Some brains just won’t make it.

All the people in my life insist that things will get better. That if you just hold on and try to live life everything magically falls into place and you find this thing called joy.

The selfishness of these people astounds and hurts me. If you were to superimpose my mental condition over my body as a physical disability, I would qualify for physician assisted suicide. There is not one time in my life I didn’t carry this burden. It started indirectly in the womb, it was reinforced by parents and society, it was miss diagnosed by everyone that tried to help. Bleeding hearts gave me hope by trying to inject enough of their own motivation and happy ignorance into my life. While never bothering to understand that the legs they were trying to help me stand on, simply don’t exist. It is a form of abuse, not acknowledging the severity of someone’s condition, just because you don’t feel like you can lose them. The truth is, what you have of them is a lie. A face made up to keep the pain around us from coalescing into a cloud that follows us like the character Pig Pen from snoopy. The person you love is not a person, but a puppet. Dancing to the needs of the world around them. This is not an expression of personality, this is survival. If you love them, understand that they may be too broken to know love as you do. Chemically incapable of feeling it even.

So what should I do? I have achieved personal and professional success. A daughter. A highschool sweetheart with 15 years of marriage. A 13 year military career as a war fighter, achieving a level of success that has me working in a small team of ‘highly motivated and skilled individuals’ thinking my life would be best spent protecting something other then my own life. I put one foot in front of the other, until I looked down and realized something was horribly wrong. I have spent years trying to understand how I’m broken. The best way I found to describe it is “I was born without legs, learning to first crawl, then walk using only my hands and upper body. The benchmarks for being healthy and successful are only a pass or fail. So each time I made it up the stairs of life using only half my body, I completed a benchmark, indicating that I was healthy enough to keep going. For years, I pulled myself through life with half the tools needed, always internalizing my failure to reach the top shelf, or play on a trampoline, as a personal failure of motivation and intent. Hating myself more and more, never identifying the real issue of the missing legs, because no one talks about legs, they simply are, and we take them for granted. Eventually I made it into the Olympics. Sitting hunched and broken on the start line of the 100m sprint, my shoes don’t fit because I’m trying to wear them on my hands, I don’t even know what having a foot would feel like. The other contestants stand head and shoulders over me. No one ever acknowledging the fact I shouldn’t be there. I don’t have the tools to finish the race. Why am I told I should be here? Who made this race anyways? It wasn’t made for people like me…”. The only thing I have internalized from my experience is imposter syndrome

My brain wants to die. This is the truth. It fed me this pain in my earliest memories, in high school, in my marriage and career… as a father… I feel only pain. Only one medication can help, and it’s illegal. This hasn’t stopped me from using it, just adds to the existential pain of living in a society that simply refuses to think, and only react. But even the power of entheogens has not been enough. (I don’t condone or recommend doing anything without consulting a physician. mine knows and supports my journey through the non-conventional). Entheogens gave me peace, but not healing. I have been better able to articulate my pain, and now I simply see my disability in… any light… for the first time. I am able to put up boundaries to protect myself from unrealistic expectations now, as I see how my attempts to participate in the world around me end up hurting me in the end.

So I am stuck, in a cycle of pain in a world without understanding, and those who do claim to understand, think it’s just a matter of perspective. Fuck you. I’ve done more for my mental health then anyone should ever have to. And I will still kill myself, despite your ignorant rallying against the pain it will cause you. All I ever wanted was support, understanding, acceptance. This means respecting the fact I have a terminal illness. And sometimes death is a valid option.

The only regret I have is giving life to my daughter, because I brought her into a pain I can’t protect her from. My own pain.