thehusk

It’s kind of absurd how one of the worst things in the world has come to feel like the most amazing thing in my mind. How could someone become so morally confused? I suppose it happened gradually. Years of ignoring taboos, pushing boundaries. Sinking to the lowest depths to avoid facing feelings I didn’t know how to deal with.

But I can’t help thinking there was always something inherent in me, some disposition or vulnerability to evil. I don’t think I would have chosen this from a position of total moral clarity. Something was always wrong, and it just grew with me.

Could it have been otherwise? Theoretically. If events had turned out otherwise. A few random encounters, and maybe things shake out very differently. Or possibly it would always have found a way out of me in any circumstance.

It’s the dissonance that gets to me. Knowing rationally that something is so wrong, yet feeling emotionally that it’s so right. It’s deranging.

I don’t want to cause anyone suffering. I find it hard to envision a circumstance where I would. But the desire is so deep within me. It feels essential and compelling, then awful and terrifying. I can’t accept it, but I can’t stop it either. It consumes and torments me, but also provides brief escape from that torment.

I keep getting overwhelmed by the thought that I should be ending it now, while I still can, before something terrible happens. Not that things aren’t bad now – but it’s more or less tolerable. I have no life, no prospects, no real relationships – I’m completely alone. I’m full of regret, longing, guilt, shame, self-hatred etc. But I’m used to it. I’m used to being miserable. If everything just stayed like this, I reckon I could stick it out another 50 years and die naturally. Or at least until my parents died.

But things won’t stay like this. Things will continue to deteriorate. And the longer you live, the greater your risk of experiencing great suffering.

The world is full of unlikely accidents and unpleasant diseases. It seems a virtual guarantee that if you live long enough, you will get cancer (mercifully most people just die of age related illness first.) Any time you get in a car, you could be in a terrible accident.

Now most people probably won’t experience the extreme end of such suffering. Burning alive is rare. Drowning in panic and desperation is rare. Being eaten alive by rats is exceptionally rare.

But the risk is always there. And the longer you live, the greater it becomes.

It seems most people have at least some encounter with severe pain over the course of their life. But that may be ameliorated by positive and meaningful relationships in their lives. For example a woman might feel that the terrible pain of childbirth was worth enduring for the experience of bonding with their new child.

I suppose my issue is that I have nothing like that. I can’t imagine anything significantly positive in my future to make the endurance of great pain worthwhile. I can’t see how I’d ever have a real relationship, let alone children.

So I face the same risk of extreme suffering as every other person, but with very little of the positive motivation.

If (as I believe) I have very little positive to live for, then it seems sensible to focus on minimizing my exposure to the negative. In which case, why not end it as quickly and painlessly as possible?

The primary reason seems to be attachment (or addiction) to being this self. To my memories, my thoughts, my conception of a ‘me’.

But this rather narcissistic concern doesn’t seem sufficiently meaningful to justify continuing to face the risks of this world.

Instead, it seems that if possible it should be overcome, so that what I am can come to an end before something truly terrible befalls me.

Which all leaves me rather lost.

Reasons To Kill Myself:

• Fear of extreme suffering in future – imprisonment, violence, poverty, homelessness, accident, disability.
• Ending my current emotional cycle of regret, despair, longing, guilt, shame, self-hatred, craving, & fear.
• Ending the near constant low level physical discomfort.
• Ridding the world of my stain, and preventing any future negative effects on others.

Reasons Not To:

• Emotional devastation of family – my parents and sister.
• Fear of the experience of dying.
• Fear of something worse beyond death.
• Attachment to fantasies of a future – love, contentment, peace etc.
• Attachment to being in this world- memory, beauty, music.
• Fear of making a mistake – that continuing to live could somehow be worthwhile.
• Addiction to certain experiences and sensations.

I wish I could settle consistently on one side or the other, rather than constantly flipping back and forth over the course of each day. It makes it impossible to pursue meaningful action toward living or dying.

It seems that everyone is in the position of gambling on the nature of reality. By delaying ending my life, I am wagering that something terrible doesn’t happen in the mean time. Or that it will somehow pay off in terms of future happiness or fulfillment. Or that my endurance of suffering will be worth it in terms of protecting my parents and sister from the devastation of loss.

My problem is that I have no confidence in any of these reasons. There is every reason to believe that at some part, it will all fall apart. That my past will catch up with me, bringing with it violence, social stigma, and ruin.

