I was looking for a sermon I had written several months ago, and I just happened to stumble upon a suicide note I wrote nearly three years ago….
Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
Isaac Asimov said that. I saw this in one of his books and suddenly, everything clicked.
I want to stop living, to be dead. I just wasn’t sure about the actual process of dying.
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Now I am though.
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I’m sorry. I know this is a stupid thing to do, but I just can’t handle any of this anymore. I can’t remember the last time I actually felt motivated to do anything meaningful. There use to be so many things I enjoyed doing. I can barely bring myself to draw anymore. This fucking note is the first real thing I’ve written in over a year. I sometimes go days without sleep. And sometimes I sleep for twenty or thirty hours straight. I know it’s probably not real, it’s probably all in my head, but I’m always in pain, or feeling sick. Sometimes I just want to keep sleeping forever. I don’t want to wake up, because waking up means I have to put the facades back on. I have to pretend to care that my classmates think I’m insane… or just stupid. I have to pretend to care that I’ve forgotten something… again. I have to pretend to care that I failed another test, or that my teachers are angry or disappointed with me. I have to pretend to smile when something happens that would make a normal person smile. I hate pretending. I can’t stand the looks I get- from everyone; I can barely look anyone in the eye anymore, and when I do, something in my stomach shifts and I feel sick, but I bite the inside of my cheek (until I taste blood) and ignore it, because as painful as every single day is for me, I can’t show them how weak I really am. I can’t stand going to school every day knowing that all my classmates are going to college, while I run myself further into this rut. Not because I didn’t get accepted, but because I didn’t even care enough to actually send in a complete application. I know I’m intelligent. I’m just too stupid to use my intelligence. And even if I do manage, by some miracle, to graduate and make it through college, and get the job I want, it still won’t be enough. I know that dreams never live up to your expectations. At least mine never have. Once I finished all that, it would still be just as bad. I would still feel this crushing weight on my mind and a mental breakdown would never be too far off in the future… just like it is now.
I think there’s something wrong with me. My emotions have slowly been fading away. Unless I’m prompted to emote based on the people around me, my face is almost always completely blank. When I smile at some one in the hall, as soon as I’m sure they can’t see me, I feel my face drop again, and I feel so relieved that I can take off the façade for a short while. Emotions are supposed to be instant, involuntary. Not coordinated and mimicked. I feel like a fucking robot. It’s like I’ve become detached from myself, like I’m watching myself go through this life. But as I watch I see all the mistakes I make (there are a lot of them), and I obsess over them, even when there’s nothing I can do to make it better. And I punish myself. I cut. I burn. I bruise. Sometimes I go jogging. I keep going until my chest burns and my legs go numb, until I fall down gasping in the middle of the road. Other times I stop eating. It’s not to lose weight. That empty feeling in my stomach is just a way to remind me of all my faults.Â
I’ve stopped dreaming too. When I actually manage to sleep long enough to enter a REM cycle, it’s almost as if I’m looking at a blank movie screen. I know when I was little I would remember my dreams just about every night. And they were fun. My subconscious would let my imagination run wild, resulting in fantastical creatures, impossible situations, and epic adventures. I miss those dreams. I know that everyone (including myself) dreams. But in the last five years or so, I haven’t remembered a single one of my dreams. Nightmares on the other hand…
I use to care; about what people thought about me, about pleasing others, about my school work… about my future. But everything seems slower now, and at the same time, everything is passing by me so fast. I just can’t keep up. I don’t care about anything, but it’s okay because no one cares about me either. I know there are people who love me, people who care about me; that’s a big part of why I struggled with this for so long, but if those people really knew me, they’d see what’s going on. I know they’ve seen the scars. And I’ve seen the suspicion in their eyes when I give my half-assed excuse about how it got there. But no one does any thing. I always wonder if my teachers know about my previous suicide attempts. Is it in my file some where? Are they watching me, waiting for a sign that I’m finally cracking under the pressure? Because if they are, then they missed it. I broke down completely a while ago. I don’t even remember a time when I wasn’t broken.
