So I give up. This is all there is, and there ain’t no mo’. God only knows what sort of fucked up crisis would actually get me to save myself, but I’m too fucking tired.
It’s not really a choice. As Ben so eloquently stated the other day, this is involuntary celibacy, and it doesn’t matter if I can live with it or not. Like many things I’ve experienced in the past seven years, you either live with it, or you don’t live. Those are pretty much the only options.
And as much as just ending it all might actually be a good way to stop hurting all the fucking time, I just don’t have the balls. Deep down inside, I’m a chickenshit, and after all, that is ultimately my problem, isn’t it? Never let it be said that I was ever brave, and that I fought to overcome insuperable odds.
It is interesting that I’m no longer sleeping all the time. Unlike the classic victims of depression, I sleep 10 hours, maybe 12 hours in a row when I get like this. Normally you ask people who you suspect of depression whether or not they can sleep at night, and if they’re depressed, they tell you that they can’t. Either the can’t get to sleep, or they keep waking up in the middle of the night. I guess I have this weird hybrid symptomatology. While I have hypersomnia, it’s not very restful sleep. I probably wake up at least three or four times in the middle of the night, and I feel extraordinarily tired by the time I actually have to wake up.
Like most depressive episodes I experience, I can’t really think of a good reason why I feel this way. If you think about it, my life is actually going relatively well. I went to my semi-annual performance evaluation the other day, and my supervisors all had good things to say about me. It’s like when I got that award for being in the top 15% of my class—I’m pretty sure a normal person would be pretty psyched and feel at least a touch of superiority about it. Instead, I just mope around, because who the fuck cares? I’ve got no one to share my triumphs with, so what’s the point? Well, I know that’s the heart of the pathology. There are at least four, and maybe slightly more, people who care at least a little, and why that isn’t enough, I’ll will never understand.
I wish that the things that I accomplish meant enough to me to get me out of my funk. I guess there is a really sick part of me that thinks that whatever I do is never enough. I suppose that’s the part of me that has driven me to the ridiculous distances that I’ve managed to get myself to, always striving to get farther and farther, without thinking about what exactly that costs until too late.
When was the last time I was happy?
Actually it wasn’t that long ago. It lasted for a few hours a couple of months ago, and despite knowing it wasn’t going to last, I remember being OK with that. That’s just the way happiness is, I guess. No one is happy 24 hours a day. I don’t care if you’re always smiling and singing “zippee-de-doo-dah” out of your asshole, you have to feel the whole spectrum of human emotion to be truly alive.
And it was all about just doing the things that made me happy when I was a kid: playing in the ocean, lying on the sand. But the kicker was this: I could share the experience with someone. It just wouldn’t be the same if I went out there by myself.
Now you might say that it’s just because I have a crush on this woman, but you know what, she will probably never see me in That Way™. This is Gospel truth if I can’t ever get my shit together, and probably even if I do. But that’s OK. I’m all right with the Friend Zone™. Sure, I dream sometimes, but hell, I also think about what I could do if a million dollars landed in my lap. She is who she is, and she has saved my ass from certain suicide, and I am lucky as it is.
(But, like I said, it’s never enough.)
So to get back to this aching fear of intimacy that is an aggressive malignancy upon my soul: I know that if I can’t shake this thing, it’s going to kill me. I don’t know what it was last week that made me realize that there’s probably about a 75% chance that I’m going to die by my own hand, but there it is. In a sick way, it’s made me feel invincible, because while there’s still a finite chance that I’ll die from getting hit by a car or by having a heart attack, the odds are that I will eventually kill myself at some point in my life. If I can’t convince myself that life is worth living, than by default, I’ll have convinced myself that it’s not.
This is not brinksmanship. This is not a cry for help. This is simply cold, hard epidemiology. It is well known and well studied that the end point of depression that fails to go into remission is suicide, and while you can survive in this twilight gray zone of never feeling normal, subsistence is a far cry from healthy living.
I will try not to look into the abyss too long. But every year it just gets harder and harder.