heartlessviking

This has been a rough month for me. It seems from the outside that I should be proud of what I’m doing, but I feel nothing but shame. I’m applying to graduate school and I was able to get my application into four different school. As of right now one has declined to interview me, and a second has outright rejected me. If I don’t get in there isn’t really work for me to do with my bachelors degree, which means that I’ve wasted the last three years of my life. For the last three years I’ve performed research and attained a GPA of 3.9. However due to my early mistakes my overall GPA is only 2.85. I didn’t do as well at the entrance exams as I hoped either. So even though I’ve put really hard work into this, it’s a waste. I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to get into the career I want, their standards are so high.

I want to die. Really, that’s my next best option. I pulled myself together for that dream job, and that stupid thing is out of reach. I know it’s selfish, and I know that others think I live this charmed life, but on a day to day level I’m miserable. The only joy in my life for the past three years has been hoping to get into grad school and get to do the work I’ve trained for years for.

I guess I just don’t matter much on the larger scale. Any work I might do isn’t important enough to anyone to stand up for me. I don’t want to go to sleep because the nightmares will come back, but I have to sleep to function. I don’t even want to do any of this anymore, it’s all so pointless. That’s life though, one long trudge through pointless task after pointless task and then one day you get to be dead, the highest aspiration any of us can be assured of.

It’s been awhile since I was here, both literally and metaphorically. I’ve been so busy, which is a lie in a way, I had time to tend to things, it just wasn’t managed very well.

Now though, I am alone for awhile. My therapist quit, not on me but the organization that I was getting therapy through. The irony here is that I hired him 7 months ago to attempt to build a longer term therapy relationship with someone…. 7 months isn’t long term, I’ve had many therapy relationships last longer than that.

I’m still missing my best friend, or should I say former? I have no idea anymore. I dreamed about her last night, in the middle of a dream orgy and we were fighting… I guess that’s the way our story goes. Strange sexual tension and confused themes regarding the role she was supposed to play in my life. She doesn’t play any role in my life now, just another regret.

I keep moving forward, and am somewhat successful at that. My deadline this week that would have concluded today now will give me another five days to finish this project, which is great.

I’m struggling financially. It isn’t that I lack for food or essentials, it’s that I have a creditor breathing down my neck that I have no idea how to pay, as well as multiple projects that are on indefinite hold. I have things I need/want to do in the next few months, and I have no idea how I’ll end up pulling together the resources to do them. I’m very sick of being financially desperate, but there it is.

Thoughts of death come and go, as do thoughts on futility, failure and so on. I’m not terribly active on that score, because on some level I believe that better times are coming. In a year and a half I finish undergraduate university, hopefully two years from now I’ll be graduate school bound, preparing to move out of my home of ten years to a new city, new state and new job. It seems so close, and it also seems so far away. Sometimes I wonder if that finish line is actually there, if I’ll be able to get in, despite my successes I’m not sure that I’m smart enough, or qualified enough to get in.

All of these things spill out here, possibly never to be read or understood because at my core I am alone. I long for many things that I’m not even able to start chasing, and my freedom is about seven years away. All the while the winds howl outside, the country I love is as always divided and in danger, and the heat of summer attempts to chip away at my physical ability to cope.

I just take another step, not knowing where my path leads, hoping for better, ready for worse.

Today has been a roller coaster, by which I mean the last 36 hours awake have put many hard to deal with things. I was nearly overwelmed by a work project, and often times I had to stop and process some of the trauma of the past few months. Then I had my last session for awhile with this therapist, and that was emotional.

Now this. I had/have this dream of owning a particular piece of land. The problem thus far has been financing it, as well as some other practical limitations. I’m trying to have faith, put the thing in God’s court.

It’s like an old scar that itches, because I first had this vision of the property 9 years ago. There were times that I was frantic to make this thing happen, coming with all kinds of wild schemes just looking for something that could work. There was a time I was 100% confident that I was going to get there, now older and possibly wiser I’m not sure. I’ve got plenty of desires, chances are some aren’t going to work out. Simply by process of elimination, some things have to fail and some things have to succeed, right?

