Extremely personal post. Contains references to suicide and existential despair. Click here to return to the Blog index.
My mind spent most of yesterday in a really bad place. I made the mistake of listening to my journal entries from May to June 2020, when I was considering quitting my job because my boss refused to make any accommodations for protection against COVID-19.
A whole bunch of shit happened all at once back then—there was COVID, sure; Donald Trump was making it into this political thing, saying it was all part of a global conspiracy to make him look bad. If he could just have read the fucking room and made a million quid selling "Make America Great Again" facemasks, I wouldn't have needed to quit my job in the first place. Also that was the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, protests were going on, and police were firing iron-core rubber bullets right into people's faces to disperse them. Without doxxing myself, a girl got half her face ripped off by a rubber bullet here; another one made a guy fall off a retaining wall and break his back; tear gas blinded a bunch of people; and all the police who did that are still with the department 4 years on, while the protestors sit in jail for incitement. Finally, there was my own crisis of spirit, which was happening on 2 separate fronts. First there was my sense of self-preservation confronting my new-found work ethic: was I really worried about my health? Or was I just trying to find an excuse to sit at home and play Doom some more? Like I said, that was a new corporate-feudal voice I'd never heard before. Second, I had convinced myself that I could never transition as long as I stayed here in this state. I had convinced myself that I would be marked for death if I even asked for HRT; that I'd be put on someone's watch-list and would have to wear a bulletproof vest everywhere I went because I had the audacity to admit that I didn't want to be my assigned gender anymore.
Anyway, listening to all these entries was compounded by some poems I found from my "artistic drought" period, where I talk about how bad it is being a so-called "essential worker" in a pandemic situation, not wanting to live in historically significant times, and feeling trapped inside my own body. I spent more time yesterday crying than I have in the past 4 years.
By the time I went to bed last night, I was so drained I couldn't have done anything else but sleep. But sleep, as it turns out, was no escape from the horrors of the day. The details of the dream I had aren't relevant, but it made me feel as empty as the day had. The crux of it was that I had to make a choice: do I reset the game by killing myself, or do I stay alive for the sake of my family? A common refrain in my suicidal thoughts is that, by killing myself, I would be abandoning people who depend on me. However, I've been bending myself to their will for my entire life, and just once I want to do something purely selfish for a change. In my dream, I would be abandoning my mum and my newborn brother (such a person does not and cannot exist in real life), so my dream ended with me crying again, with the same despair as I felt all throughout yesterday. When I woke up, it wasn't even a particular relief that I didn't have to make that choice. It was just my brain continuing to invent situations to feel depressed about like it has been for the past 2 weeks.
It all comes down, I think, to the fact that I'm lonely. I've been lonely for so long, I can't imagine how it would feel to not be. Also, I think the situation my brain invented can be traced back to a chost I made a couple days ago, about being glad I didn't have any kids. I'm not going rewrite that post here, but I feel like, if I did have kids, that my guilt over bringing new humans into a world as fucked-up as this one and my desire to kill myself would equalise out to the hollow, emotionless expression that I've seen on so many millennials' faces. I simultaneously want kids and don't want them, and I think this is the feeling my brain dredged up to create last night's interactive movie. All I really want is to not be lonely anymore.
The ironic bit is that yesterday morning, I woke up and gave myself permission to be happy and to have fun. Sorry, neither.