There is very little reason to believe that I will ever find any degree of fulfillment or happiness. I’m incredibly isolated and lonely, but I don’t think I’m capable of any degree of intimacy. I’m a bad person, in ways no one could tolerate. There’s things about me that I can’t change, that can’t be forgiven, that I have to hide. I have to lie, to pretend that I’m not a terrible person in order to get close to anyone. So what’s the point?

I do think my family would be devastated by my loss. My mum in particular is far too emotionally invested in me. They should have disowned me years ago. I can see them falling apart. I don’t know if I could knowingly do that to them, after all they’ve done for me.

On the other hand, I’m already hurting them, by failing to be a functional, decent member of society. And knowing that isn’t enough to change me. Does it really matter if it does destroy them? I feel it does, but perhaps that’s delusional. Everyone’s dead ultimately. Everything falls apart. Does it really matter if they have to face the despair of that sooner rather than later?

And if I do decide to keep living in order to delay that…how would I even do it? If I have no other reason to live, other than protecting their feelings. How do I motivate myself to function, if I just want it all to end? Living like that seems tortuous.

I’m scared. Of death, of dying. Of it not being the end. I fear becoming trapped in a state of suffering, in this life or the next. I assume that what constitutes ‘my experience’ comes to an end upon death. But I don’t know. Do I take that gamble? Why delay, if I have to face it sooner or later?

In order to give my family a few more years of clinging to the hope that I’ll somehow turn it around? To cling to my own fantasies of living a real life? Blind survival instinct?

By continuing to live I’m constantly making wagers. But I have no faith in my ability to make smart choices. Much of the time, it seems it would be better if I were dead. Part of me longs to just…stop. To no longer carry the weight of being this self. But I’m also terrified of letting go. I’m so deeply emotionally attached to fantasies of life.

I’m in a near constant state of internal conflict and uncertainty. I should be dead. If anyone should, I should. I must be among the most wretched people on this planet. There’s so much wrongness in me.

But ending my life seems likely to devastate my parents and sister. When they’ve done so much to try to help me. I don’t want to do that to them. To infect their lives with my despair and hopelessness, when they worked so hard to give me hope and happiness when I was young.

Perhaps that’s just a rationalization, and all that’s really keeping me going is blind survival instinct. Presumably as long as I’m alive there’s still some (vanishingly small) possibility of me passing on my genes, no matter how miserable I get. If so, it unfortunately doesn’t seem strong enough to motivate me to do anything other than eat and sleep.

I don’t know whether my resistance to suicide is something that should be overcome. Things seem likely to get really bad at some point, and I might not have the ability to escape then.

But beyond just the experience of dying, you’re then facing the risk that it’s somehow not the end. I’m not a believer in any religion, but what the fuck do I know about ultimate reality? Maybe we do have eternal souls. Perhaps this is the matrix. How would I know? Maybe I should be trying to mend my ways to avoid eternal torment. How do you judge something like that?

Significant parts of me still want to live. To really live, rather than just consuming oxygen. But I don’t know how. I don’t think I can ever let anyone in, which rules out any meaningful connection. I don’t think I can ever really relax and enjoy another person’s company. Every interaction is forced and artificial.

I’m tormented by the stuff in my head.

I don’t know what I’m doing. My mind is all over the place. Hopes, dreams, longings, fears, despair, guilt, shame.

If I was a morally normal person, I’d have killed myself long ago. But then I’d never have gotten into this situation in the first place. I’m not a moral person. I care what people think of me, but I don’t value honor or social sentiment. I don’t trust society. I’m selfish.

So only I can make this decision, no matter how often morality informs me I should kill myself. But it’s hard to do, when you’re largely unmoored from social convention and belief. All I have is my feelings, and they fluctuate on a minute to minute basis. What kind of guide is that? It’s like being pulled around on a lead by a dumb animal. But when I try to reason it out, I get stuck. How do I weigh up ending my own misery against inflicting it on others? How do I weigh up the existential risk of something worse beyond death? The tiny possibility of happiness and fulfillment against the looming threat of everything falling apart. It’s too big for my tiny little mind.

I’m so wrong. And sometimes I can kind of recognize it. I’m a partially self-aware monster. But I won’t change. Because changing would mean letting go of fantasies, and false meanings. And there’s nothing else for me. There’s no other motivation in my mind. My core self is corrupt.

Strip that away, and what’s left? Just an aging meatbag who spends all day sleeping and digesting.