Anyway, just feeling lost, it’s been a tough couple of months.

I don’t know what sick part of me likes to look up my exes and fantasize about if I had made it work with them. It doesn’t happen with the ones I had several years with, most of them I’m glad to be rid of. It’s the ones that I dated for a few weeks, a few months at most. The ones that showed so much promise. They’re amazing people that for whatever reason it just didn’t work out with. I wonder if my life would be different if I had worked it out…. then I wonder what the point is….

I’m missing a deadline as I type this. It’s agonizing failure that I’m slowly against my will getting used to. Maybe it won’t have consequences, maybe it will…. I couldn’t have even done anything about this dang one. Last week I managed it, this week…. after three exams in four days I just can’t. My wits are worn down, I flubbed two out of three of the tests, still waiting on grades. I’m lonely…. it’s a small little hole I’ve managed to dig myself, no idea how to get out apart from waiting….

Everyone says the stuff will go away, but I’m not going to stop being busy until either I have a substantial amount of money or I’m dead. Taking bets on which one (hint, I’m going to die before I get to stop or rest.)

It seems like there should be some bright side. All I can think about is this stupid movie quote: “There’s one bright side to this; one day you’re going to die. When you end up in hell, at least it will be a step up from this place.”

Today we were reviewing a statistics question. The content of the question doesn’t matter, but the answer does. We were talking about solutions to problems, my favorite subject. I figured out that there had to be a solution to this problem, and my professor said: “That’s math over your head. It’s over my head.” The lady has a PhD in evolutionary psychology, and probably knows more about social psychology than I’ll figure out for another decade. Yet it’s this arrogance, over my head. You joking? I’m always at the same time in over my head and underwhelmed by the challenges presented to me. That’s fricken the life of a broke student.

It’s the life of a mentally ill person with intellectual ability to push through anyway. I’m in over my head, but I’m used to it. Right now I’m working on applying to grad school and others are saying “that graduate school might be too hard to get into.” I know it though, but why not try? Why does everyone around me avoid the difficult by pretending it is impossible. Very little is impossible. Impractical is usually the reason, but frankly the people making those judgement calls don’t have all the data.

Right now I’m standing when I feel like everyone thought I would fall. I kept working when it seemed like I should throw in the towel. In my head the big battle, the worst impossibility was already defeated. Everything else? Smaller problems than the ones I’ve already lived through. The terrors of my present are nothing compared to the nightmare of my past.

I’m working on a project on delusions, for a class I’m taking. For this class we have to assess the delusional state of a person, explain their symptoms and the source of the disorder.

It brings me to something close to my heart but that is hard to talk about. I’ve had delusions, and hallucinations, and further they happened while I was absolutely sober. There was no warning, just bang and the reality I knew was gone and I was talking to people that didn’t exist.

It occurs to me that this may all be a delusion, every moment from 2010 to present. Supposing there was some severe stressor; both parents dying violently, for example. Someone sick enough could conjure up an entirely different delusional narrative, and present it to themselves as fact. It might be so.

I have no evidence for this little hypothesis, but that makes it no less troubling. When I was delusional before I wasn’t very realistic about the difference between reality and un-reality.

I might imagine those parents still alive, and any help they provide would be entirely a construct of my mind, I might be effectively gaslighting myself. For a reality so horrible terrifies me to the core, more even than the possibility that it may be false. I could be sitting in an empty house, imagining the woman that loves me in the next room. I may have dreamed up people to like me, all to satisfy my own needs, to make myself hold on and not kill myself.

================

No way of knowing is there? This radical idea is mad in itself, and presenting to my potential delusions that I doubt their reality isn’t going to end well for me if they are real. I have to wait for evidence, for things that present as outlandish or foolish.

