. I spent all of high school with my plans for college being to pick somewhere really far away and just, tragically, not make it there. Disappear on the road somewhere. Ever since I’ve had coherent thoughts I’ve been struggling with the idea that I’m doomed no matter what I do and I should at least get to see myself out on my own terms.

And I still got over it. My childhood was fucking ridiculous. My teenage years almost killed me many times. I was self harming from middle school until after high school graduation because I was in so much pain it was very literally driving me crazy that I couldn’t see it, that it wasn’t getting better or going away, and at least anything I did to myself physically would be there, and heal. All that and I still got better. I got older, got control of my life. Generally, I’m a reasonable fucking person, so I did okay. I got along okay.

But I’m cursed. I started saying that as a joke, and I don’t know how much I mean it at this point.

I keep repeating this, because it really is the crux of it: I’ve always felt out of place. And, y’know, obviously. Nothing that was happening to me was normal. It also never let up. I had very few chances to socialize or make connections for myself, plus I’m autistic. Any chances I did get usually didn’t go well. I was isolated, traumatized, and no one ever had any idea of what to do with me. I didn’t talk about any of what I was dealing with or thinking about, mostly. I didn’t have much else going on. I was boring. I was awkward, and I was quietly losing my fucking mind, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And now I’m sick. It’s not life threatening probably. I don’t actually fucking now, because I spent all of last year and what now feels like way too much time and money for no help whatsoever. I go out to lunch with an old friend and get so tired after less than an hour that I slump over onto the table. I get so exhausted and have so much trouble thinking and paying attention that I can’t drive unless I absolutely have to, because I get into wrecks. I’m so tired all the time that just doing my job (which I might lose soon, by the way, because the company is slowly going under) and sort of mostly taking care of all the other shit I need to do to not die is more than I can handle. There’s no public transportation where I live. All the specialists I needed to see last year were further than I could go on my own, and eventually people stopped being able to help me, and I was out of money anyway. I’m stuck in my house. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t do anything. I can barely think. My body hurts all the time and it’s sometimes literally decomposing out from under me.

I’ve lost friends, my family is a disaster, I can’t consistently even hold text conversations enough to make or maintain new relationships. My best friend of 17 years told me, verbatim, to my face, that they only want to hang out with me when they have nothing better to do, because I’m so tired all the time and it’s boring. I can’t even blame them. I’m so miserable living like this that no matter how hard I try I’m sure I’m still not good company, and I’ve never been the greatest to hang out with anyway.

I’ve gotten this far. I’ve tried so hard to keep going. I made it so much longer than I thought I would. I don’t really want to die. But every time I ask myself if I want to keep doing this, the answer recently has been no, emphatically. I keep thinking about when I was, god, really just a baby, thinking that there was fundamentally some error in me existing at all. It feels like it.

Today was a pretty good day for me. Health-wise, I’m coherent, and I had to sleep for a lot of the day for it, but I’ve had enough energy to do a few things. My body doesn’t hurt too much. Some other symptoms are around but bearable. Someone messaged me to chat for a second. I did a couple chores.

And that’s it. That’s a good day. Bearable, mostly. Kind of fun, for five minutes. That’s all it takes. Most of my days haven’t been good. Not for about two years now. And on top of my baseline misery and despair, bad shit keeps happening, to me and in general. I stagger on from the last brick to the head, and as soon as I can see straight I get hit with something else.

And then, on top of that— I literally, practically, physically don’t know how long I can keep doing this. I have to work to live, and I had enough trouble getting hired when I could string sentences together and think clearly. Staying where I live now is killing me for a lot of reasons, but I can’t move by myself, and even if I could, I don’t know how long I’d make it by myself afterwards. I don’t have the money to just hire people to do the things I don’t have anyone else for.

I can’t go anywhere. I can’t do anything. My life and my prospects and my health keep getting worse and worse. I’m bored and lonely and terrified and hopeless. There are no resources available to me. The very few people who do— or did— love me have mostly stopped bothering with me. And even if they hadn’t, I can’t keep up with them anyway. I can barely move some days. I’m not fun. I’m not smart. I’m not interesting. I’m not worth listening to, or helping, or having around, according to apparently most people who have met me, the medical system, the government, and potentially the universe or god itself.

I’m so tired. I’m so tired of doing my best, even doing well, even succeeding, and— having it not matter. I’m just not right. People just don’t like me. They’re not interested in me. And that was fine, mostly, for a long time. It stung, but it’s fair. But now it’s a death sentence. I don’t even think if I magically got the power to make everyone love me that I would use it, not even to help myself out of this, not even to get a single fucking doctor to listen to the words coming out of my mouth.

And, like, the response most people would have to all this would probably be to “temporary problem” speech me. But here’s the thing: the main reason I almost didn’t survive high school was because I was so completely flattened by the idea that no matter what I did, or how much I tried, or how much better I did get, it wouldn’t be enough. I would still be wrong. I would still, fundamentally, unavoidably, just not be enough— not for myself, not for anyone else, not for anything that I might ever want to do. I had to drop out of college because I couldn’t do class while working full time, and I couldn’t afford to do it any other way available to me. I never had dreams of what to do with my life in the first place, but if I did I would have had to give up on them. I’m sick of my own company and so is everyone else. It almost killed me then, just thinking it, and it’s killing me now, in practical terms: I’m just not enough.

There’s nothing I can do to not be myself. But I can take myself out of the equation. I can, finally, just not have to deal with my own shit anymore. Most of what I’m dealing with isn’t my own fault. Most of it would even be solvable, if things were just a little bit different, or if I was just a little bit different, or I’d had just a little more luck. It’s not going to happen. It’s never happened.

I’m really sick of it. There are some five year olds out there who have the right idea of what they should do with their lives. It’s not many, but it happens. Maybe I was just one of them.