I have never actively thought of killing myself. I have however entertained the idea of my non existence occasionally. But as Freud said, it's impossible to truly think of one's own death. This because you somehow have to be there to imagine your death.
Many people do not know this about me but I have been struggling with low moods for a couple of years now. I have a couple of speculations on what has led me to this but that's for a different post.
Depression is a somewhat curious condition and I have always convinced myself that I don't have it. Sadly, I am also a psychology graduate and so I know all it's tell tell symptoms.
Depression is like getting burned from your insides. You can almost feel the raw pain, what happens I don't know what exactly happens but it's something to do with an imbalance of chemicals in the brain. Too little dopamine re-uptake Too much cortisol production? I am no neuroscientist, all I know is that I hate how it feels. The frustration comes from trying to feel normal which is like trying to lift yourself by pulling at your bootstraps.
I haven't had such a bad life, we have had family issues, we are not the most close knit family but then isn't this the story of everyone's life? Abuse comes in all it's shape and sizes and emotional abuse can be just as bad as it's physical counterpart.
I remember during graduation, I had just gotten a second class upper. It was supposed to be my happiest day and yet I remember feeling empty. I knew I should be happy but i wasn't, I faked the smiles of course, human emotions are easy to replicate with a little practice. Only a skilled person can see beneath the layers of pretenses and only an expert can see the layers of darkness.
I was lucky to land on a job almost immediately after campus with a liberal and really awesome boss. I work between 8am and 2 pm. This is the job of my dreams since allows me a lot of freedom and space to be creative and pursue my own interests and hobbies. And yet sometimes even getting satisfaction out of this can be difficult. Sometimes only sleep can help one escape the mental torture these moods can subject one to. Some poet talked about being together alone. This is really how it feels sometimes, you are locked in your own bad of bones on an indefinite sentence.
Depression is like a demon that is also a part of you. You feel like you can't escape it because you can't outrun yourself. It erodes a little bit of your everyday, you watch yourself fade. You feel helpless and this just sends you further down the black-hole People who commit suicide I suspect are usually trying desperately to exorcise these demons, anything to make it stop, a pop of few pills, the ones with a flair for the dramatic blast themselves to hell (or should I say from this hell). I think I now understand why people commit suicide. It's not cowardice, I think it's a final act of defiance. It's recognizing that there's no escape route anyway.
I consider myself a nihilist, I am not sure if my views led to these persistent dark moods or whether it was the other way around. Perhaps it was an ugly marriage between the two, I will never know. I have never given much thought to suicide but at the back of the mind there's always that nagging question. What's the point of all these, why do we struggle to live when we are just living to die. Sometime it's easy to shake these feelings off, but days like these are usually a drag. A grim reminder of the fragility of existence. That thin line between being alive and non existence.
Not to toot my own horn but I will leave you with a quote I came up with in one of the depressive and perilous days "Mortality is always around the corner, lurking, no walls of denial and pretense are high enough to keep away the little hints life is always dropping everywhere around us. We are always reminded of this morbid eventuality, some more often than others..."
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