thehusk

It appears my continued existence basically comes down to fear and attachment. I am more afraid of death than I am of the pain of life, intolerable though that often seems. Or possibly more afraid of what might wait beyond death (comeuppance/karma.) And I am attached to the positive possibilities of this world. To fantasies of being a different person, or memories of who I used to be. To beauty in all it’s forms.

So it would seem to follow that until my fear of this life overwhelms my fear of death, or my attachments sufficiently diminish, I am stuck here.

The sensible response would be to focus on making the best of things. To minimizing my suffering, and appreciating whatever positives I can find.

I just can’t seem to bring myself to actually do that. The motivation isn’t there. It seems I won’t even lift a finger, even to save myself considerable pain down the road. There’s no hope left in me. There’s no vision of the future, no point where I can tell myself I’ll be ok. There’s no carrot – only a slightly smaller stick (that wasn’t supposed to sound like innuendo.) So I struggle to push myself through anything difficult or painful, knowing that my reward will be to briefly feel slightly less miserable.

I suppose that’s the essence of depression – when you lose the belief that things will ever be ‘ok’ again, and thereby lose your drive to try to make things less shitty for yourself.

I don’t have it in me. To end my life, or to make my life worthwhile. I just want to give up. I want the pain to stop. But it won’t. It only gets worse. And I’m too much of a coward to end it. I’ll just suffer on miserably, until things finally fall apart, and even then I’ll cling on. And when death is finally forced on me, I’ll still deny the reality of it.

I want so many different, conflicting things. Delusional things. Terrible things.

Rationally, I know they will not make me happy. But that doesn’t change anything. Because I don’t believe anything could make me happy.

So my mind is consumed by one fantastical obsession, then the next, and on. Always attempting to escape from the awful reality

I try so hard to maintain some kind of internal coherency, some sort of balance. But the truth is there is no ‘objective me’, detached from all the delusion. I am the most disgusting sociopath you can imagine, and also the most innocent idealist, all within the same head.

My reasons for not killing myself are emotional. My reasons for wanting to end myself are also emotional.

I can’t be otherwise. I have no ‘self-control’. There’s no ‘self’ to control. Just these whirling, raging, maddening emotions, like cats fighting in a sack. What will I do next? Which will win out, from moment to moment? I can predict, based on past behavior. Probably I won’t start randomly attacking people in the street. Probably I won’t suddenly become super-functional and get a high-powered job. Probably I will continue on deteriorating, as my emotions tear me apart.

I can predict, but I cannot control. And yet I must also maintain the delusion that I can somehow regulate this churning sea.

Exit, and devastate those I care about. Somehow overcome the fear of death. Face the possibility of some worse punishment beyond.

Or try to find some way to stick around for another 20+ years, as my body continues to deteriorate, and the pain grows. Find some way to survive in a world I don’t want to be in. Endure the constant anxiety and exhaustion, as contentment becomes an ever more distant memory.

This is a recipe for depression. There is no hope. Things are bad, and they will get worse.

All you can hope to do is limit the suffering along the way. But your suffering, or the suffering of those you care about? And suffering in this life, or some unknown beyond?

I somehow need to overcome this impasse in myself. To either decisively end things, or to fully commit to survival. My current approach is the worst of all worlds – failing to function, exposing myself to ever greater pain and suffering.

My emotions are in a terrible state. They refuse to accept the reality I live in. But they also won’t accept leaving it once and for all.

What do you do when you’ve made connecting with others impossible? When you entire existence is a dirty secret. When every positive encounter you have is contaminated by the knowledge of what would happen if they knew the truth. And you can’t ever risk anyone knowing the truth.

I may be a monster, but I’m still human. I still have the same drive to escape isolation, to seek out company and fellow feeling. To feel accepted, related to, understood.

So there’s this constant nagging demand within me to reach out, to somehow breakthrough the wall that separates me from others. But there’s no way of satisfying that need – of bridging that chasm. The people who can relate to the real me are so tiny in number, and they’re all terrible people just like me. I wouldn’t want to talk to anyone like me.

