WEDNESDAY NIGHT

(CONTENT WARNING – DISCUSSIONS OF SUICIDE)

For the longest time I had no fear of death. It’s not that I felt strong enough to not be afraid of it, I just don’t think I really thought about it at all. I was young. I was a child and I was having fun being foolish and reckless. There were so many things with which I would rather occupy my mind and my time. I wasn’t playing video games and pondering my own mortality. I wasn’t going to football games and wondering when my time would come. I wasn’t completely ignorant to the idea, I understood death, and I had experienced it.

I remember lying in bed and crying thinking about the fact that eventually my parents would die, and having a small crisis acknowledging my own death. But it was never a thought that persisted, it never really hung around, which makes sense, I was a child. But the further I grew into my life, the older I got, the more aware I became of my mental distress. Attentiveness turned to complacency, joy and whimsy turned to apathy, and happiness turned to ennui.

The more I sank into these feelings and these mind spaces, the more difficult it became to remember the other side. Floating along with these sentiments and this all encompassing malaise put into question my time and place here. It never was a question of my worth or meaning, or whether I should be here, at least at that point in my life. But the less I felt like I was living the more I thought about death.

It wasn’t until many years later when I was 19 that it fully came to a head. I had dropped out of high school multiple times at this point, tried and disliked college, held and lost a job. I had failed at many things that I had tried in a short time, and it was eating away at me. I was so tired of reaching the same hurdle and tripping every single time.

I had just been hired on as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, and at this point I had only completed my first shift. It was much more brutal than I was anticipating, and I knew that I was going to collapse at some point. During my second shift I felt that same feeling of reaching the hurdle and knowing in that moment that I was going to fail. I gave up. In the middle of the shift I left and went home. I remember distinctly driving home staring at the illuminated road ahead of me, not blinking, not shifting my gaze, nothing. I was completely and utterly gone. Running through all my failures and the lack of life I had to show for the years I had lived, and I knew. I knew in that moment that I no longer wanted to try. I didn’t want to go any further. I didn’t want to fail again and again and again. I didn’t want to let anyone down, so I thought I only had one way out. I got home and took a shower and just cried, I didn’t even wash my hair or myself, I just stood and cried in the water. Because I was afraid. For the first time in my life I was truly afraid of death, and more so that it was going to come at my hand.

I didn’t act on it. I sat and thought in my room for a long time, and eventually I convinced myself to fall asleep. It was a sobering and alarming feeling wanting to be dead, but I really did. Life moved on, I moved on, but that feeling never really left me. Not the feeling or desire to not be here anymore, but the malaise that preceded it. I stopped burdening myself with the thought of death, but the fog and lull that surrounded it was and has always been with me. I’ve grown accustomed to it, and it doesn’t really affect me as much anymore.

Recently I began thinking about my mortality much more than I ever had. I don’t really know what spurred it nor do I really know why. It wasn’t even that I wanted it or felt more depressed or numb than normal, but it was a more frightening and present feeling than any I had had since the time I mentioned before. For some reason I just felt like I was going to die. I felt closer to death than I ever had and it seemed like an inevitability. I was having dinner with a friend one night and sitting in the restaurant I told him I was scared. I was truly scared that something was going to happen that was going to kill me. I didn’t think someone or something wanted to harm me, but I thought that in some natural way it was my time to go. It was the purest and most intense panic and anxiety I had ever felt. But just the same as the time before, it eventually went away.

I’m sure at some point a similar feeling will return and I will get through it all the same. I know not what might cause the feeling to arise nor do I know how I will get through it, but I’m sure I will.

I will certainly talk about death again, likely in a different way, but I was unsure of what to write tonight, so I hope this sufficed.

(This was more rushed than I would have liked, but I wanted to publish it in time to post it today.)