I know my family and friends will be sad. But they’ll get over it. Mom and Dad have two other perfect children. They don’t need me. And I have a small group of people that I consider close friends. But they will forget me after a little while. I’m not incredibly important to anyone. I think a lot of people might have a problem with being forgotten, but it’s exactly what I’m hoping for.
If I ever find the courage to actually print this out, I hope whoever ends up reading it isn’t too mad at me. But by the time this note is found, it will be too late. So I guess it doesn’t matter all that much.Â
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I just want some of that peace that Asimov was talking about.
I’m honestly not sure how to react to finding this. I didn’t even remember writing it until I was half done reading it.
But I don’t feel amything…
Surely, I’m supposed to feel something?
6 comments
“waking up means I have to put the facades back on.â€
Many days I couldn’t agree more. I hate having to fake it in front of literally everyone: My professors, my family, my friends, other students and acquaintances. I don’t want to talk to my friends about my depression because I don’t want to bring them down, and I know many of them would say, “YOU have no reason to feel bad, your life is fine. You’re a good student, an intelligent person, shut the f*ck up and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You just want pity and someone else to feel sorry for you, just like you do.†Many of my friends would be surprised as hell if I told them I was depressed. But that’s just more evidence that they simply don’t understand.
I remember coming across a suicide note a couple months after I had written it. I had written it while sitting in my roommate’s BMW in the garage with the car on, windows down. The entire note was about a page and a half long and basically went through all the “logical†reasons why I should kill myself, and included all the rebuttals of the typical reasons to not commit suicide.
Because I was doing “much better†I felt disgusted at the note I had written. I ripped it up and threw it in the trash. However, now I write all my notes on the computer and have them saved. In some ways I hope to look back on them and realize how far I have come. However, I read a couple of the notes recently and know that no real progress has been made.
Ashley, I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to feel anything when you read this note. I hope you fell better though, and even more so I hope you feel like you have improved since that time in some way. I hope there are some attributes in yourself that you can see that have changed for the better since that time.
Hey Ashley,
This was the most important part imo…
I feel like a fucking robot. It’s like I’ve become detached from myself, like I’m watching myself go through this life.
Wanna talk about it?
Amakua
i have no idea why but i read this and i loved it… i can feel every emotion, every ounce of pain and sadness if i were to write a suicide note i wish i could convey my pain as well as you did Ash444 i know im insane but reading this made my day
Hm, you don’t have to feel anything about finding the note. I would feel suprised, maybe, that I still had it. But if you are in this emotionless state, of course you would feel nothing. I have a question for you about that; do you think that it may be some kind of defense mechanism for you? Making yourself numb as to avoid any pain? Otherwise, I would say it is a stage of depression that you will eventually move on from. I have experienced the same thing.
This stuck out to me, “But everything seems slower now, and at the same time, everything is passing by me so fast. I just can’t keep up.” I can relate to that feeling. I can relate to a lot of your note, the pretending, the not caring. Anyway, I hope that the emotionless state that you’re in is only temporary and passes soon.
Sometimes the act of writting a note can put everything in perspective..i sent my last one to my shrink -email as soon as i pressed the send button i felt fear fear that someone else actually would know what it is like inside my head when i felt bad enough to start planning for it…i got reeled into his office and talked it through it was really good to be able to show the window of my soul to someone else and it lifted the load.i found out my mother has 13 letters i wrote before trying to off myself it made me feel very angry and hurt i wonder how often she looks at them???any way what you wrote was really deep and maybe writting more will help you especially here i hope
You sound tourtured,depression is awful i sometimes experiance the same as you the self hatred and self doubt the wanting to sleep and not wake up and how just being awake hurts.i hope knowing that you are not alone and talking with us helps in some way try not to be so hard on yourself