It’s a funny kind of torment I’ve created for myself.

Parts of me want so badly to stop. That hate what I’ve become so much. But this stubborn resistance refuses and clings to existence. So I post here, in an attempt to relieve that feeling for a while. So for a time I can pretend that it’s not hopeless. In hopes of feeling a little less alone. Sometimes it works.

I’m not a cutter – generally averse to injury of any kind. But something to interrupt these feelings – this despair – that appeals right now.

This state will not last. In a few hours, it will have been pushed down again by some form of distracting dopamine. The reality will be suppressed, until tomorrow morning. When I will again spend hours torn between the savagery of my psyche and the exhaustion of my self-image.

I need a personality transplant. This one has no future. Tear it out, and replace it with one that doesn’t respond to reality in such a dysfunctional way.

I’m not constitutionally capable of reform. Too damn stubborn. The rot runs too deep in me. I refuse. I shall cling to my misery, even as it tips me toward annihilation.

Fear of suffering. That’s my primary drive and motivation. But if that’s the case, why isn’t ending it the rational choice? If there’s probably no existence beyond death, and probably no monotheistic God to punish me, and probably nothing I could do to avoid such punishment anyway, then…why am I enduring this? I’m suffering, and my suffering only gets worse as I age, and continuing to live risks exposure to really terrible suffering.

But part of me is resistant to that logic. I fear death. This animal wants to survive, and replicate. Even though death is inevitable, and replication extremely unlikely.

Suicide seems the obvious choice, at least from a purely self focused point of view. Ending my suffering versus significantly increasing the suffering of family. But I can’t even seem to bring myself to make that choice. The irrational attachment to life is still to strong.

I’ve made connection with others impossible. Because of the things that I’ve done, and seen, and cultivated within myself. Nobody could see the truth about me and still want anything to do with me. At least, no one morally sane. No one I would want in my life.

Evil is an emotive term. Let’s say that I’m sick. I’ve made myself sick. I’ve grown this side of myself that finds pleasure in wickedness. And I don’t think that’s something that’s ever going away. It’s not something you can unlearn. It’s a key part of reality – once you’ve seen it, you can’t forget.

The things I’ve seen, and felt – they’re incompatible with a decent society. Repulsion is the logical response.

So I can’t let anyone see this twistedness in me. I have to pretend, and keep that side of myself on a leash.

I don’t want to deceive others into caring about the pretend me. The me that is harmless. I don’t want to contaminate the lives of good people by involving them with my corruption.

But I also long for connection – to be seen, understood, accepted – even as I recognize that it’s not possible.

So…I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. I’ve made it impossible to pursue a meaningful life. I’m still holding on to the idea of it, without having any way to move towards it.

I don’t know which is worse – to attempt to deceive others into caring for me, and suffer the guilt, fear, and loneliness that result. Or to remain in complete isolation – and suffer the longing, regret, and loneliness that accompany that path.

I’m so insanely tired. I just slept for the best part of 10 hours, and somehow I’m still tired. There’s just nothing in the tank. My body aches. My mind is numb. I have no drive to do anything.

What’s my motivation here? To try to suffer a little bit less? Seems sensible. But I can’t bring myself to actually care. The things I actually want from life are fantastical/delusional. All I’m left with is damage control – trying to limit the pain. However bad it is right now, it can get so much worse.

But emotionally, I’d rather just stop.

I want to stop being me. I’m constantly making myself miserable, and I don’t think I can change. I’m just too broken – it’s like I’m addicted to being unhappy. It goes too deep – there’s no decent person left to salvage. Rotten to the core etc. I hate myself, and yet I love hating myself. I want it all to stop. I want me to stop – no more thoughts, no despicable monstrous feelings, no sensations. Take me apart and let my matter become other things, that don’t hate themselves or the world.