My will to survive is bound up in the unconscious delusion that at some point my fantasies will come true, and all will be right with the world.

Take away the wanting, craving, narcissistic fantasist…and nothing remains. Maybe pain. But nothing else.

What keeps me stuck is that there’s no ‘alternative’ reformed me. I don’t value people as ends in themselves, though I recognize the moral pull of doing so. I don’t have human connection. I don’t really care.

Perhaps about immediate family. I don’t like the idea of devastating them. But that’s insufficient to really change myself. I don’t think I can reform myself into someone they wouldn’t be disgusted by. I just don’t care enough to keep that up. I don’t know why. It just doesn’t seem meaningful to me, living for other people.

I guess that’s the whole point – that I’m an asshole. I don’t care about other people enough, on a deep enough level. I can care about people in an abstract or superficial way. But emotionally other people aren’t fully ‘real’ to me. Perhaps I’ve just spent far too long alone.

So anyway…the idea of trying to ‘fix’ myself – to somehow repair the damaged ‘inner child’ who grew into a repulsive adult – it doesn’t really appeal. Forcing myself to fully confront what I’ve become without anything else to cling on to – it seems like a recipe for pain and failure. I don’t see anything worth living for on the other side of that – just someone finally forced to sit with all the sadness and despair he’s been hiding from all these years. Probably a better person. But not someone I really want to be.

I think I’ll always choose to run, to hide, until the very end.

I’m so tired. Not sleepy. I slept all day. But still, I just want to curl up in a ball and forget everything. To be free of it. To not be aware of myself.

There’s stuff I have to do. Even just to keep living in the short term. Bills gotta be paid etc. And if I’m ever going to make an attempt that is smart rather than botched, then I’ll need to purchase equipment. I’ll need to research, and plan, and prepare.

I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything that requires acknowledging my fucked reality. I want to forget, to escape, to close my eyes and discover it was all a bad dream.

No matter how many pragmatic talking-toos I give myself trying to pull myself together, my body refuses. My limbs are leaden. There’s no gas in the tank.

I have no motivation. Things aren’t extreme enough yet that I’m desperate enough to overcome my fear of death. And by the time they are, it’ll likely be too late.

I see no meaningful future, or prospect of ending my misery. There’s no carrot leading me forward, and though rationally I know the stick is coming, I can’t see it yet.

My body is effectively doing the equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum, lying on the floor, refusing to move until someone gives it a cookie.

I know it’s not smart, but I’m just so fucking tired. Every tiny action takes so much effort. It’s like I’m moving through treacle.

Why do anything? There’s no hope, and my greatest fears are still distant enough that I can pretend they aren’t coming.

There’s so much wrongness in my mind, This gnawing, obsessive craving that eats away at me. Delusions that I can’t let go of.

‘If only reality was this certain way, then I’d be happy.’ Perhaps. But reality isn’t that way. It’s not going to happen like that, and there’s nothing I could do to change it.

But despite knowing that rationally, I can’t seem to accept it. Because all of my meaning, all of my hope, is bound up in these delusional fantasies. Accepting the truth – that it’s never going to happen, that it’was likely never possible, and certainly isn’t possible now – that forces me to confront the emptiness of my life. The nothingness that I am. The monster I’ve turned myself into.

And I don’t know how to live with the despair of that. So I fixate on fantasies of what cannot be. Because at least then I feel some flicker of positive emotion, some semblance of hope, even though it’s false, and craving after such fantasies quickly becomes it’s own kind of torture.

I probably shouldn’t exist. But I’m afraid to end it. To let go of being. To cease clinging to dreams of a life that never was. I fear hell. I fear having to finally face up to and answer for how I’ve lived.

I need to stop feeling this. But I suppose I’m also addicted to a cycle that produces these feelings. I’m addicted to living, and to continuing this suffering.

I have ruined my self, and now nothing is tolerable. Existence is a shard buried under the skin, digging it’s way ever deeper as I claw at myself. Nothing can ever be ok again, because I can’t let it be. Because I don’t know how to accept the reality of what I am, and what I’ve done, and what this world is.

Still, at least I have obscure doom metal bands to listen to, so I can properly wallow in my despair. Sometimes it even feels kind of comfortable, until my mind tries to remember. Shut up mind, with your stupid struggling and striving and trying to fix things. Shut up, and embrace the warm fuzziness/cold majesty of despair. It can be beautiful, but only as long as you don’t think about it too hard.

