thehusk

Every now and then I get a clear reminder of what I’ve done and who I am, and how everyone else feels about that. I live in this state of denial and emotionally distancing from it the rest of the time. Like I know, factually, what I’ve done. And how horrific everyone feels it is. But that knowledge doesn’t fully connect. I have this emotional shield of rationality, where I disconnect. I detach emotionally.

But sometimes an explicit reminder cuts through, and I remember. I remember what I’ve effectively been trying to bury for 17 years. I remember I don’t want to live in this reality. […]

I wasted my teenage years on fear. Anxiety, avoidance, isolation. Missed all the opportunities to grow and develop as a person. Went to college barely more socially capable than an average 11-year-old. Became even more isolated, even more crippled by anxiety. Dropped out, and gave in to depression, addiction. Wasted my early 20s on that. More fear, more isolation. Only this time without hope of a way out. Lost any sense of who I was. Guilt, shame, despair.

With a lot of help from my family, tried to pull things together a few times in my mid-20s. Finally got a dead-end job, still living with parents. […]

I don’t want to exist in this reality anymore. Being the bad guy in everyone else’s narrative… it gets old, you know?

I tell myself that I should stick around, on the off-chance that there’s some way to find peace. To be free of this despair. To possibly repent of my past. Or even just become someone capable of repenting. Just in case death isn’t the end.

But there’s probably nothing. And even if hell exists, there’s probably no way out now. I’m effectively already there, psychologically. I’m stuck in an endless self-reinforcing loop of despair, hatred, craving, resentment. I have no real hope. And I don’t […]

I waste a lot of time and energy pondering whether I should kill myself. I wouldn’t say it’s that I want to, exactly. I’m hugely afraid of death. And my subconscious will to survive, though weaker than average, is still clearly present.

But it strikes me that in my current life suffering predominates. Not in an extreme sense. I have chronic back & stomach issues, but it’s rarely agonizing. Mostly just uncomfortable and irritating. But it’s bad, and it has the potential to get much worse. And is unlikely to get much better. So it doesn’t seem worth enduring, for its own sake. In other words, it would […]

One of the most prominent undercurrents in my neurosis is fear of cruelty. Within myself. Within our species. Within the whole natural world.

The most recent manifestation: a morbid fascination with cannibalism. Turns out, remarkably common in pre-modern times. Especially in tropical zones, and particularly within island cultures.

I was aware of “emergency cannibalism”, in times of extreme famine. Horrific, but understandable, given severe enough hunger pains and desperation to survive. You’ll find it throughout history and across the world, from medieval England to 19th century China and Ukraine during the Holodomor. When people are pushed into terrible enough circumstances, the moral inhibitions of a proportion of […]

I’ve been drifting for so long now. Half my life. I wish I had some sense of clarity or consistency. Any kind of purpose to keep me going. Like, what the fuck am I doing here? What am I living for? I’m not trying to find a relationship. I’m not that interested in making friends. I don’t really enjoy other people’s company . To the extent that I have career goals, I don’t really care whether or not I get there. I don’t get much pleasure from any of my hobbies or interests. I have no drive.

The only reasons not to kill myself are not […]

While dreaming, upon coming face to face with a former childhood friend, I apologise for being like the person who hurt her, the one who messed her up. I repeat multiple times that I wish I wasn’t what I am. At least in that moment, I think I meant it. I honestly repent of who I am and what I’ve done. But there’s no going back, there’s no undoing what’s been done, so…

Except now, I’m suddenly lying face down, and the bed drops out from beneath me. And I’m falling, fast. It’s kind of exhilarating, almost like flying. And the thought fills me that maybe […]

The problem with sleep, I find, is that it requires you to let go. To accept the circumstances of your reality, at least enough to feel comfortable being unconscious for 8 hours at a time. To feel that things are in some sense ok, or at least they will be at some point in the future. That things are, more or less, under control.

And I haven’t had that feeling, for so long. Nearly 15 years now. And it’s been getting worse and worse as I age. As whatever irrational youthful optimism I once had drains away.

I need something to tell myself, to convince myself that […]

The things I used to rely on to get me through don’t work anymore. They don’t distract me from my reality. I don’t care enough to invest. I’m not interested in anything. I have no plans, no goals, no aims. There’s nothing I want from life that’s realistic for me to work towards. The only things I want are impossible – to turn back time, to not be who I am. Right now, I mostly just want the pain to stop.

And it’s not that the pain’s even that bad. It’s that I have nothing to make enduring it worthwhile. I have nothing to distract myself […]

I don’t want to be this anymore. I’m pointlessly miserable. And I don’t know how to stop. I’ve made myself so fucking alone & isolated. I can’t relate to other people anymore. Not really.

I just want to stop. I’m so sick of myself. These thoughts, these feelings. I hate myself. I hate the world. I hate everyone. I hate reality. And that’s fucking pointless. To make yourself miserable over things you can’t change. But I can’t stop.