It’s a tough project, tougher than my project on suicide actually, if only because I have so many reasons to deny reality at the moment. I want to be connected, and such desire might motivate me to pretend. I’m not laughing as much as I was before, the bounce gone from my step as I determinedly march through my routine. The pain is there, denied, hidden, held back by years of careful planning.

Worse than all this, what if that dam breaks?

I cannot think of how I might cope, and thus I bolster the barrier and push through to the next moment.

I’m in so much submerged pain, and I’ve reach out to everyone, yet the people closest to me are making this the hardest day I have ever gotten through without a breakdown, without cracking completely open.

My best friend was on the verge of suicide, and I called people to help, now I’ll lose my home if I let her back in, my fiance is mad and somewhat blaming me… and I’m torn up more than I knew I could be.

I feel utterly alone, despite being surrounded by people that love me

I can’t cry, and I can’t come to terms with what happened today. I keep blaming myself, even though everyone else says I did what I was trained to do, what I was told to do. my heart is breaking, and I can’t feel it. Numb entirely the one time I want to feel, I want to cry and let go…… just so hard being strong when I want to be vulnerable. If these sleep meds don’t let me sleep I’ll be up with the crisis line all night, trying to stay alive….

I know, I know, protect myself… but dang it…. there’s nothing left of me in this hollow shell. All humanity was drained away doing the hardest thing I’ve ever done…. and I get the perspective of everyone involved, everyone but me….. I don’t get who on earth this guy is, some jerk who prefers an alive friend to her respect, to her kindness….. I feel so fucking selfish.

A mentor of mine said something pretty revolutionary to me; “Learning is pain, one cannot exist without the other.”

It upset me at the time because of the intimate relationship that I have with pain, and my job is essentially to remove pain from people’s lives, or at least bring it down to manage-able. So why do we hate pain so much, and if we hate it so much why do humans expend effort seeking out situations that cause them pain?

It’s been bothering me for awhile about people who have toxic families. Beyond a certain point family is a chosen relationship the same as any other. It seems like that’s remove-able pain. Knowing that, I still have family that pains me, but not on the level that I can stand to live without them. Why stay though, if the pain is so severe, if the family provides no support?

Early on I did take this strategy with my depression, out with toxic people. I had no energy for them. Yet slowly and surely pain crept back into my life, most of it created or sought out by me. Why do I do this? What’s the point?

There’s no way there is anyone in my face to face life that I can talk about this with, but it feels like it’s going to poison my heart if I don’t get it out.

I had a dream about being intimate with my best friend. In some ways it is expected, I used to be romantically attracted to her. On the other hand, it’s inappropriate. She’s living with me and my fiance for christ sake. I’ve been dealing with her being suicidal lately, being the shoulder to cry on and so on. I feel very responsible, and that seems like a positive thing.

I just can’t say anything, do anything about craving a certain kind of tenderness from her. She can’t give it to me. She shouldn’t give it to me, it isn’t her job.

None of this stops the hunger within me for it. There must be some part of my heart that thinks I could give her comfort if I held her, or more. See, can’t even say it in an anonomous way. That I desire.. THAT.

It’s also scary that I’m a professional caregiver. My job means taking care of mentally ill people, this is going to come up again. I was warned about this by an early mentor; being attracted to those I’m supposed to be helping. I have to learn professional distance, and it seems that I’m being taught how to tame my desires by being challenged by them.

It’s a challenge, one I want to rise to meet, but it’s also scary, isolating, and hard. These are things that provoke anxiety and a bit of depression within me. Which is why I’m writing about it. All married men are tempted, it’s part of the male experience in monogomous relationships. Usually that temptation has come to me from strangers, people I can avoid. Not this time…

I’m frustrated, which just makes the dogged arousal worse. I want to solve, be active in my angle of attack for this thing, and I can’t.

There is a part of me that could see giving in, and the other part horrified. I couldn’t forgive that in myself. It will be a struggle to forgive that temptation, which is more innocent than acting on it.

I’ve been trying to be kind to myself, but this really makes that nearly impossible. The line has to be somewhere, violating my base morals is worse than just being a wreck.

