Armistice

Memory really is a funny thing. I'm pretty sure I've written a bit about what comes next, I was pretty sure I'd even written about it on this blog, but I can't, for the life of me, find any traces of it. It has to do with my own personal nightmares, of which I have five. No one who knows me knows the full list, even those who know me best only know a few of these nightmares that haunt me. One of them has to do with loneliness, or more to the point, it has to do with solitude and dying alone. I'm not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying alone. This may be true for everyone, I suppose, but I can only speak for myself.
I'm not being completely honest here. My nightmare involves specific circumstances, those being that I somehow screwed up my life so bad that I die alone in some street somewhere, poor, hungry, defeated. That's a thought that hounds me.

I'm trying to write a bit about my mental health, but it's never easy. It's never easy.
When I was a kid, my parents were worried that I didn't have friends, that I didn't get along with other kids, and that I'd rather be reading something than making friends, I guess. So they took me to see a psychiatrist and he put me through a number of tests - including an IQ test - to see if something was wrong with me or not. Bear in mind that this was in the early 80's. So that amounted to pretty much nothing except the suggestion that I might benefit from a more challenging environment, and there was the ghost of a chance that I might attend some sort of school for gifted youngsters. Not Xavier's, though my CV says that I did, and I've only been close to being caught on that particular white lie the once.
So that never played out, and I had a more or less stable childhood, though as my adolescence set in I started having some therapy sessions. I went through a very rough patch a few years before my parents split up - we all did, truth be told. But I was... jesus, I was insufferable, and I pulled some stupid stunts and eventually my father laid into me - I can still vividly remember him punching me hard in the face right where I'm sitting typing this. I was 11 or 12, maybe. Therapy came short afterwards, and though I really didn't think it helped much, I at least acknowledged why it was necessary.

As I grew out of that phase and settled into adolescence, I'd be on the down low for a while. When I was 17, I decided to quit school and join the Air Force. Six months into that, I got hospitalized with a respiratory infection and that brought me down quite a bit. I was bedridden for a few days, I had to spend my birthday alone, and I was crying all the time. One day I was visited by the resident psychiatrist and he talked to me for a bit. He then told me that I had a depression. And believe me, this is something that they take seriously, because the last thing anyone there wants is for someone who's depressed, maybe suicidal, and has access to guns to be on duty. And I thought to myself that it couldn't be possible, I thought that only the weak willed have depressions, and that I'd have to man up. Stupid shit like that. Never even gave it a second thought.
In 2000 I moved to England for the first time, and pretty much nothing went right for me while I was there. In fact, more often than not I was miserable - I missed my family, my son, my girlfriend, my cats, my friends. And to top it all off, I was living with a couple who I was friends with, and though me and Carla got along famously, her idiot husband I just couldn't stand. You know how someone can ruin your day just by looking at you funny? He's that kind of guy. So what did I do to cope? I started working double shifts, 15 hours a day. That meant starting work at just before 7 a.m. and often leaving way past 10 p.m., all so I could spend as little time near the guy as I could.
And, of course, after maybe a couple of months of doing this, I broke down, hard. My manager - a guy who to this day I sincerely cannot stand - took me to the hospital, and yeah - I'd had a breakdown. These would be my first experiences with medication, and none of it was particularly good for me. I eventually stopped medication altogether, and after I returned home I managed to keep myself afloat for a number of years, some small crises notwithstanding. It would be a few years until I'd have the breakdown that nearly finished me.
But one thing I do have to say in all this, and that is I've never really entertained any notions about killing myself. I mean, at my worst I felt utterly defeated, destroyed, abandoned, alone, miserable, apathetic, unable to cope with most anything. I felt more like a living dead person than a real live one.