I don’t know how to live. With myself. With this experience. I’m so tired. And afraid. I’m not even sure of what. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop I suppose. For all my wretchedness to finally be revealed to the world, and my just deserts to catch up with me. Then there’s this constant nagging craving for any kind of intimacy, which I don’t think I’m capable of finding.

There’s no guide book on how to be this much of a fuckup (at least if you’re not religious). We’re in uncharted waters here.

I want these experiences to end. But I’m too much of a coward. And when I really think about it, I’m not sure it would be the best choice anyway. Maybe it would be for me. But not for my family, who have done more for me than any family should. I don’t want to make them as miserable as I am now.

So I should probably keep living, in the short term at least, while preparing for when things go south.

But I don’t know how to live with this. All I want to do is hide away from the reality of it. But that just stores up problems.

To keep living, you really have to give it your all. But I have so little to give. It takes so much to get myself out of bed, or prepare food, let alone deal with other people.

There’s so little hope, and very little to hold on to. Mostly all there is is tiredness, despair, longing, self-hatred, and fear.

Still, I’ll keep drifting on until it all finally falls apart. I just hope when it does I have the strength to end it.

Each time I make the decision to keep living, I’m quickly overwhelmed by experiences I don’t know how to deal with.

One of the biggest problems is desire, longing, or craving, for things I don’t think I can fulfill. I don’t know how to let go of it. I can’t convince myself it’s not desirable. It’s just there, in the background of my mind, tormenting me.

I don’t know how to just accept that it’s not something that’s possible for me, and move on. There’s so many other things I could be focusing on, but none of it feels meaningful. My mind doesn’t really engage with it. Nothing seems worth doing, if I can’t have this one dumb thing.

How do I accept it? That it’s unlikely to happen? How do I live with that, when it’s the only thing that really feels meaningful?

In theory, I tell myself it’s not enough to outweigh my reasons to keep living. In practice, it feels unbearable. It’s like this splinter in my mind, digging away.

I invest hope in dumb shit that’s none of my business. Politics should be of no concern to me. However much my fellow citizens want to fuck things up is entirely up to them. It’s a reflection of how little I have going on in my own life that I let myself get hung up on the idea that external forces will somehow improve things.

The world is fucked, and I should be indifferent to that fact, instead of allowing myself to be hurt time and again by entirely predictable political outcomes.

I wanted this tiny issue resolved, after wasting a whole day on it. So I persisted. I faced my fear. I tried other avenues. I panicked. Now I feel shame. I feel fear. I feel…pathetic.

Some people were nice. Some were alarmed. The minor issue is somewhat resolved, though threads lie untied.

But I feel…worthless.  Pathetic. Inferior. Disgusting. Inadequate. Hopeless. Like the ground should just swallow me up.

Nothing significantly bad will result. Those who think worse of me are unlikely to do anything about it. Nothing major will happen.

But I have exposed myself as unworthy – as inadequate – as weird, erratic, inferior, pathetic. I have allowed the world to see my weakness, my shame.

In a few days, this tiny incident will join the exhaustive list of times I felt socially out of my depth. But right now, I just want not to be. I want this feeling to stop. I want a drink, but there’s no drink in the house.

I’m alone, with my shame & self-hatred.

I find people…difficult. Maybe everyone does. I don’t know. Most don’t seem to get so hung up on the little things. There’s this feeling inside of paralysis, of wrongness, when it comes to minor social interactions. I don’t know what’s appropriate. I am consumed by doubt. I fear negative judgement.

Do I insistently bang loudly upon the door until someone answers, or return some other time? Do I wait for that organisation to call me back, or take matters into my own hands, risking later confusion & annoyance? Is my uncertainty a demonstration of foolishness? Of lack of common sense? Would any normal person know what to do in this situation? Is this a sign of weakness? Or cowardice?

That’s what I fear – showing any sign to the world of my inferiority. My wrongness.

Rationally, I know these things are trivial. Nothing disastrous will result, whatever the outcome. No matter how weird or pathetic or inferior people perceive me to be, the world will continue to spin. Death, disease, famine & war will continue unaltered.

But still, it’s the little things that unsettle me. The not knowing what to do, or how to be. The feeling of wrongness, & uncertainty. That whatever choice I make, it will be wrong. And that will somehow unveil my inner wrongness to the world. And disaster will follow.