Does anyone else think about those that die with no effort? It’s sad, sure, but does it bother anyone else struggling with suicidal thoughts that there’s such a thing as an easy exit?

I mean, there isn’t an age exclusive set of people, it happens to a wide amount of people. One minute their living their lives, the next gone. Could be me or you any time. Wouldn’t it be pointless if we were ready to end it and cause so much more grief when we were around the corner from an easy exit?

I know that most of the time lately I’ve been feeling better, and it would be better if I didn’t spiral just because some of the depressed feelings are starting again…

Life is good at least by all measures that anyone else cares about. I’m working on a degree in a double major I like, I have shelter, lots of stuff that I wanted/want, people that care about me. It seems like I should feel blessed, and usually I do.

No matter what I do though I can’t run from that feeling deep down that I’ve sold out. Worse still I sold out for cheap. For some petty creature comforts I’m working on one of the most difficult projects in my life, because deep down I like to work. My dreams, there’s no direction and no hope to making that happen.

It’s like life itself is the enemy that I’m at war with. Every day I find a way to put on a smile and fight my best and hardest. At the end of the day I come home to an uneasy truce. Life gives me just the barest amount of what I desire, without ever satisfying those deep desires that I try to keep stuffed down.

Everyone else seems easily satisfied from my view. There’s no one I find common ground with.

This is a war with two potential ends. One way is that my ideas and plans somehow happen. The other is I die unfulfilled, with almost no one knowing how hard I struggled for something I could never have. For a long time I deluded myself that by some miracle the first one would happen… but lately my relationship with God makes me think that he’s just as satisfied with ordinary, and with the things that satisfy other men.

At times like this it seems like even God has abandoned my hopes, the deepest things that make me hold on and hope.

Yet, I try and find some joy somewhere. I try and laugh, because it’s all a big joke. It’s a joke that the world gives people hope when all it deals in those areas are pain and disappointment. It’s really quite funny, and most comedy does come from pain. My greatest comfort is that most of mankind is in horrible pain and the only reason that self awareness brings these things to the surface is that I delude myself into believing in a life without certain pains.

Like a starving man with a small amount of food, I try to imagine and pretend it is enough, and maybe someday it will be.

This week I’m working on some projects for class that have to do with suicide. I don’t really know how to handle that. Even though I’m plugged into therapy, an hour every other week isn’t enough to process all the stuff going on in my life.

Things are going better, stress is on the decline. Sometimes I feel like I can see a light at the end of the tunnel of this set of classes, but there’s tough days still ahead. Tomorrow I’ll be spending 3 hours talking about suicide in class. Then over the weekend I’ll be doing 16 hours over two days dealing with strategies for dealing with suicide. Luckily Thursday includes a therapy session, but I don’t know how much progress I’m going to make.

Then there is how I’m starting to understand that it isn’t just depression that makes people including me suicidal. It can be anxiety, or other mental illness problems. There are dangers to living in the world I live in. Today I read that I’m in the highest risk groups, college student and my history of problems put me high in the risk zone for these things to come back.

Then there are things I might not be able to do, because of my risk factors. I had a dream of working for the military or VA. I wanted to go in when I was younger, but it just couldn’t happen with how sick I was. Now I’m witnessing the death of the dream entirely, because VA workers and military service members are screened against risk factors. It’s a rational reasoning, they don’t want to put people at risk, I just don’t know how to take it. It ticks me off that I can never serve my country. I feel cheated of my ability to live up to my potential.

It kind of is what it is though. My upset-ness isn’t going to improve the situation. I need to process all this stuff but I’ve been riding my support people so hard that I can’t stand to bother them. Isolation, it’s a major risk factor for depression

Yet, my personality isolates. I need alone time for self care, but what happens when there’s too much alone time? What if I need love, care, all that touchy feely stuff?

I don’t know.

