It’s late February 2007. I have a job as a junior civil engineer after 8 years in IT. It seems like a decent job, it has its challenges, but it is also engaging. But coming along for the ride is a terrible sense of loneliness. It permeates my existence. I have coworkers, but I can’t connect with them. Overall life seems grim and unredeeming. Miserable memories dominate the good ones. There seems to be no way to tell my story, and besides, who would want to hear it?
So after a night of heavy drinking, almost on a whim, I take the pills I have been stowing for just this moment. I write a suicide note, there really is no doubt in my mind that death is the outcome I desire.
But somehow I fucked it up. Did I not have enough pills? Was the suicide note too inaccessible? Maybe if everyone had read it, everyone would have been on the same page, that to me life is not valued. Maybe less effort would have been put into resuscitating me. But in fact, much effort was put into resuscitating me, and keeping me around. My family did not want to let me go, and certainly some selfish part of me did not want to either, just some small slice of me, still connected to the pleasure I might extract out of life at some point in the future.
I almost died, it was very very close. I was unresponsive when the paramedics arrived. I hung onto life by the thinnest of threads. Somehow, they revived me.
When I came to after days in a coma, there was a sense of “oh fuck, I’m still here.” In someways it was a nightmare. And it makes me wonder, “can I even die?” And in fact, I start to doubt that I can. I start to believe that whatever effort I make to end everything, somehow, I will find myself still on this earth, quite possibly in a worse state than before. It’s a terrifying possibility. I could go into the slings and arrows of fate that led me to this position, but I don’t know what good that would do. Now it seems the taxpayer and benzodiazepines keep me going as a zombie or a “walking suicide” as someone once referred to me.
But maybe I do need to start telling my story. Maybe that would allow me to let go and either die or move forward. Unfortunately, there are parts of the story that I just don’t know. Worse still, it seems that my own mortality has become something I just cannot deal with psychologically. And I can hardly see humans anymore, only physical biological entities that respond to the laws of chemistry and physics. Now I feel less and less like I am living in a human world, and more and more like I am living in a cold, mechanical world of cause and effect, of dominoes that just knock each other over. It is perhaps a form of dark knowledge, impossible to forget. I find it ever harder to see human interactions, only physical ones.
I and countless others feel this way. We cowardly don’t die, nor do we take the steps to live, and maybe we can’t.
Maybe someday I will summon the courage to try again, to live, or failing that, to finally die.
Musings of a Hyperactive Thinker 