Ramblings

It’s sad, really. I hate that people have to feel this way, especially at such young ages. I’m sorry. I really I am. And there really isn’t shit I can do for anyone accept say that I truly feel you. The problem with pain is that there is no magic gauge. My wonderful mother dying might affect me the same way getting an F on final paper might affect anyone else. We can’t know. And we can’t judge. I know what it is to hurt, and I’m sorry that other people have to feel the way I do, or worse than I do, most of the time. The reasons for the pain don’t matter much in the end. People who say things like, “buck up! What’s the matter with you? It’s just an F. it doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t matter if it matters or not (lol stupid things make me happy) No one has the right to tell you not to feel pain. Sure, 20 years from now you might look back on your life and say, “why the fuck did I almost kill myself because I got an F on my English paper?” Good. I hope you get to that 20 years from now and think the past you is stupid. The past us is always stupid. At least, it better be. Otherwise we haven’t grown or changed much. Wow. I am digressing so much. The point is, I get what you’re going through. I know what it’s like to wish for death. I’ve been doing so pretty steadily, with short lived highs, for the past 6-7 years. This is going to continue to be pretty unconnected. Like you’ll be reading my written thoughts, so it probably won’t flow very well. Hopefully it will be a brief respite though. A bit entertaining even.
I’m 23 now and have been struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide for a long while. The depression started early. I’m overweight. And pretty much always have been. At my biggest, I was near 400 lbs. and starting to have to wear size 5xl t-shirts. I’m about 280ish now and fit in a 2 or 1xl.I’m not actively trying to lose weight. It was when I was at my biggest and at my lowest that I started thinking of killing myself. I more than likely wasn’t in school my junior or senior year. Instead, I’d lie in my bed, having just departed from some fantasy world in a novel I was reading, trying to think of ways to end my life. My thoughts were usually as follows:
Too fat too hang myself. Too fat to climb anywhere and jump off. I’d probably break my own fall. If I drown myself in the tub, how would my parents get me out of the room? Would they have to knock a wall down? Would they, my relatively poor, lower-middleclass parents, have to spend extra money on a double-wide coffin? I wish there were drugs in my house, then I could pop some pills. Wait, If I kill myself I go straight to hell right? Fuck you, God. Fuck you. That’s bullshit. I wish my father hunted. Or just had a gun. That’d be quick. Bang. Dead. I wish I could drive a fucking car. I’d drive my fatass off a bridge.
The only things that kept me from taking a knife to my skin were legit fears of going to hell and the impact my death would have on my parents, both emotionally and financially. I was already putting them though their own little hell by not going to school or doing my homework. I really don’t know how I made it through my senior year. I missed about 50 days of school, but they still let me graduate. Thank you, George Bush, I was not left behind.
Depression followed me, but life consisted of sleeping, a part time job and lots of reading. There wasn’t much stress in my life. I think stress is what pushes people over that edge of wanting and into the abyss of doing.
Oh, wait, I skipped over the things that I think led to my depression setting in at young age.
My earliest real memories are all sad ones. Well, one might not be. I seem to recall a small, green plastic watering can, my grandfather, and his garden. But I was only four or five when he passed on. I probably only have this ‘memory’ because of stories I’ve been told about the two of us. I wish I could recall his actual face rather than a photograph I once saw. Alright. Back on topic.
My depression and self-worth issues (I refuse to say ‘confidence’ as I believe the word itself is used poorly by most people. What I would consider real confidence is actually just experience and success. If you claim to be confident and don’t have those things, I believe you’re lying to yourself and doing so unnecessarily. Basically, without experience or success, you wouldn’t actually be confident. ) have deep seeded causes. Most of these, have to do with women. (I am a guy, just fyi.), so I’ll cover those few instances last. First there are mommy and daddy issues. I was never close to my father. I love the guy. He never beat me or anything like that, we just never talked. We still rarely say anything to each other. We just don’t have much in common. Oh, when I was 10 he ran off from home for a bit. He sort of went insane. Stress got to him at work and his mother died and some other stuff was going on and he just snapped. He started thinking the government was after him and/or watching him. That none of us, his family, loved him. He left on September 10th, 2001. So while everyone else was at school on the 11th, watching the planes hit the towers, I was at home with my mother and my older siblings trying to find out where my father was. Actually I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. He came back eventually. I forget how or why. I think my uncle found him somehow. He came home and started a big bonfire with our video cassette collection and all my mother’s books. Then the police came and carted him off. He spent some time in the hospital, and then he came home. And we don’t talk about the incident very much if at all anymore. I think it fucked me up a little bit. I don’t know how, but that had to affect me, right? My mother is like super naïve uber Christian woman. I love her too, but she never really got me. She still doesn’t. Neither of them does. They know I’m depressed and want to help, but what can they really do? On to the women. Sigh. If there is one thing I want from this life that I think would make it truly worth living, its love. Love wants nothing to do with me. It never has. I am, after all, an ugly, fat bastard. Sometimes it seems like love and happiness are just for beautiful people. I know that isn’t true, but that’s how it looks…
