My daily life is a lot like me, staring back at myself in the bathroom mirror at 12:10 AM, on an April twenty second evening, in the year of twenty nineteen. I look at my drunk self, angry and disappointed in myself, my situation, my surroundings, everything that I consist of, and my life consists of. Just angry, rationally, irrationally, it doesn’t really matter at that point.
I stare at myself in the mirror, and I have nothing to say to myself. Nothing to comment; nothing to remark; just pain in my eyes, as I stare back into it. No goals, no assumptions, no intent.
I just want to exist without hating myself. I just want to exist without feeling like I’m useless. Without feeling like my writing will never see the light of day; or it won’t have any meaning to the rest of humanity. I don’t want to feel like I could kill myself at any moment, on a dime, and let the world be left with nary a trace of what I am and what I was. Because I have no clue what lies beyond death, and it terrifies me more than anything else.
I’m sick of listening to sad songs to make me feel less alone. I’m sick of telling myself it’ll get better eventually. I’m sick of saying I won’t give up; how long can I be expected to keep going? How long until I’m allowed to give in to this inevitable end? I can’t lie to myself anymore.
I hate living; I hate prolonging this fight. It’s already taken my soul, I’ve already lost control, I gave up on this war long ago, and I know this is a battle I’m not going to win. The demon inside of me has already won, I’m just delaying the inevitable.
I could go on the Joe Rogan podcast and tell my life story tomorrow, and it wouldn’t stop me from blowing my brains out on Tuesday. My level of sadness, my life is not as simple as a 3 hour podcast. And even if I could communicate even 10% of it, I would feel like I exaggerated it, I would feel like a giant fucking fake. There is no exit plan for me that I haven’t already decided on.
I won’t be marrying someone I love, I can’t have the son and daughter that I dream of; how the fuck could I raise anyone when my mom couldn't raise me? My dad couldn’t be bothered to know my fucking name, and the only person outside of my family that showed me kindness, shits on me on a daily basis.
Tells me that I’m wrong because I won’t call therapists and beg for help; tells me I’m wrong for not begging his mom for forgiveness when I couldn’t afford the rent. Tells me I’m the shitty human being; because I couldn’t force myself to live a life I hated and wanted to kill myself for living.
And everybody keeps commenting saying they’re concerned when I say I’m sad and suicidal; but to be honest it doesn’t make me feel better. I hate the attention; I hate the rejection of my feelings. My friends and family get angry at me for being sad, and I get angry back, because they don’t get it. They still don’t get it, even after listening to my desperate cry for help; I don’t want sympathy, I don’t want criticism: I want a safe place to express myself.
I want less judgement, not more. I want forgiveness for my feelings; not condemnation and ridicule. I hate myself for feeling like this. I hate myself for wanting to end myself. It’s a never-fucking-ending cycle. And when your response is anger, it just reinforces my self-ending-desires. It tells my most negative and depressed self; you were right. You should just end it; look what you get when you express yourself the only way that you know how.
It just reinforces the behavior you’re trying to prevent by telling me to hang on. I’ve been hanging on for five years by myself, in the darkness, with no mom or dad or brother or sister to guide me, when the previous eighteen were spent hopelessly clinging to them, hoping that the pain and misery would stop if we just worked together.
Now I know better; now I know reality. Nothing comes together for you unless you build it yourself, and anything you build for someone else is expected to disappear from your grasp, as soon as that person you’ve invested yourself in, decides it’s time for you to fuck off. Brother, Mother, Father, Sister, Uncle, Aunt, Grandmother, Grandfather, all of them will kick you to the fucking curb and tell you to figure shit out on your own if you are stupid enough to put all your cards into solely them.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t received help from these people; it just means the end result is the same: if you can’t take care of yourself, you might as well not ask for help at all. That way, in the end, when you ultimately fail, you are less of a burden on them.
I wish I could walk into work tomorrow and tell them I’m so depressed that I want to kill myself. But that wouldn’t result in anything positive. They wouldn’t pay me more for the hard work I do, they wouldn’t soften the blows when I fucked something up, they wouldn’t blink a god-damn eye at it; I would clock in like normal, and regardless if they took it seriously or not, I’d be expected to bust my ass for eight hours.
Maybe the world is better off that way; there are millions of me. Millions of people consumed by guilt, anxiety, depression, drowning in their own negative emotions, all the time, at any time ready to burst and quit their job and commit suicide, or go on a shooting rampage, depending on their personal morality.
And the only thing stopping them, is that they know for the most part the world wouldn’t give a fuck. It would go on without them, regardless if they silently went out in their bedroom with a 9mm pop; or if they went out trying to find out how many they could manage to kill with an AR-15. Maybe their name would be used by the media to further restrict freedom, but that would be the extent of their fame, beyond their parents going on CNN and saying “We never expected this.”
God forbid the people of the nation ever stopped to think to themselves; “You know who’s REALLY to blame for the kids shooting up schools? Maybe it’s the people that raised them? You know… the PARENTS? God forbid we blame the BABY BOOMERS for anything.”
I can’t even feel bothered to keep writing this. I feel like anyone who is even remotely paying attention knows this shit already. I feel dumb for saying it, but so many people are ignorant of the problems right in front of them. I bet the average person has already colored me as a whiny millennial. Someone who had it so good that they don’t know how bad it can really get.
I spent my entire life grappling with the fact that I didn’t have a father. It was this giant gap in my fundamental identity that I filled with so much bullshit. I filled it with ego, food, video games, being right in arguments, alcohol, weed. Nothing filled that hole. Nothing ever will.
