it’s a cool but brilliant friday morning here. - Help.com

it’s a cool but brilliant friday morning here.

a year ago, deep in the throws of insomnia, i’d have just gone to sleep a couple of hours ago, only to wake well into the afternoon. but in the last year, i’ve been up to greet the dawn, falling to sleep either sporadically throughout the day, or fitfully between 9am and noon on my days off. this moribund insomnia is the latest in a catalog of symptoms accompanying a dizzying depression i’ve struggled–and mostly failed–to manage since i was 17. the most remarkable observation i have of my own experience with depression is that it has been an unwarranted fight. better by far to have simply walked out on this tasteless b-flick years ago than to have trusted in arrogance that the years ahead would provide reason, purpose. Ephemeral, insubstantial, unjustifiable hope.

first suicidal at 9, and coming closest to acting out the rubicund thoughts taking my mind hostage during the languorous death of a parent years later, the intervening years have been an otherwise pedestrian decline. when i was young i yearned for companionship. in earnest, i wasted my youth prowling for it, finding only rarely its phantasm. my favorite 20th century writer, russell, mused that those who most need friendship are those least likely to achieve it. loneliness, together with its stolidly driving but unfulfilled lusts, has since so effectively eaten at my frangible sanity i can no longer abide the very thing i most want. now; in the cool, anonymous, unjudging dark; i anesthetize myself on the half-ignored images flashing by on the screen. i wonder at the obvious–that those lives are not mine. that those countable characters, i am not. hardly ancient yet, i feel like the walking dead. i feel my time has long past with those blundered opportunities to walk out gracefully on this tatty, bogus film.

“yours was not an ill for mending,
’twas best to take it to the grave…

oh you had forethought, you could reason,
and saw your road and where it led,
and early wise and brave in season
put the pistol to your head.

oh soon, and better so than later
after long disgrace and scorn,
you shot dead the household traitor,
the soul that should not have been born.” (housman)

i know there are options. make friends. join a cause. talk to a therapist. swallow pills. but really i don’t want any of that any more. it’s been a very long while since i shared any of this–since reading tolstoy’s proclamation that the vocally suicidal are unforgivably irrational because rather than simply act on our apparent knowledge, we simply harass others with our vitiating tales. in a way he’s right; i’d therefore resolved not to do that anymore. but i still get lonely. so i’ve found out this community. of course, lest anyone misapprehend, i’m no danger to myself, for those ever vigilant for such signs. i’m too much a coward. i just wanted to share my feelings, my experience.

This open post was written 4 months, 3 weeks ago | V/U/S: 51, 1, 2 | Edit Post | Leave a reply | Report Post

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