Posts Tagged ‘suicide’
Worse
Posted on: December 14, 2013
For fuck’s sake. I can’t do this. Read the rest of this entry »
Plans
Posted on: August 27, 2013
Optimistic Laura
I’m going to move out. I can buy a house, or a flat. I’ve been looking on property websites, and there’s a flat for sale in almost the perfect location for me – a short walk or bike ride from work, close enough to home for me to visit occasionally, for Sunday dinner or DVD marathons, but too far for my mum to walk over and cry on me when she’s annoyed. I can afford it, or something like it. I could buy it, get a mortgage sorted, live at home for a few weeks and go round to decorate and move in furniture, then I could move in and be surrounded by my own peace and silence.
Then I can start studying again. I’ve been looking at Open University courses. I’m interested in so many things, I just want to find stuff out, I want to get new skills and knowledge. Start small, don’t make too big a commitment until I know I’ll be okay with it, but just do something, a few hours a week, to make me feel like my brain is still working, like I really can learn something new every day. I can do other things, too. Maybe relearn the musical instrument I used to play as a child, and join a gym, and learn to cook. Tentatively, I might try writing again, like I used to always want to, although I’ll do it with the knowledge that even if it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world. I might learn a language. I might volunteer for a charity that helps people.
Every day, the not-getting-the-job thing gets easier. I can say it without the stabbed-in-the-heart feeling now. I didn’t really know if I wanted the job, so I can’t be surprised that I wasn’t really considered for it. But the whole incident has shed light on my life. I was right when I said it: everybody needs something. More than one thing is best, in case the one thing falls apart. I want to fill my life with activities, things that make me feel movement and progress. So even if work, or anything else, isn’t going particularly well, I can carry that with the strength I’ll gain by all the other things. I can build skills and knowledge and confidence and independence, and that’s happiness, for me.
I can write a timetable for every day and a budget for every month, and I’ll be happy. I don’t know what job I want to do, I don’t know where my future lies, but you build your future in the present, and that’s what I need to do. In the words of Malcolm Tucker, “life is just a succession of five minuteses”. If each five minutes is the same as the next, and they’re all dull and empty, then that’s my life. I need to stop worrying about the long-term, if I don’t have a plan for it, and focus on making now work.
Pessimistic Laura
The perfect opportunity is coming up. I need to take this time to withdraw money from my bank account. Small amounts, consistently, so I can build them up. Once I go, that’s it. I don’t want to be traced by my card transactions.
I have an old friend, who lives in a different city. I can say I’m staying with her. I haven’t seen her for ages, but I used to go to visit her regularly. My parents don’t even know she’s moved, so I could say I’m going to stay with her in the city she used to live in, to cover the trail further. She wouldn’t have to lie for me, my parents don’t have her number, so they wouldn’t be able to contact her. She wouldn’t have to know.
I’ll leave it open-ended, say, “a few days”, so they won’t be expecting me back at a particular time. I’ll take a bag and say we’re going to sight-see and have a few drinks and just hang out for a while and catch up. Then I’ll go to the train station, and get on a train in the opposite direction. I’ll head to the coast. My mind is full of sea and horizon and cliffs, and that’s where I want to be. I could stay for a day or two, get my head straight. Breathe fresh air and cushion myself in quiet, and think properly for a moment. I could send a postcard, maybe. Not a note in the traditional sense, just something to let them know where I am. Maybe an apology.
Jumping off a cliff seems a simple way to do it, but there’d be other methods available too, if for some reason that doesn’t work out. I will end it there, or else move on and find somewhere else to do it. No turning back. I want to be in a place where I’m a stranger. Somewhere calm. I will run until I can find it. No-one will mind, no-one will care, because no-one will know me.
The awful truth
I’ll probably do neither. Lately, I’ve been believing both of these things, pretty much at the same time. But this is me we’re talking about. I can’t change.
I’ll stay at home, doing nothing, and let my brain rot. Too scared to make my life better, too scared to end it. This is it, this is me – forever.
I wish I had the courage to do one thing or the other.
Birthday blues
Posted on: August 9, 2013
This morning, I woke up crying. I’d been half-awake, half-asleep, curled up in bed (having a lie-in on the day-off I’d specifically arranged, solitude as a birthday gift to myself), and there had been a dream, or a fantasy, or an illusion in my head.
A voice, telling me it’s okay to die. No guilt, no indecision, no fear. And a gift – I can’t remember the details, but something along the Magic Button lines. Press this and you will die, immediately. In my mind, I was reaching for it before the explanation was complete.