This life is for nothing. All it does is delay the inevitable. Delaying the leap into the void. On the off-chance that there’s something beyond death, and maybe it’s […]

I think I broke my sense of morality a long time ago. Possibly when I was still a child. And I’ve been trying somewhat to artificially re-construct it for a while. I have some of the vague reasoning mapped out, for why what everyone else seems to believe is actually reasonable and valid. But that doesn’t mean I actually feel it. At least, not most of the time. A lot of the time, I want to do the worst things imaginable. Like they seem incredibly appealing. Beautiful, even. Essential. Life-affirming. How could something be evil, when it feels so good?

For a long time I’ve assumed […]

I’ve written about this before, but I have this exaggerated fear of loss. More specifically, my parents golden retriever is 16. She’s doing well for her age, but she’s growing more and more unsteady, slowing down month by month. She probably won’t last the winter. This reality terrifies me.

I’ve spent a lot of time raising her, looking after her throughout her life. A lot of that time I was living at home with her. She was pretty much the only being who consistently looked happy to see me when I got up every day, who wanted to be around me when I came home from […]

There’s this part of me that longs to let go of being this twisted thing. And it seems like dying is the only way to do that. To cease being this failed creature and return my matter to the planet, so it can be part of something less repulsive.

But death seems terrifying. The end of all possibilities, all attachments. Every abandoned dream, every lost hope, every unfulfilled desire. Finally nullified beyond doubt.

So I sit in this misery I’ve created for myself. And every year it feels worse. And I tell myself I’ll try things to change it. And I do try a little, ever so […]

This has no relevance to anything, I’ve just been feeling the need to say it somewhere, so…

I’ve fucked up my life about as much as I possibly could’ve, given the cards I was dealt. So a lot of this is no doubt down to envy. But when I see people reach the level of wealth where they can throw away thousands and not give it a second thought, I feel anger and resentment. Even if they’ve worked hard, and they’re decent people, and they’ve pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Even if they grew up poor, and spent years sweating away for the minimum wage, […]

Most days I wake up in this haze of irrational anger and hatred. I literally spend hours where pretty much my only thought is “I want to kill everyone. I want to destroy everything.”

Now obviously, that’s not within my power. I’m not a super-villain. But it’s the sentiment that’s confusing. Because deep down, it’s not really that I want to hurt people. I don’t want to take life from anyone who finds it meaningful, however much I may envy and resent them. I’m not a sadist.

At the core, I think I just desperately want not to exist anymore. To not be this mind that I […]

This post is mainly written for the purpose of self-clarification (like all my posts really). Every day is Groundhog Day, and through denial I continually forget what I am and what I’m doing here.

Being caught between the conclusion that my life is worthless, and the aversion to following through with what that conclusion implies. That’s the space I exist in. Despair, depression. “Everything is pointless, so why do anything?” And “I shouldn’t exist anymore.” But also “death is terrifying, so don’t take the necessary measures to kill yourself.”

My life is “worthless” in my own, subjective terms. I don’t believe myself to be capable of being […]

I know there’s things I should be doing. So, so many things. Enough to occupy several lifetimes. Instead, I do nothing. Day after day. I don’t have it in me, to push myself to do anything even remotely challenging. What’s the point? Will I be happy on the other side? Will I feel any better? I can’t imagine feeling better. I can’t imagine not being filled with regret, fear, anger, hatred, and despair. I can’t imagine trying to go to sleep without this deep sense of wrongness.

I should probably try something radical, to reshape my brain and emotions. Drugs, probably. But that requires effort to […]

The majority of my life is governed by fear, and has been for a long time. I seem to have a far greater sensitivity to perceived threats than is normal or healthy. On top of that, I think I find it much harder to accept the suffering that this world contains.

You could get hit by a car tomorrow, and paralysed, and trapped in a state of chronic pain. Or any number of seemingly unlikely things. The longer you live, the greater the opportunity for something like that to happen. And I’ve never known how to be ok with that potential. It doesn’t seem worth the […]

I’m the problem. My mind, my personality, how I relate to the world. Everything about me is wrong. I’m a waste of life. A waste of existence. I make things pointlessly miserable and painful for myself. It’s so fucking stupid. There could be someone here enjoying life in my place. Using the resources, the space I take up and actually making the most of it. Instead there’s just this misery I’ve created for myself. I don’t want to be this anymore. But I’m too afraid, or too attached to being this to end it. Too afraid to let go. Too attached to ideas of who […]

I’m so far from anything healthy, or normal. I’ve completely isolated myself. To the extent that even when I’m around people, drinking and talking, trying to be sociable and personable, I’m alone. I’ve isolated myself morally, psychologically. I’ve become something unrecognisable, twisted, alien.

And I have no fucking idea what I’m doing here, out on my own. This is uncharted territory. Here be monsters.

I know there’s no way back. There’s no way of unseeing the things I’ve seen, or undoing what I’ve done. There’s not much of a path forward either. No real examples to follow. Those who’ve been down this road tend to keep it […]