Reasons to Live

It's that time of deepest winter when it seems like the sky has always been steel gray and everything visible from here to the horizon has always been shades of brown and death. It's also that time when hopelessness is at its worst and the "Seasonal Affective Disorder" has piled so thickly onto fifteen years of ongoing clinical depression that it's hard to remember why I bother living.

While searching the All-Powerful Internet for reasons to live, I realized that no one else's list is going to do me much good. Sadly, the first two I pulled up listed sex as at least one of the authors' reasons. Sorry, not going to work for me.

I had such a list in high school. I was reading a Dean Koontz book and the main character had one which, among other things, mentioned a certain burger from a fictional burger joint. After a moment's wondering whether a food item could really be worth living for, I thought of one that I actually considered enough of a reason to make it another day or so. Unfortunately, Pizza Hut's triple-decker, stuffed crust, deep dish, heart-attack-of-bliss no longer exists, and the stuffed crust alone isn't enough. Plus, I can't afford fast food.

I'm living on $150 per month. I live at my grandmother's house, but that's still less than two hundred dollars per month, and I use half of that on gas driving my daughter places. School, mostly. The library. Wal-Mart.

I spend a chunk of it on Internet because the place I live contains some houses, a hardware store, and a bar, none of which I'm interested in, and the nearest town is fifteen miles. I have to buy my own toilet paper and whatnot, so that leaves me with nothing. But I digress.

Reasons to live... Not leaving grieving family members used to be a big one on my list. I think they'd get over it, though. They'd be horribly ashamed of me being so weak, but I'd be dead, so shame means nothing. Ditto for leaving behind debt and a storage unit full of most of my belongings.

Fear of Hell is on my list, but it's not as powerful as it should be at the moment. When in the throes of misery, when you feel nothing inside but seemingly endless self-hate and misery, eternal suffering doesn't look like much of a difference. You must keep in mind, of course, how very important perception is, and that logic doesn't work against persistent, irrational thoughts.

I hate you.

No, you're just miserable. You know you're smart, you know you have artistic talent, and that you're a good writer. You know people love you.

So? Everyone hates you for that alleged smartness, and I don't care if that's a real word, because you know how it pisses off your dad any time you mention anything he thinks you might have learned in college, because he assumes you're talking down to him.

But you can't help what people think or assume, and you know he loves you.

So? He doesn't like you. If it wasn't for your daughter, he wouldn't care if you visited.

Probably not... But my sister likes me.

Yeah, and that does you a lot of good. Everyone's already ashamed of you for being such a failure. You can't get a job in two years of unemployment, and everyone's sure that you're not really trying. In fact, you're not! When was the last time you filled out an application?

...I'm sorry! I'm sorry, but every time I try to, or even think about it, I just think what a failure I am, and what a waste of time it'll be to fill out yet another application for another job I won't get! It's a waste for me, and for the hiring manager who has to look through all that crap already!

You don't even TRY, so stop pretending.

I'm suffering from long-term depression! I need to give myself an emotional break, forgive myself a little. It doesn't have to be perfect...

If you're only second-best you won't get the job, so yes, perfection does matter!

So does luck! I could get lucky!

People don't get places with luck, they get it with hard work!

I try!

Liar. You don't try. You nap half the day on the couch because you don't want to think, and because you hope desperately that your grandmother's cats will sleep on you and maybe you'll feel worth something.

But...

You're worthless! It's no wonder everyone says "I wish I knew how to help you," but no one ever actually does anything!

They try to give me advice...

Because "You need to get a job" is advice. You didn't already know that?

Well yes, I did, I want a job, but...

You're a f~ing loser and you always will be.

But I went to college!

Pretentious bastard!

No, that's not what I meant! I meant, I went to college full-time and I graduated, and I had a part-time job and an internship, and...

And you couldn't get your bills paid. You realize it's been two years, and you still owe hundreds of dollars to the utility companies before they'd hook you up, even if you WERE competent enough to get a job and find your own place to live? And your grandmother doesn't even want you in her house anymore because she can't deal with the noise of a child, and because you aren't social enough to be the companionship she needs.

No! I'm smart, and I have proof! I graduated college! I learned common sense that I didn't have when I was a teenager! I have friends! I have a friend who loved me enough to fly me halfway across the country to see her, and another friend who would gladly do the same if she had the money! They love you, and they think you're smart and clever and they like you as a friend, and if you told them that you desperately needed them...

They'd apologize for leaving and promise to talk to you later.

Because they have school and jobs...

Which are more important than you.

Which is how it's supposed to be.

Loser.