But I don’t want to devastate my family. Especially my mum. They’ve invested so much emotion and so many resources in trying to support me. It would crush them. I can’t do that.

But I can’t stand being me anymore. The shame of it. There’s no way out. I’m so insanely alone. There’s no hope. Just day after day of decline. And it hurts. This is not a life worth living. This is a sentence I’m imposing on myself. And it only gets harder the longer it goes. I don’t think I can stick out another 20 years like this. I can’t imagine how awful it will feel by then. I don’t want it. Skip to the end. If it’s just going to finish with me being glad to finally cease existing, I’d rather avoid all the horrible bits in between.

But I can’t. I can’t do that to the only people in this world I care about. The only people who care about me. Can I? Can I?

I think avoidant is a pretty good label for at least part of what is wrong with me. It’s not the worst thing, but it’s a big issue. At root, I am terrified of being seen, perceived, or judged. Of the negative assessments of others, spoken or unspoken. And so I instinctively seek to avoid real world contact with people wherever possible.

It’s understandable that I would be sensitive to judgement, given that in many ways I’m pretty disgusting and pathetic. But I feared judgement long before I had done so much to deserve it. I was resistant to anything that would expose my underlying weaknesses.

I isolate myself not because I don’t crave social contact, but because I feel the need to control it. If you let people into your life, then they might do or say something that highlights your flaws. And how could one possibly tolerate that?

Perhaps there’s a kind of narcissism at work underneath. If I can avoid any exposure to others perceptions of me, then on some level I can pretend to myself that I am the handsome, witty, and moral person that I want to imagine. My self-image was always incredibly weak. I never really had a strong sense of who I was beyond superficial expectations. And now I’m too broken to develop one.

So I feel the need to avoid others wherever possible. In order to feel safe and not be gripped by paralyzing anxiety, I need personal space where I know no one will pop round unannounced. Where there will be no cold callers who peer in at you, or maintenance workers who turn up without an appointment. Where I don’t see or hear from my neighbors. Somewhere I can pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

And unless you’ve got a tonne of money, or you’re prepared to live in the wilderness, that isn’t realistically possible. So a lot of the time, existence seems intolerable.

Rationally, I know it’s stupid. Even if someone observes you doing or saying something embarrassing, what’s the worst that could happen? They assume you’re a loser or a weirdo, so what? Unless you want them specifically to be your friends, who gives a shit?

But I just can’t seem to tolerate the threat of random strangers thinking poorly of me. It’s a real problem. It’s making me incredibly dysfunctional – I often won’t even leave the house to get essential groceries. I don’t make necessary doctor’s or dentists appointments. I haven’t worked a real job in years.

And yet the idea of change seems impossible. The prospect of trying to overcome such fears seems overwhelming and unbearable. The world is just too terrifying to me.

It’s hard to accept this despair. It’s not an intense kind of suffering. Not like grief. I’m not in agony. I’m not tearing my hair out. I’m just…chronically disappointed? With reality, and with myself. It’s not an existence I think is worthwhile. But it’s not truly awful, compared to some states. I’m pretty much fine – it’s just that a lot of the time I’d rather it was all over. I don’t want this experience anymore – I don’t want this life. I want to hope, and feel invested again. I want to feel involved in life. And I don’t think I can now.

Presumably most of what’s keeping me here is evolved instinct – an organism that wishes to delay it’s demise as long as possible. I might think to somehow overcome that side of myself and end it, but the rationality doesn’t really check out. If I don’t want to die despite kind of wanting it to be over, there might still be some sense in which I should end it. But the only justification I can think of is to spare myself this suffering. And if I should value my suffering,,, shouldn’t I also value the greater suffering that would be caused to my loved ones by my loss? What is perpetual disappointment & longing when compared to the intensity of grief and loss? The bottom dropping out of your world and your life collapsing?

So it seems I continue to live – because I’m a genetically programmed survival machine (with admittedly poor programming.) And I should live – to spare my family the pain of my loss.