When I was probably about 4 or 5 I had my first crush. It was the youth pastor’s daughter at my church. I still remember her black dress, rimmed in purple, her long dark hair secured in a pony-tail by a big violet bow. One of the ways I most show my affection is giving people gifts. I gave this little girl, this tiny love of my prepubescent life, a fake diamond ring I had procured from one of those candy dispensers with my mother’s quarter. She refused it, rejected me with upturned nose and the words, “Why would I want that? I have plenty of rings.” I was heartbroken. Christ, I wish I could remember the good things. I know there had to be some good times in my life back then. After her there was a girl in my kindergarten class I liked. I never said anything to her because the day I was going to, I think it was Valentine’s Day, she started ‘dating’ this little dude named Andy. Then there was no one. Well. I carried a crush from 4th grade up until I graduated high school. This girl from my church. Ah. She was/is beautiful on the outside and inside. I never said two words to her though, fat coward that I was/am. She ended up marrying a different guy from my church straight out of high school with the same name as me. In 6th grade I gave a girl I liked, my one friend and I called her BK, like burger king (we were so funny!), a single rose. Actually, I put it in her book bag. And watched her smell it and wonder with her friends who it was from. It was magical. Until I, with shaky voice, told her it was from me. “humph,” disappointment dripping from her words, “from you?” She threw the rose to one of her friends. I can still see her tearing it apart petal by petal. The rest of the day, which ended in my first dance, was complete shit. I stopped there. That experience ruined me. I got fatter. And fatter. Until, well, read above.
Fast forward to a more recent date. My first year of college, which came after two years of working in a pizza shop after high school. My main motivator in deciding to go to college? You guessed it, I wanted to meet a woman. I met this homeschooled girl my 2nd semester. She was nice. We talked a bit. She actually seemed to like me a little. I’ve never had anyone show any type of interest in me. I started to like her. And I worked up the balls to tell her I liked her. She made me wait 3 days, and still hung around me and my friends during this time period, before telling me, just before I was about to go to bed, that no, she did not like me that way. I was like a brother to her. I didn’t take it well. I blew up a bit. I don’t like being friendzoned. Fuck that shit. Over the summer, I felt like crap for the way things ended between us so I sent her a long Facebook message outlining that I was sorry and that I still thought we could be friends and do things together. Even grow as people together. She didn’t respond. The last line of my letter said something along the lines of “if you want me to leave you alone and never speak to you again, I’d get it. Just tell me to bugger off.” But she never said anything. I sent her a txt, asking if she got the message. She accused me of stalking her. We didn’t talk anymore after that. Until the next year of school when I run into her. She gives me and my roommate a hug. She wasn’t a hug person before and we hadn’t talked since she told me I was a stalker. The only physical touch I ever had from her was some footsie bullshit. I tied to patch things up between us again after a while, but she wasn’t having it (oh, I’m not mentioning it, but I failed a class when stuff went sour with her and thought of killing myself plenty of times throughout that whole ordeal, which for me lasted over a year). Fast forward a year. I started talking to this girl in my creative writing class. We sort of hit it off a bit, but it was always difficult to get her do things alone with me and it was always awkward when we were together. I’m told the awkward stage, the stage before the girl/guy decide if they want to pursue a relationship, only lasts a few days. It lasted months for us. She could never decide if she liked me enough to date, even though we’d been on quite a few not-a-date outings, like movies, lunch, a trip or two to walmart, her hanging out with me and my friends. We’d chat for hours, text throughout the day about our days or other random things. I apparently “got her” she even slept in my dang bed while I was away for a few weeks and she didn’t have a place to stay. But no. That too fell apart. It fell apart more than once. I saw her today, tried to smile at her. She did her best to ignore me. So, I did the same. I don’t meet women that I find worth pursuing very often. I’m fat, I know. I’m unattractive, I know. But even of the women who blatantly look at me with disgust in their eyes, I haven’t met many I could see myself wanting to be with. I have never been loved by a woman. I doubt that I ever will be. Oh, I failed two classes throughout this last attempt at love. Stress got to me. I started drinking. I spent a couple hundred dollars on alcohol and spent any night I could drunk. But even that doesn’t numb the pain enough anymore, so I’m done with it. I almost killed myself. I had the knife in my hand at one point, but I txted her and asked if we could txt like we used to for a bit and we did. So I thank her for that, I guess, because I’d be dead right now if she had ignored me. I still want to die. I still see little point to life, especially mine. There’s this song by David Ramirez called Stick Around. It’s perfect. While not about suicide, I don’t think, I believe it can apply. It certainly applies to how I feel about my shitty life. I haven’t even given all the details of why I’m depressed and have thoughts of suicide. It’s more complicated than what the above makes it out to be. I have issues with the faith I was raised up in. I have issues with my friends, my dreams, expectations, blah blah blah. The things I mentioned above are the major contributors though. I don’t even know why I typed all of this shit out.