No one can ever see my weakness. That’s been my thing for so long. It started off as trying to hide little inadequacies. But now it’s trying to cover up monstrous, cancerous character flaws.

Writing this made me feel a little better, for a while. No matter what results from such little things, it’s highly unlikely to have any significant impact on my life. It could go humiliatingly, cringe-inducingly awfully, and nothing would change.

But still, the unease will persist, until the matter is somehow settled. Because in the mean time I don’t know what to do, or how to be, and I have this embedded sense of wrongness inside.

So…I should kill myself, because I’m a worthless piece of shit. But I’m not going to, because I’m a coward. Which leaves me having to face my own worthless shittiness.

The obvious solution would be to stop being such a worthless piece of shit. But that’s easier said than done. My instinct is to be that way. When I try to do otherwise, it feels worse. It’s like the wrongness in me is constantly fighting to be expressed. Constantly suppressing it is an effort I’m just not motivated to maintain.

So, realistically, I’m not going to change. I’m not going to kill myself. I’m just going to go on, as this pathetic thing that I am, until something really bad happens. And then I’ll finally see how foolish I was to waste all this time, but it’ll be too late. Still, however bad it gets, eventually it will be over. Everyone dies, one way or another.

I am torn between two views of reality, and of the self.

One is that the self is dependent on the brain. It changes as the brain changes, and as the brain is damaged by injury or disease. Who you are is what your brain does. As the brain dies and is broken down and subsumed into other organisms, so the self fragments and is dissipated.

The other is that the self can somehow transcend death, and will be held to account for it’s actions in life. That it is a discrete entity, which can be detached from the world, and judged alone. That in some sense it is eternal.

These things are mutually contradictory, yet somehow I believe them both, one rationally, the other emotionally. Try as I might, I cannot seem to settle on one or the other as an approach to reality. It leaves me in two minds about everything, especially suicide.

I should be researching methods, ordering equipment, preparing. If I was serious, that’s what I’d be doing. Instead I procrastinate. Clearly, I don’t want to die enough.

I just desperately want to not feel this way anymore. To not have the experience of being me anymore. To not have this guilt, shame, regret, craving, self-hatred constantly hanging over me. I want to be free of myself. But I’m simultaneously too attached to it all to let go.

Killing myself would devastate my family. So I shouldn’t do it. But it would (probably) put an end to my suffering. So I should do it.

It seems you can’t change the past. So I’m stuck with this reality. I’m stuck being this person. I should either end it, or make the best of it. But I don’t seem to have the motivation or ability to do either. I just want out. I want an experience that isn’t this.

I don’t know what to do. In one sense, I should kill myself. I’m a terrible person. I’ve done awful things in the past, and part of me wants to do worse. And recognising objectively that I’m a bad person doesn’t motivate me to be much better in future. My conscience fades in and out, like a radio station – some times there’s just no signal, and I want to do the worst things imaginable (though fortunately I have little ability to). People like me shouldn’t exist. I don’t want to exist as this person, during times when my conscience is stronger. It feels wrong to continue to exist. So I should end myself.

On the other hand, doing so would devastate my parents and sister in the worst way. They’re all good people, living relatively meaningful lives. My sister is getting married in the spring. Killing myself would likely cause them all a degree of suffering equivalent or worse to what I experience. So…I shouldn’t do that, on the basis that tripling significant suffering would be bad.

I keep thinking I should wait until the balance changes – until something gets much worse in my life, or one of my parents dies, and my suicide would cause less suffering. But that leaves me having to live with all this conflict. Hating myself one minute, consumed by terrible impulses the next, then terrified. I don’t know how to live like this – how to be this thing that shouldn’t exist. It hurts too much.

Then there’s also all the other stuff that normal people have to deal with. There’s parts of me that are terrified of death. There are bits that long for companionship, relationship, goodness – all the things I’ve made impossible for myself. I don’t know whether even if I decided I should kill myself I would have the motivation to do so.

I’m so insanely lost and confused. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whether I should kill myself, and I don’t know how to live with myself in the meantime.

Every so often I get a reminder of how bad existence in this world can really get. A common theme is a depiction of someone burning to death. Today it was a film clip of someone caught in the blast of a nuclear explosion. Apparently, if you’re a certain distance from the centre, you don’t get vaporised, but it’s so hot that everything around you catches on fire – your hair, your clothes, everything. Now obviously this was played up for dramatic effect, but the level of agony, terror, and sheer animal desperation depicted on this character’s face rang true.