And I came to full consciousness, and there was no voice, no gift, and no truth in what I’d been dreaming, and I cried the kind of uncontrolled, chest-shaking sobs that I haven’t experienced in a long time. I can’t begin to describe the relief and longing I’d felt in that dream, or the hollow reality of waking up. Because no-one can take the guilt or the worry out of suicide, and no-one can provide a guaranteed, uncomplicated method – and even if those things were possible, no-one knows me well enough to set me free like that.
Even when things are going well, I would press the Magic Button without a moment’s hesitation. Take away my fear and my duty, and I’d be dead already.
Birthdays hit me badly. I know I’m only a day older than I was yesterday, no matter how much we all pretend it’s a year, but I can’t make myself feel it. And it’s a milestone, which feels worse. A quarter of a century I’ve been on this planet, and what the fuck have I done with it?
I’ve felt old for most of my life. I’ve always felt like I’ve somehow missed the point at which I could have started to live properly, to be happy and successful. I’ve always felt a little too late, and wished I could tear everything up and start again. And all the time I’ve been feeling that, I’ve been wasting my life more. Time’s been rushing by, and I haven’t noticed, because I was so caught up in regretting time already lost.
I’m 25. When am I going to start living?
At this point, anything I say just seems like repetition. I’ve been here before. It gets so that I can’t believe I’ve ever not been here.
My mum calls me these things, and I don’t know what to do.
A difficult day.
Posted on: March 4, 2013
I went out with some people from work last night, had a few drinks and a bit of a laugh. It was an okay night – nothing special, but it’s nice to get out and do something, isn’t it? I wasn’t really drunk, just a bit tipsy, and I got home at a reasonable hour and went straight to bed. Read the rest of this entry »
Sudden waves of suicidality
Posted on: January 26, 2013
Like a punch in the gut.
Making plans
Posted on: April 2, 2012
There’s a part of me, a tiny little part, that thinks I have some sort of future. There’s a person inside of me that believes I can stay alive, not just on a short-term, make-it-to-next-week basis, but for decades, for an entire natural life.
That person, she makes plans. She wants to find a house, get a mortgage, live alone. She wants to push on and succeed at work, do some volunteering, join a gym. She wants to create a little haven of calm, a home in which she’s not always watching the door, waiting for someone to barge in. She wants to learn to cook properly and paint some walls and organise her life. She wants something to organise, expenses to budget for, a diary to arrange and a life to keep in order. She dreams, vaguely, of writing something. Not for publication (even the dreamer in me is slightly realistic), but just an exercise in creativity, something to uncover her childhood enthusiasms which have been buried for so long.
But a dream is all it is. I fantasise about being a functioning adult human the way a child fantasises about being a film star or an astronaut or a Barbie doll. Having an actual life is about as realistic an aim for me as growing an extra arm. Read the rest of this entry »
The usual birthday wobble
Posted on: July 21, 2011
One minute, I was standing in the bathroom, looking myself straight in the eye in the mirror. Face it, I told myself, in crystal clear silence, you’re never going to kill yourself. Stop pretending you’re going to somehow develop the guts to do it, and find a way to live.
The next minute, I was sitting in my room in darkness, crying and Googling suicide methods.
Every time I try to close a door on it, it barges through as strong as it’s ever been.
I can’t help but feel that my birthday would be the day to do it. It means people only have to pretend to give a fuck once a year, doesn’t it? And it has the handy advantage of being less than three weeks away. (Incidentally, less than three weeks to go and no-one in my family’s mentioned it. I don’t usually do much for my birthday – just a couple of cards, a cake, maybe a cd or dvd – but no-one’s said a word and I think they, like me, just don’t want to admit I’m getting older. The longer I live, the more of a disappointment I am.)
It’s better to die, as soon as possible, than to keep dragging this out. The awful reality is that if I don’t take matters into my hands, I might live for decades after now. I might only be a third, or a quarter of the way through my life. And that time I might have too left, it’s too short to put right the mistakes I’ve made, and too long to live with so much shame and fear.
I need to get real. Stop living in some fantasy world in my head where I am someone else or there’s a time machine I can use to go back, back, back, right to the beginning of my life, and choose to do everything differently or maybe to just not be born.
I’ve backed myself into a corner. I’ve told myself, live like this or don’t live, and I’ve fucking tried, but how long can I carry on like this?
I can’t do it. I can’t make myself feel better so the only thing to do is find a way to make myself stop feeling anything.
Let’s shoot some elephants
Posted on: May 22, 2011
The room is full of them.
Loopy, Lonely and Lost 
Recent comments.