It’s just I don’t want to experience the reality of it anymore. I don’t want to see what I see, know what I know, feel what I feel. If I could just check out and allow this body to run on autopilot, that would be ideal.

I have locked myself in a cage called life, and now I’m banging on the bars, yelling for someone to come and save me. But I won’t/can’t liberate myself. Even with keys lying all around.

It would be funny, if it wasn’t my actual existence.

I want not to be this anymore. I want not to be me anymore. Every time I’m around other people, I hate myself. I deserve to hate myself. But I don’t want it anymore. I want the feeling, the guilt, the self-awareness – I want it all gone. I want to be free of it – of this self, this identity, this craving. I’m so tired of it – I don’t want to be the villain anymore. Fine, me=badman. Deserving of death. Stain on existence. Can we just get it over with already? Just end it – so I can finally stop being this?

But of course, that’s not what I really want. I want ‘freedom to’, not just ‘freedom from’. I want to exist again, without these chains dragging behind me. And that’s not possible. There is no freedom – there is only an end. And that’s where the doubts set in, and keep me clinging on to an existence and a self that I’m thoroughly sick of.

I have a virus in my mind. If I could just let it go, then things would be so much easier. But I can’t seem to. A part of my brain is fixated on pointless unhealthy delusions. It’s almost a religious conviction at this point. If I could just have these impossible things, then everything would be ok. Land of milk and honey. But I can’t. And it wouldn’t.

But knowing that rationally doesn’t change how I feel. It’s been over 13 years now, and I’m still fixated on this shit. No matter what I do to distract myself or focus on other things, I always get pulled back to it. It’s at my core.

Like I said, it’s a religion. There’s no rationality there. No evidence. In fact there’s a whole bunch of contrary evidence showing that it would be a really bad idea to go down that road. And yet I somehow ‘know’ that it would make life meaningful again. Even though it wouldn’t. It would make everything worse.

I am addicted to a fantasy. An idea. A really bad idea. And no matter how much I reason with myself, it will not fade. I torment myself over it. I both hate myself for it and love it simultaneously.

It’s ridiculous how someone could become so twisted up in themselves. Freud would honestly have a field day.

I should kill myself, morally speaking. It would be the honorable thing to do. I’m far too corrupted to ever be able to live any kind of decent life. But I doubt I’d ever do it. My sick brain is far too attached to tormenting itself.

I would give anything to be free of the knowledge of what I’ve done. I don’t know if it’s even guilt. It’s hard to feel guilt, when you don’t know if what you did had any real impact on others. I suppose I wronged a lot of people, in an abstract kind of way. But I don’t know if that’s what I feel bad about that, if it didn’t actually change anything for them. Maybe I’m in denial.

I think I mainly feel bad for me – being the one who has to live (or not) with what he’s done. Having to know what I know about myself. I don’t know how to cope with it, mentally. Being the villain in other people’s stories. Viewing myself that way – it’s hard to accept. But I can’t escape it. What do you do if you’re the monster (other than kill yourself)?

It doesn’t change much – recognizing that what I did, what I want to do, is wrong. Because it also feels so right. No huge lessons were learned, no greater moral clarity was reached. I did try. But my mind resisted. The evil was sunk in too deep. So it’s very wrong (morally speaking), but also very right (emotionally speaking.) And that contradiction exists inside my head, constantly driving me mad.

So I have to live with myself, as someone who shouldn’t exist. I should hate and despise myself, as anyone who knew me would. I shouldn’t want anything good for myself, because I’m complicit in something horrible that’s ruined the lives of others. And no matter what I do, this knowledge will never go away. There’s no escape. No peace.

I just want the awareness to stop.

No, that’s not true. I also want what I did to somehow magically be made morally acceptable. And it’s not. It can’t be. I will never be acceptable, and I will never be acceptable, especially as long as I still want that. I will never be ok. I want the impossible.