Every time I come across something like that, I find myself thinking; ‘What’s that like? What’s it like to be in that kind of desperate state? Surely it’s better to end your life now, rather than continue to face the risk of that kind of experience?’

Now obviously, the chances of dying in a nuclear blast are currently remote. The most common causes of death in the west are heart attack and stroke – effects of age (or morbid obesity.) I would expect a fair degree of warning before that kind of health problem was close – time enough to check out on my own terms. Likewise with cancer, which sounds like a potentially wretched way to die – plenty of time to choose my end.

But people do die, in violent accidents, all the time. The longer one lives, the greater the chance that it’s you in that car crash, or trapped in the burning building, or being savaged to death by a hamster with a vendetta.

And that’s not to mention the potential for future global instability. The peace we enjoy in the west is a historical blip. War is the norm for human society. On a planet with a rapidly expanding population, with rapidly diminishing environmental capacity, and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, what are the chances that things don’t kick off sooner or later? What happens when food supplies collapse in Russia, or China, or India? Do they just accept that and let their people starve, or do they start eyeing up their neighbours? And if that happens, how long before someone pushes a big red button?

My instinctive reaction to all this perceived threat is to want to peace out, ASAP. It seems like I’m a fearful, cowardly person. I’m either more aware of the potential for suffering than most, or I’m more averse to it, or I value life less. But to me, much of the time, nothing in this world seems worth facing that kind of extreme, desperate experience. Life isn’t worth the risk.

The problem with that is that at least part of me believes in consciousness continuing beyond death. And I have an extremely guilty conscience. I’m terrified of having to face judgement, or answer for what I’ve done in life. A significant part of me believes I deserve punishment. And what punishment does monotheism offer? Burning, for eternity, in unending fire.

Now, rationally, this doesn’t seem likely to me. Supposing conscious experience can somehow transcend the death of the brain, it doesn’t make much sense to me that even the worst people would just be endlessly tortured. What possible purpose would that achieve? But then I’m clearly not someone orientated toward existential justice.

Unfortunately, I just don’t have confidence in my rationality, in my capacity to accurately assess reality. I have this deep and abiding dread of the other shoe dropping, of my crimes finally catching up with me, and my worldview proving to be a delusion.

So I’ve managed to trap myself in this strange psychological prison. Life is terrible, because of the enormous capacity for extreme suffering. But death is also terrible, because it exposes me to unknown quantities of negative experience in the great beyond. Clever me.

Since it seems I’m not going to be ending my life (at least for the time being), that leaves me trying to improve my current experience. I’m just not sure how. I’m so tired, afraid, isolated, despairing, full of self-hatred etc. Then there’s all the physical discomfort I’m in. I just want to zone out and totally disconnect from reality. But I can’t. If I’m going to try and survive, I need to find some way to function.

But I don’t know how to do that without making myself feel worse. There always seems to be some reminder of my inferiority, my worthlessness, how hopeless it is for me. It just sends me spiralling straight back into the ‘I want to die’ mindset. I’m stuck in this endless loop. I need to figure out some way of engaging with a world that rightfully despises me. But I have nothing to fall back on – no real reasons to live. I’m primarily not killing myself because I’m afraid – of the effect it would have on my parents, and of the possibility of being trapped in a worse state beyond death.

There’s nothing much else for me to live for – no connection is possible. I don’t have the strength in me to face the reality of who I am and my situation. I’m completely alone, floundering in the dark.

Imagine not being alone. Imagine there was someone you could be around without crippling fear. Imagine being able to let someone, anyone in. Imagine experiencing a sense of peace and contentment. Imagine not having to hide yourself from the world. Imagine not being a twisted evil narcissistic failure of a person. Imagine someone actually knowing you. Imagine emotional intimacy. Imagine a partner, someone truly on your side. Imagine the background hum of dread subsiding. Imagine feeling glad you were alive. Imagine having a future. Imagine not being consumed with shame, guilt and self-hatred. Imagine experiencing real hope again. Imagine not seeing this world as a terrifying ball of threat, loss and misery. Imagine being able to acknowledge the hardships of life without desperately wanting a way out. Imagine feeling gratitude for existence. Imagine going back in time, and doing it all differently. Imagine becoming someone capable of love, contentment and living a full life. Imagine real human connection. Imagine being able to appreciate the moment. Imagine feeling purpose. Imagine warmth. Imagine being ok with reality.

Imagine no longer being what you are. Imagine peace.