This morning I thought very seriously about jumping in front of a train.
I was on my way into London for the incredibly crappy temp job I'm currently working. While I was waiting for the train I found myself working out the best place to jump to ensure I would be smeared emphatically into hairy pate. The ideal spot on the platform where I wouldn't arouse suspicion in the interim.
Then I went and stood there.
I didn't intend to actually do it. I have often idly contemplated suicide, but generally lack the constitution for it. This time, as the rails hissed and the train rounded the corner, I felt in my body the momentum that would pitch me over and take everything else out of my control. It was alarmingly vivid. I could practically feel myself going.
Needless to say I stood my ground, boarded the train, and went about my day as usual. But I've been unable to forget the sensation that gripped me on the platform. I have not been able to stop my hands from shaking.
Where did it all go wrong?
As the beleaguered regular readers of this blog will know, I'm hardly one to bang on about my current mire of depression and my blighted lot in life. So here is a swift summary: 26 years old, jobless (basically), sexless (my current dry spell is coming up on 2 years), riddled with depression, living with my mum, and the owner of a preposterously over-sized head. As a youngster I never had terribly high hopes for the future, but I never thought I would find myself watching the oncoming front of a train quite so greedily.
I often wonder if I could pinpoint a single moment of my past where it all went pear-shaped. Was it during the late '90s when I ate the equivalent of Guatemala's GDP in junk food? Could it have been one of the many squandered romantic opportunities of university? Maybe it happened when I decided to grow my hair and wear tie-dye. Should I not have built this blog on an ancient Indian burial ground?
I can't help but wonder if I am still paying off the ransom of past mistakes. I have tried what feels incredibly hard in the last year or so to improve my situation. Nothing has worked, and a profound sense of hopelessness has set in. Maybe my current failures are easier to take if I believe myself to be doomed by history. Or maybe it is simply my self-hatred going ever deeper.
Tomorrow it will all begin again. I will wake up and force myself to get dressed for this crappy temp job. I will walk to the station and I will wait for the train. As it approaches I will try to believe that there must be a better way for me to escape this mire.
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ReplyDeleteHello Dave! Right, I eagerly read your posts in the hope that one day you will find what it is that will lead or make you happy as I know you can & will eventually be. The dedication, passion and exceptional detail with which you write with is fantastic... though I also hate to admit it the ongoing BeRob stuff brought me immense joy!
It is hard for anyone to comment in a way that a) isn't insincere, b) too clichéd, c) focuses on their own problems rather than empathising with yours, d) gives you a valid answer e) some even might accidentally attack you out of an angry love/ fear that you'd even think about such a thing and then well f) the answer you need.
Often we look to others in comparison, for compassion and in some way hope of finding a resolution because for all the anguish of inner searching to coming up with (seemingly) no result there therefore has to be a formula or something everyone else is doing right that surely we could adopt to make our own situation better.
Alas it just doesn't work - from our own angst ridden soul searching/ beating, the perception that certain actions will surely come to a conclusion right through to the advice/ help & following in others footsteps.
The suicide contemplation is an awful place to be in and how that must have felt for you both to think it, be pulled in by the almost 'tragic romance' of just letting go, to the pull back to the mundane reality that you then found yourself back in.
Thank fully you didn't follow through, I know that I and many others will say the same thing but that doesn't stop the way you feel - a mundane loop that never seems to improve (?!)
I hope that what I am saying isn't like a load of crap to you right now but that it in some way sounds about right?!
If it doesn't then I am all ears to listen and help in any way I can. If it does sound familiar then that will be out of my own experiences which are ongoing - 8 years single, mixed up education, self-esteem and problems with work and the repetitive cycle of anger & despair in my head, tensing my body to lead me to contemplate the worst.
However it also comes from these things that I hope will trigger something for you;
- I have seen the fall out of suicide. Last September a close friend's best female friend chose to jump in front of train and another being the slow decline of someone who gave up through drink & drugs. Both left confusion, unanswered questions and most of all an out pouring of love in mourning for these people. It made me recognise just how much we impact people, we may not always know it but we really do. You are not selfish person, you are important to many people - someone somewhere is thinking of you in a positive and caring way.
- The charity work I have seen via mates who have depression and the impact they have made by sharing & channelling their thoughts into the thing they fear most. I strongly recommend the charity CALM on that basis - it is specifically for men with depression and coping with the thought of suicide. You don't have to talk to them but there might be something on their website that you can relate to.
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ReplyDelete- Jobs suck end of, no really. I hated being unemployed - I was on job seekers for a good while a few years ago and that was awful but working can be just as crap. That may not sound helpful but the truth has to be stated here... all work even if some claims to love their job doesn't love it enough to do it 24/7. Correct me if I am wrong but your passion seems to be the written word but a permanent job in that field isn't coming through? Then I suggest a book I am reading by Ken Robson called the Element - it is straight forward and interesting - I am reading it because I am on the verge in my own job that was promised to be THE job but it has in fact made me seriously look at my career, my health and passions in life.
- I am writing all of this because I wish I had someone who would have done the same for not only me but for anyone who thought/ felt that they didn't have someone to turn too. An example being my brother who ran a Samaritans like line at uni - a guy rang in saying that he was on the edge of life and he ended it because his family didn't answer the phone, just out of that they didn't answer the phone straight away. For it to be down just even to the sake of a phone call that I cannot abide, I can understand it the thought process but I cannot accept it. So out of my own selfish reasons I will write and rant! ;)
- Finally (because I am clearly on a mission here!) the one thing I know to be true, the one thing that I with out fault can say to people and to myself when at the lowest is this... self realisation.
Someone, anyone can talk to you until they are blue in the face and it won't ever sink in with you. Comparing yourself, listening to cliches, fucking hobbies, so called self-help to people telling you to simply snap out of it does not work & can trip you up only to go back down. The only person that can make the penny drop, enhance, change or realise is you but it does happen.
There is no formula, time frame or solution that you can absorb or train into, the challenge and the reward is you - a stronger, more intelligent, empathetic and accomplished you.
You can only do what feels right for you, small steps from decent rest, diet, exercise and stimulation can help but do what feels right for you. Focus on what provides sustainable clarity/ musing moments to those rare moments of balance (not necessarily happiness because I think people then end up hooked on temporary euphoric fixes that then just burn out) that occur and just centre on those, try to sustain them.
You are a good, strong and intelligent person - let's keep it that way :)
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Don't jump.
ReplyDeleteHey,
ReplyDeleteI really like reading your blog and I really emphatise with you.
Your depression is not mild, you could really befenit from professional psychological help.
I admire your courage. My depression has been my secret for so many years and hiding it ate me up from the inside.
greeting from germany
the wet gremlin
Wow. That first person wrote a big long comment! I was going to say stuff but now I can't get over how much they wrote. I couldn't even bothered to read it. I just saw how long it. I hope they don't read this.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I didn't come just to comment on a comment. Just wanted to say there is nothing wrong with being 26 and living with your Mum.
End.