My biggest remaining question is: are there reasons why I’m the terrible person that I am? And is there a real way that things could have turned out differently? I don’t remember ever thinking ‘Aha, I’ll be evil!’ I think I did evil things because they appealed to me, and they felt good. I didn’t consider the morality of it, because I couldn’t see any consequences.

I have no real outlet for the loneliness I feel. Reaching out to others doesn’t help. I’ve cut myself off from everyone morally and psychologically. Which means all I have is myself. And I’m tired of me.

I wish I could go back to before I made myself this. So much of the time, I want not to be me anymore. For the self-awareness to be gone. So I can experience the world fully again, without the burden of my identity.

It’s such a waste of a life, to be so inhibited. Someone else could be using this oxygen, and really making the most of it. I just don’t have it in me to enjoy this world. There’s nothing I really want to do as me. I just want to stop being me – to be someone else, free of the things I know.

Presumably I’m resisting suicide because of some kind of survival instinct. And I can’t convince myself it would be best to try and overcome that – at least while my parents are still alive and so invested in me.

Which leaves me trying to make my life less miserable. And I honestly don’t have a clue. My body leaves me uncomfortable most of the time – my digestion, skin, back, teeth – all cause me pain. I’m constantly tired – even when I get lots of sleep. It’s like there’s nothing in the tank. I wake up, have breakfast, and I just want to go back to sleep or curl up in a ball. I rarely have the energy to focus on or enjoy anything. I can’t face the world. I can barely function.

I’m completely alone 6/7 days a week. I can’t do social interaction without crippling anxiety. I have no real hope of ever finding a partner, or even a friend that I enjoy being around. And I get regular reminders that I’m irredeemable and shouldn’t even attempt to form relationships anyway.

But still, I have to try and somehow make things feel a little less shitty. The problem is that my brain is fucked. The only ways I know of coping are what led me here in the first place.

My brain is endlessly hung up on things I know logically are no good for me. This dumb insistence that if I could just find this specific thing in this specific way, then everything would be ok. That I would finally be happy again after over all these years.

Rationally, I know it wouldn’t end up like that. If I got anywhere close I’d most likely be left feeling far worse, and in danger of severe consequences. Nothing would be resolved, or healed. I would’ve just discovered a new low, and put myself and others at greater risk.

And ‘logical me’ knows that, and knows I’m never going to pursue that course. ‘Emotional me’ on the other hand is stubbornly fixated on it. It’s the desperate longing that torments me last thing at night, and wakes me feeling empty and despairing.

It deranges me. I have dumb addict brain. I’ve tried so many things to change it, but it’s hard-wired too deep. Wasted so many months in therapy exposing my darkest self. This obsessive fantasy still just gnaws away at me, constantly under the surface.

I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to take any steps away from darkness, when I have this thing tormenting me at my core. I want peace, but I don’t know how to let it go. How to stop wanting what I know would only make things worse.

This life terrifies me. I’m scared of judgement, violence and imprisonment. Of being stigmatized, shunned, condemned. Scared of never being able to connect with another person. Of being forever beyond the pale. I’m scared of spending the rest of my life alone, and dying embittered and ashamed.

I’m afraid of how irreversibly broken I am – so that there’s no point even trying to fix it. I recognize the evil in myself, but I love it – it’s the only thing that gives me respite. There’s no hope of anything good – I’m way to far gone. So evil is all I have left. But still, I hate myself. I both love and hate the evil within me.

I fear there is no happiness for me, no recovery, no peace. Just ever greater regret, shame, despair, loneliness, self-hatred, and desperation. Until death.

Apparently, I fear death more than all of the above.

I don’t remember consciously choosing to be such a coward. It’s not that I never faced my fears. I had to, at least for a time. Day after day. But there were so many of them, and they never went away. My nervous system became hyper aware of threats, and saw them everywhere. I couldn’t turn it off. Every day became an ordeal. So I numbed it. I tried to push all my anger and fear down inside, and it twisted me.

It seems I love torturing myself – making myself miserable by observing my pathetic life, while refusing to let go and embrace the nothingness.