Actual mental conversation, there. Not really a dramatic reenactment. Oh yeah, I was supposed to be listing reasons to live. Number one about half an hour ago was that my friend told me I have to keep living, whether I want to or not. If I manage to think of a number two, maybe you'll get a better blog post next time.


Reasons to Live:

1. My friend told me to.
2. Because there has to be more than one reason, or making a list was pointless.

No One

One of the many problems with long-term depression is that it doesn't stop. There's no three-month period where you're sunshine and roses, and everyone can just enjoy your company and forget the depression ever existed. It's constant, and that makes it extremely difficult to find anyone to talk to when you desperately need to talk.

Everyone has problems. Everyone has bills they need to pay, everyone has things they need to do and not enough time to do them. Everyone has people who need things from them, and that's not a complaint, it's a fact of life. People have problems.

I can't ask my friends and family to put their problems aside and listen to my unfounded worries (or my completely legitimate worries) every time I have a stress attack. They know I'm stressed. They know I'm broke, that I hate myself so much sometimes that I can hardly stand to take another breath, and there's really nothing they can do about it. They can't take care of me.

I should be able to take care of myself, anyway. I should. But for some reason, I can't deal with stress the way "normal" people can. I can go take a shower, try to read a book, snuggle under some blankets, eat comfort food, tell myself repeatedly that someone loves me, and the entire time I'm still on the verge of breaking down.

Does it really matter if someone loves me? Not really. In the face of crippling depression, logically knowing that someone loves me doesn't help. If I die, they'll be miserable for a while, but they'll go on, because that's what people do. When I'm in heaven or hell or purgatory or limbo or being reborn as a dung beetle, is it really going to bother me that a handful of mortals on planet Earth will be left mourning? Probably not. They'll comfort each other, assure each other that they'll see their loved ones in heaven.

No matter how many times I try to convince myself that I've made a positive difference in someone's life, or that I might in the future, I still feel empty and useless. There's nothing I can do that no one else in the world could do. If I don't do it, someone will fill my place.

No happy ending this time. That's life; suck it up.

Santé Mentale

My mental health is far too precarious for me to feel like a functional human being. It likely doesn't help that the only people I have regular face-to-face contact with (due largely to a combination of location, funds, and lack of employment) are a ten-year-old girl and a 54-year-old man. There is the desk clerk at the library, but I don't consider handing someone my library card and being told You're on computer three quality time. Call me picky.

I'm in an odd position, actually. I'm what you might call a loner, or perhaps socially inept, or even misanthropic. I don't feel a need to constantly be around other people, and have never been a social butterfly, but there comes a time now and then when I find myself in company and realize I actually enjoy it.

I've been craving social interaction lately, which is odd enough on its own, but what's even stranger is realizing that I no longer know where to find it. My college friends have had a couple years to move away and get distracted with other things, and since I've got to drive fifteen or so miles to get to the nearest town and I'm broke as dirt, I find myself testing my Internet to see how far I can stretch 5GB per month.

I'm freakin' out, man.

Winter is hard enough as it is. The seasonal affective disorder kicks in and when I'm not drooping from a desperate need to sleep, I'm on-edge, trying not to have a breakdown. No, I will not throw things and scream and kick and generally make an ass of myself because doing so doesn't actually make me feel better, it just makes me feel out of control. I enjoy control.

You would think that all this would motivate me into a thorough job search. I want a job, I want to look for a job, I know that I have skills which would make me a valuable employee, but my mind is all over the place, unable to concentrate on much of anything.

You're doing a pretty damned good job right now, you say.

My mind really is all over the place. I'm just a really good writer, wink, nudge.

I'm good at psyching myself out. If I can't concentrate, how am I going to function in the workplace? If I have no social skills, how will I ever make it through a job interview, assuming I can make it to a job interview? Strangely, when I get to a certain point in a high-stress situation, my never-ending thoughts clear, I go on autopilot, and I cruise through with smiles and grace. It is, however, difficult to push myself into that state, so I continue hovering on the edge of OMGWTF SHOOT ME. (Don't really, please. Unless you feel like it, then shoot to kill, not to injure.)

And then we have suicidal thoughts. I've been dealing with depression for so long that it feels normal to have them now and then. Just your average little, I could easily drive into that solid concrete wall or I wonder how many of my medications could kill me if I downed the whole bottle? but they pass as quickly as that and it's back to regular life.

Mid-winter I have to think about it for a while before I can move on. I have family who likes to look at the corpse before it's buried, I could at least make sure I die without facial wounds, and my meds would probably just give me seizures and make me puke. Then I'd have medical bills on top of everything else. Damn.

Just completely lost my train of thought, a side effect of overstressing.

So I lost my cheese factory turtle recently. Can't believe I still even had that thing.

This is my anticlimactic ending. C'est la vie.