Spirals and Contemplation

Content Warning - Excessive talking about suicide. I wrote this while spiralling to distract myself from doing anything else and making myself feel even worse. It's been years since I last cried myself to sleep. It was one of those nights and I proceeded to have nightmares as well. But I'm fine now, I just want to archive this.

I can fill my life with art, characters and creations all I want, I can colour an image of myself and trick my brain into thinking it's reality.

I've always tried to be sincere about my feelings online, I feel a lot of emotions, happiness, sadness, melancholy, excitement.

Abusive people in my life gaslit me, questioning the way I expressed myself, claiming that I was faking my friendship and my concerns. My feelings weren't for me to experience. They were to be questioned by others, to be explained and justified.

Every thought I have needs to have a reason to be, to have me fight tooth and nail in order to prove that "Yes this is how I'm feeling, stop putting doubt in me, stop poisoning my brain into thinking that others know my feelings better than I do"

I saw someone post the other day, about how when you're spiralling, your emotions have no sense of object permanence and it really resonated with me.

I'm spiralling as I write this, and while a logical part of myself is thinking "This will pass and I'll be normal again", another is drowning in these negative emotions. I feel miserable now and I cannot foresee a future where I don't feel that way and like this is all I'll ever be.

I can keep distracting myself all I want, but the reality is that my life feels meaningless, and not a day goes by when I don't wish I was dead. I suppose an advantage to having felt this way since I was 17 is that I've numbed myself enough to the feeling, that it's just a nuisance more than anything else.

I've filled my life with art, friends and projects and things that make me feel like it's worth it, but it's getting harder and harder to cling to that hope and I feel myself cracking. I don't remember it being this bad when I was a teen and I'm scared...

I never felt more stuck. I feel like I'm stuck in the middle on all these branching paths. And every single one of them is miserable and ends in me being unable to take it anymore where the inevitable result is me taking my own life. There is no happiness to be found in my future. There is no home of my own, there is no success and no career.

The scariest realization hit me recently. The position I'm in, right now? My happiness? My progress as a human being? This right here? Right now? All of this?

This is as good as it's going to get.

And I can keep pretending it's going to last forever, I can be blind to the passage of time, but I know my time is running out. I know those miserable branching paths are demanding my attention, and if I don't make a choice, then life might as well make that choice for me.

And yet, I can't be moved. For all the paths end the same way for me. Dead. Mourned for a week if not less, then regarded as a distant memory of someone lazy who "had so much potential", who "didn't know how good they had it". I'm exhausted.

I don't WANT to die. I just don't want to live in this world. A world where I can't find, let alone maintain a job that won't make me miserable, a world where I can't afford a place of my own, a world where I feel like my happiness only comes from the validation from my friends and strangers on the internet, a world where I have to keep my identity a secret in my day-to-day life, where I'm called a name that isn't my own. A world where if I somehow managed to get a house and a job, would turn my body into a soulless husk, surviving every day, too exhausted to create the things that give my life purpose.

What's the fucking point of all of this?

To dedicate your life to jobs that eat away at your body and psyche? To be grateful for having a sliver of leisure time every day while you work every day in a job to pay for a house you can't even live in because you're either outside at work or you're home sleeping because what else do you actually have the energy to do?

That life is not worth it for me. It's not "freedom", it's not "having my own autonomy". It's another prison. I'm nothing without my art. And if I have to live a life where I'm deprived of it, then I'm better off being dead.

I could never kill myself because I know God would find some way to keep me here, for whatever purpose I'm supposedly meant to have. But I don't want to be here. I don't want to keep doing this. None of this feels worth it and I just want the pain to stop. I want to stop wanting to die all the time. I want to have hope for the future and to believe I'm capable of changing for the better.

But as I look into those branching paths in my fast-approaching future, nothing is going to change and there is no hope to be found.

Only suffering.