Though this has changed a lot recently. Especially with lockdown, my mind has wandered down those dark, treacherous alleys. And I always seem to be stuck in the same point, where I can't find a viable way to do it without deeply scarring someone. If I throw myself under the bus, well, that's a busload of people, plus the driver, plus the witnesses. Ditto for trains or subways. If I shoot myself (not that I have a gun, but still...) or hang myself, it'll either be my family or some poor soul if I do it somewhere else. The same goes for OD'ing on pills. I don't think I could ever slit my wrists. The only way I sort of could see this working would be going into the sea, and let it carry me far away... but the anguish that would cause on my family and loved ones... and eventually I'd turn up, a half-eaten, bloated abomination, barely recognizable. There's just no good way. Also, and because I'm severely allergic to pain, I could never do it in a way that I'd prolong my agony. So no throwing myself into a fire, or into a wood chipper. I don't think that jumping from a really high place would be in the cards as well - who knows if I want to change my mind on my way down? No, the ideal solution would be something instantaneous. Like when you see in the sci-fi movies and the aliens zap someone and bam! - they're just gone. It takes like half a second, at best, and it's like you were never there.

Also, the reason I'm writing about all this is because this morning, around 3 a.m. or so, I was replying to a few e-mails from my friends, and I realized that I have an unfinished and unsent e-mail to my dear friend Sérgio from over a year ago, and that particular e-mail delves into yet another of my nightmares. I remember deciding not sending it then, when it was written, because a part of me didn't want to bother him. And yes - I know that I can talk to him, and to my other friends - few as they may be - about my mental health issues, but there's always this underlying feeling of not wanting to bother someone with these matters. There are voices inside my head that tell me many things, that tell me many lies. One of them is that no one cares, not really. Another tells me not to be even more of a burden. And so I keep so, so very much to myself, just because of that. But it'd be remiss of me if I didn't admit that my overall mental health has declined these past few months. It's not just the erratic sleep schedules, or letting myself go even further... it's not just the apathy I feel encroach upon me, it's not just the loss of patience for pretty much everything. It's how now I think about suicide so much more often than before. I'm not - at least I think I'm not - anywhere near suicidal, but I have never felt as tired as I do now. So on the verge of accepting erasure from existence, if such a thing could be done in a non-traumatic way.

A few years ago, my favourite author of all time - Terry Pratchett - died voluntarily in Switzerland. It was his choice, he'd been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, and he didn't want to stick around to see his mind so deteriorated that he wouldn't be able to recognize anything. There was a documentary he was in about the freedom of being able to choose when and how you die, with your dignity intact. In it, we actually see an elderly gentleman taking his steps beyond this mortal coil. He drank a special liquid, shortly thereafter he closed his eyes, as if sound asleep, and just drifted off. This touched me so much that I cried my heart out. I thought this solution so elegant and efficient. I also knew that, obviously, this would be something off-limits to me, because I could never afford this option.
Here's the thing : I ultimately want to live, and live a happy life. But I am not happy. I'm actually not unhappy either, at least not most of the times, but I'm fairly indifferent to the idea of being alive. There's a deep-rooted belief in me that I will die alone, that I'll never know happiness again, like I once knew. And maybe, maybe that's true, or maybe someday I pull myself off of this funk and things change. But as long as I can keep on surviving myself, day after day, then I'll be here.
But believe it or not, these thoughts have been so prevalent in me these past few months that as far as a couple of days ago I was still searching online for answers on how to kill oneself with the least amount of trauma to anyone possible. Naturally, such a thing does not exist - or so Quora assures me.
(A really good thing is that as soon as you type in something that revolves around suicide you get loads of links to suicide prevention sites and lines.)
As I was doing my research on this, I came across two videos that tore my heart in twain - one is by Sue Klebold, mother to one of the Columbine High School shooters - where she discusses how her son's mental health and the lack of understanding and acknowledgement thereof may have contributed to the tragic outcome that destroyed so many lives, hers included. See it here, it's part of a series of TEDtalks. That led me to catching another TED video, this one by Steph Slack, where she discusses the absurdly high rate of male suicide, and how society's expectations of what masculinity must be leads to such numbers.
It's always very sobering for me when I'm confronted by these stories. I soak it all in, take a deep breath and try to put everything into perspective. I can count myself blessed for many things, though in my darkest moments I feel anything but blessed.
I've long learned to take this day by day, one victory at a time.