It's hard not to get worn down. I'm working hard at this. Real fucking hard. I do just about everything I think you should and can do. But it's hard. Really fucking hard.
I don't know if you've ever been out on foot in really difficult conditions and you have no choice but to keep moving forward but your legs are like lead and your mind wants to give up. Your legs and feet hurt so much and are so tired that they almost refuse to take another step. Your mind just wants to lie down and rest. But to rest is to die. Each step is like torture. You are mentally and physically at the end of your limits. To live you have to keep walking but each lift of each leg and movement forward is torture. It feels far more tempting to just rest and let be what will be. If only you could just imagine an end in sight that you could push towards. But you can't see ahead, all you can see is an endless line of the same torturous footsteps. Your imagination, so vital for visualizing hope in times of darkness, starts to break down and go blank and play tricks on you. This is challenging for even the healthiest of minds and strongest of wills. Most minds begin to break down under these conditions. Each step is too hard, there is no end in sight, it's far too tempting to just stop and rest.
It's kind of like that. The trail behind me is five and a half years long. For five years each step has just led to worsening conditions. Suicide has been an issue for exactly three years. What that's looked like will be the subject of future posts (hopefully).
I'm just on this trail and the footsteps get tortuously hard. There are just so many times I don't want to take another step. The conditions just keep worsening, why torture myself just to go further into decline? I can't see ahead but when the trail's been this hard, how can I expect the trail ahead to be any better? For more than five years I've pushed on one step at at time with the hope that I'd some day walk out of this. But for each of those five years it's just gotten worse. Spells of it being better - cruelly false spells - but ultimately worsening conditions. It'd be nice to have company on the trail but I don't. It'd be nice to have someone along the way with whom to share the journey, but I don't. There are people whom I thought could be there but they have failed me. They choose, unfathomably to me, not to.
The mind can be devilishly good at conspiring against you. This is part of the fun in mental madness; your mind is broken. As hard as you might work at all the things you're supposed to, the broken parts keep popping up. I'll write in the future more about what a bitch manic depression is but the darkness and despair it cloaks your mind in is formidable. Match that up with difficult life circumstances, five years of a never ending exhausting journey, five years of non-stop stress wearing down everything in your brain and body and you've got a recipe for how my mind gets. I get very tempted to just lie down and rest and not go on.
Suicidal ideation, as it's so delightfully, euphemistically and misleadingly known, is a tricky psychological beast. I've fought it in many forms for three years now. Everything else aside - and that's a lot on its own - just fighting this off has been exhausting. There are many ways to fight it - trust me, I know them all - but it at the same time conspires with episodes of manic depression, shitty life circumstances and its own seductive brain altering power to break down your will. A will already badly damaged and malnourished.
So I just sometimes don't want to take another step. Not another step when each painful step just leads to more of the same. The darkness has been bad again recently. I'll soon be without a home for the first time in my life. I'm separating from my family (wife and daughter). Hundreds of job applications have yielded nothing. I have no source of income and all savings are exhausted. I'm not even sure how I'm going to eat. Yes, I know, the one day at a time thing. I am well familiar and practiced with this but it is not always possible to push all these things out of your mind. As I said, the mind is a devilishly bad conspirator at times, especially during manic depression. The steps are torturous and it's hard to see any reason to take another one.
I don't know what I will do. I'm losing more and more touch with the things that previously saw me through the darkest times and the worst suicidal psychosis and I'm becoming, and feeling, more isolated. Solitude may be good, isolation may be fatal. I don't have - nor can have - any idea how it will go. I consider buying a gun. A gun is by far the most efficient means. I consider obtaining cyanide. I research poisonous mushrooms. I research opium (an apparently fairly blissful death). I realize that soon - if things work out - I'll exist almost entirely in a small enclosed space with a gas source. I don't know which one it'll be. I'm just pretty sure that one day - I don't know which one or how many days in the future - it'll be one of them.
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