Sometimes I get practical about things and wonder what humans exist for. Capitalism’s answer is to make money, but Automation is destroying the heck out of that. Some people have proposed that it is to perform meaningful work, again I return you to my previous statement; Automation has already taken many jobs, and will take more.

The biological imperative is the one thing that no one seems to be coming for, because they’re destroying all hope that having children is a productive and useful path. We don’t need more humans we need less, likely an order of magnitude less. Maybe there’s enough work for 800 million people after automation is done with the planet, and possibly not even that.

I want to have children, more than I want my dumb career actually, but thinking about it compassionately I can’t see how having children is anything but shoving innocents into a short brutal existence without hope. What are they supposed to dream of? Our world is run by wealthy land owners, and us poor serfs are living on borrowed time….

I was bound to fail big eventually. I just…. thought I wouldn’t. There was this thought that if I did everything that I was supposed to, somehow that would protect me….. but I’ve been working like crazy for 3-4 weeks. I’m tired, I need rest…. but my failure makes me beat myself up and feel self destructive.

I’m alone. My fiance went to bed, I missed the one hour that I can see her out of the last 24 because I was pushing this stupid deadline, that I couldn’t meet. I’m debating how bad I feel. I know whomever I talk to is going to tell me I’m beating myself up too much…… ugh. It’s a lonely place in my head.

How am I supposed to not beat myself up, when I could have worked harder, done better, taken fewer breaks….

This also kind of means I won’t be resting a whole day for a while yet…. and I really wanted a day to rest…. nothing for it but forward.

The crisis line isn’t taking my calls. My fiance is complaining of depression also but she won’t even go to the doctor, my best friend is threatening suicide, though that’s just one of her natural expressions…. and I missed a deadline. It would be worth it somehow to work the way I do if I didn’t screw up so big.

I’m just utterly alone. Which isn’t a reason to do anything, I’ll keep on working and pushing hard because that’s the way to sucess, and I guess I’ll take time for me somewhere in there. Somewhere in the future there will be time to be kind to myself…. in the meantime; pushing, aggressively forward. I have a significant amount of anger. I’m not allowed to lash out at the thing hurting me, or at myself, so all I can do is funnel it into my work.

I don’t know that I’ve heard a story like this. People talk about their attempts, but usually it is in the immediate past and they are still wondering if they chose right, if they should still be here. Kind of like me. But here is a guy that I have to respect the bravery of:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfNiSkd3HfI&w=560&h=315]

Last night I cried for a long time, over issues within my career, issues in my community. In the light of day today they didn’t seem worth crying over. This last few months have been a bunch of me sitting on the edge of the cliff of falling apart, looking down and wondering if I’m going to fall.

Then today happened. I had some really big personal rough news. News that I didn’t want to hear, and that news came right in the middle of me doing a timed, essential and unavoidable project. I just sailed right through it.

Which is what is so wacky about the thing. Why do I break down over the smallest stuff (I also broke down over a broken keyboard yesterday….) Then huge stuff I just take and deal with, no issue?!

I don’t know, really there’s nothing that makes sense in this equation.

“Maybe it’s growth”, he lied to himself optimistically.

not like it matters…. really. does anything?!

Pain is real, much more real than this whole stupid thing. I’m so sick of it, of what I do. Living in my head….. I just want to feel something other than this crushing reality, makes it hard to breath, hard to hold back the depression.

So I march myself forward, hurting and torturing myself, because sometimes pain is the only thing I can understand…..

Screw…. no one understands anything, that’s the only wonderful truth there is.

I’ve been accused of being obsessive, insensitive, single minded, all of which I feel like misses the point. Yes, I’m a mono maniac, I’m seeking something with every ounce of energy I have:

It’s hard to describe the conditions that create the feeling that I crave. I’ve tasted bits of it my entire life, just enough to get me interested.

I’m sick,okay?! I have a disorder where things that interest or arouse normal people don’t even register with me. I have to take medicine to function, meds to work, meds to sleep. I’m 31 years old and at times I feel as frail as my 93 year old grandfather was before he died. I keep a cane by my chair in case my back goes out. Existence is pain. It’s expensive and it is pain.