And I thought for awhile that I’d at least have my mom to lean on, for the rest of my life. And now I couldn’t be bothered to call her, all while thinking about twenty years from now, when she eventually dies, will I regret blocking her out? Regardless of the evil and ignorance her decisions have inflicted on me, my brother and sister, I still worry about her. I still worry about the effect on my unborn children. I still worry about the relationship I might never have, explaining to them I won’t talk to my mom because she took thousands of dollars from me. Wondering if they’ll understand the pain and misery those lack of dollars inflicted on me.
Every single day of my life, I think about how afraid I am of death. I hate it. I hate death more than any other concept on this Earth; nothing makes me more scared or humble than the idea that I won’t be here anymore. Some days I literally can’t wrap my head around being dead, and I wish I could live forever.
My heroes have told me over and over, killing myself won’t solve my problems, but I think they’re wrong. Because they didn’t do it themselves; they’re speaking from a point of bias. Chester didn’t think they were right; neither did Kurt, and David Draiman's’ girlfriend agreed. That’s why I beat my head against the wall.
That’s why my anxiety eats me alive everyday; because I’d rather not be here, and the guilt alone kills me. It ends all positive emotion I have and leaves me feeling like I’d be better off pulling the trigger; who the fuck’s ever going to relate to me and tell me I’m right?
They’re only gonna tell me that it’s temporary, that I’m overreacting, that I’m not being rational. The people who feel the same are too afraid to say so, and the only people brave enough to speak up try to mitigate reality. No one just tells me that it’s okay to feel this way. No one ever says it’s normal. No one ever says that I’m right.
They just insist that everything I say is wrong, and I’m crying when I say I know they are wrong. I wish they weren’t, I really did. It would make this so much easier. It would make me so much happier. I wish I could just go to fucking sleep like a normal person at 12:10 AM, but instead at 1:22 AM I’m writing this bullshit, and I probably won’t even pull the trigger. I’ll talk a lot of shit and keep living like a pussy, because I don’t know what else to do.
Which begs the question, why don’t I just get some sleep so I can go to work, so I can pay rent? My insides out, my left is right, my upside’s down, my black is white. I hold my breath, and close my eyes and wait for dawn, but there’s no light. Nothing makes sense anymore, anymore.
I can’t even express my own misery, I need Mike Shinoda to speak my truth for me. I’ve always felt that way. Linkin’ Park, Nine Inch Nails, Three Days Grace, Disturbed, Shinedown, Seether. They’ve expressed what I am better than I can.
Maybe that should be a hint that I’m not alone. Maybe that should tell me I’m a little silly for telling myself I’m alone in this. But I can’t shake the feeling of reality. In all of my life experience, there’s always one constant; if I’m not paying for it now, I’ll be paying for it later. There is no such thing as a free thing. There is no such thing as generosity. No one makes investments, they make loans.
Every single day, I hurt myself. To see if I still feel it, when it touches my skin. The alcohol sours my liver, the weed simplifies my brain, But I don’t have any other way to feel happy anymore. I never had a girlfriend, I never had a real relationship. I never had sex with someone I loved. I never kissed anyone I was attracted to. Johnny Cash and Trent Reznor had more successful lives, by many orders of magnitude, and even if I lived until 90, I wouldn’t match even one of them.
I thought when I became an adult I’d be the exception, I used to think I’d work my ass off and make my families life better, single-handedly, but I can’t even bring myself to work for myself anymore. I’m so sick of my life and everything it consists of.
I honestly can’t fucking bring myself to keep going. I want to beat my own head into my tile floor, until it turns into mush. I want to shoot myself seven times in the head, destroying any evidence of my justifications.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be haunted, maybe I’m just being a little bitch. Maybe my friends could go through my life and come out stronger, rather than the blubbering mess I’ve become. I told myself to give up and kill myself years ago, and still I’m here. I don’t view that as a victory, but rather a thought experiment; “If I decided NOT to kill myself, would it get better a year from now? Two years? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? How long until I’m fundamentally ALLOWED to kill myself? How long until it’s enough? When am I allowed to give up?”
The thing that bothers me the most is the lying every day. Every action I take, from putting on deodorant, to brushing my hair, rinsing my teeth with mouthwash, and clocking in. To pocket drilling, edge-banding, helping an installer, caming shelves or building drawers. Talking to the one of four people I have to interact with for work, that feels fake too. Showing up to work feels fake, going to my friends house feels fake. Cooking dinner feels fake, going to the gas station and buying a twelve pack of beer or six to eight mike hard lemonades at a time, so I can chug it when I get home and feel a tiny bit of happiness. It all feels artificial as fuck, like the second real struggle comes along I’d be laid flat by it. Like I don’t even deserve to keep breathing.
It is what it is, like my musical heroes tell me. It is what it is. It’s so selfish to think of, but I don’t want to kill myself for my sister, and my nieces. They don’t deserve that negative energy in their life, before they’ve ever really started. If I really cared about my own suffering, I’d try to mitigate it spreading to the people I love. I don’t know if me not caring about that makes me a bad person, or just a troubled person.
I honestly don’t know if I’m going to make it through this. I don’t know if these will be the last words I ever type, or if I’ll push through another decade of this hellhole I’m living in. I’ll be amazed either way; I never expected myself to give up, and at the same time, I never thought I could deal with this level of constant negative emotion for as long as I have.