So I want to make the best of it. I look around and I see places I could fix things, a way I could function a bit better, and I chase it.

There’s a dream though; a lifestyle that I dream of. 26 hours a week of work. a heated pool I can swim in every day, and a sauna for my nerves. Somewhere that I can go walk. Coffee pot, an office with a wall of books and a big window looking out on somewhere green. Thick walls so I can’t hear the street, better still how about a few acres between me and the neighbors.

The best thing though; a big property, rolling hills, some underground quiet space, a workshop….. dreaming is nice.

Sometimes I sit up at night and I walk through this missile silo that I had a dream about owning for awhile…. it has the bones of what I desire. The money though…. I don’t see how I could ever get it, even though I’m not poor, being that rich is an unknown….

I keep hoping God will just drop it in my lap, as yet it doesn’t work like that. I just keep improving my cell, working a bunch of hours to distract from the pain, staying busy so that I don’t hurt myself. Sometimes I exercise so that I don’t have the energy late at night when I’m feeling down, so I don’t hurt myself…. other people love me and I guess I love them, but dang it, keeping me alive is a project, and dying is also a project….. I take the one that hurts less people.

I’m a sucker really, the empathy makes me suck up pleasure and pain all the same… but I can’t get how the rest of people work….

Sometimes I would do almost anything for VR to be able to work brain chemistry so I could figure out how other people actually feel. What the heck is it like walking around being grateful that your feet hit the ground, for when knees and back don’t hurt? What’s it like not being constantly aware of who’s frustrated? Are there people out there who don’t fear more than anything falling into alcoholism?

I don’t know. I keep saying it because people seem to miss that I haven’t a fricken clue about some things, and even if I have the information the chances are it didn’t process. They all like to tell me about how much I’m supposed to know, but…. I’m not that guy. I might be flexible, and plan ahead….

*shrug* I can’t communicate all this in any other way, and maybe I never will again. The point is that there is a destination, and a reason for how I act.

There is the place that I used to long for her, here was the place my heart swelled with ownership

Was I young? Was I stupid? How could I have given away my heart to her….

Here is where I found out who you were. There is where I said goodbye. I somehow knew I would still be hurting long after you moved on.

Here’s where I met someone new, here’s where I risked it again. Over there is where I buried my hopes of being entirely someone’s, my romantic ideals, and my desire to love someone more than myself.

Now I sit a ghost of the man I was. A monster, cobbled together from the pieces they discarded. I tried to make someone to love, but in the end the only one that loves this mess is me, well maybe God wherever he’s gone.

There is where I dreamed the dream. At this desk I made a plan. I hoped beyond hope that the impossible could still happen….

Water down the stream, time has slipped away. I stand above and try to sift through and find who I used to be.

I don’t recognize the man in the mirror, he looks so tired, used up.

Somehow the organs keep working, heart pumping, mind analyzing. The transformation continues, into someone I won’t recognize tomorrow.

Someday maybe these wounds will close. The holes filled with something or someone else.

just found out that the problem I spent the last five hours trying to figure out and holding myself together over… wrong, entirely wrong. I’m trying not to completely lose it. I’ve been awake since 8:30 AM THURSDAY, that’s 28 hours, and working since 9:30 AM…. I hate this, I hate everything, I really really want to hurt someone, apart from myself,, but there’s no one that has it coming like I do. See? Logically, I should just go walk into traffic, because I’m the problem.  I’m the one that wasted immense resources screwing up….. I’m so tired, but I don’t get to sleep, not yet, because I still have MORE WORK.

I hope when I get checked into the hospital the school will send me bills, because this is how nervous collapse happens. I would have been happy if I was even nearly right, but I wasn’t…. not even in range… I can’t even bring myself to ask for another chance….. And once again I’ve got clouds and rain, I can’t even go for a fricken walk and get out of this place……of course I can’t feel the cold… walking into traffic sounds incredibly good.