Category: Autobiographical
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I rarely cry. I learned quickly as a child that crying resulted in one of two things: being yelled at for crying, or being bullied worse for crying.
I cried today for a good five minutes. Nobody came to see if I was okay. There it is. My pain is just background noise. Family is a mere concept to me, I have no experience with what it is supposed to be about. The connections everyone else has in life are absent from mine. I will never have them. Even friends are thin on the ground, and growing less and less every day.
Eventually my only friend will be, as the rock poet Jim Morrison sang, The End.
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I would be lying if I said my original decision to drop out of work was altruistic. It was for three reasons: my anxiety and depression went into overdrive, and I decided I was safer and happier in my flat doing drugs.
Unsurprisingly, I had to leave the flat due to none payment of rent (my parents bailed my out there), but I clung to those childish little hopes we all have: maybe tomorrow the antidepressants will work, maybe tomorrow I can find the money to buy my stuff and stave off withdrawal, maybe tomorrow I’ll win the goddamn lottery (or mum or my sister will).
Of course, none of these things happened because they are the childish daydreams of an adolescent stuck in an adult’s body. I’ve never found a way to change that mind set. Maybe it is just how I am, but it makes me chronically unsuitable for the modern world.
Reading Liz Truss’s comments about how the workers here should be more like the Chinese workforce (you know, the country that has to put nets around their buildings because of all the suicides from their cruelly overworked workforce), I realised something as dark and sad as I have ever known since the nightmare of secondary school: this world doesn’t give a shit. About any of us. We are here to feed capitalism, and then die.
“Well, what took you so long to realise that?” It’s a good question, and the answer is Elphis. The Goddess of hope. The thing I have clung to for so long, that brief feeling during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure that maybe things really were changing.
But the Capitalist machine saw off the threat. And now it’s gearing up to grind our bones to make their bread. Before they fuck off into space and leave us all to starve to death. Interstellar was way ahead of its time there.
Well, I’m no cog in a machine. If it comes to it, I’ll make damn sure I’m dead before that happens. I’ll do my drugs because they make life bearable. They will kill me. I’m okay with that. It is, in the end, my choice to do this, and not some asshole bathing in millions I can only dream of.
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I spent 8 hours in hospital on Tuesday for having a seizure. They found no cause, and I was useless because I remembered nothing about it. It was like the blink of an eye: I was reading my phone, then suddenly my dad was standing in my room looking at me in horror.
“You just had a fit,” he stammered at my blank expression, before calling an ambulance.
How could I have a fit – a stereotypical epileptic fit from what I looked up later on – and have no memory of it? All I felt was tired and my mouth felt numb. Nobody in my family is epileptic. This made no sense whatsoever.
It happened. And after eight hours, bloods, chest x-ray and a CT scan (had that yesterday), nobody knows why. I suppose there’s a “life comes at you pretty fast” joke in here somewhere, but mostly…I’m scared. Did I cause this with my admittedly not exactly clean living life? Is it finally time for, to quote my favourite novel, “the momentum of change” to begin?
I don’t know. I’m the sort who acts fairly blasé about the idea of my death, but death is still a frightening concept even to the most suicidal.
I don’t know where I want to go from here. But I don’t want to stay here.
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I don’t have a title for this, and I’m unsure whether it’s a poem or a stream of consciousness. But this is an ode to Queen. -
I followed Ariadne’s thread leading me out of the maze.
A slow process of many years, of trickery and wrong turns.Thankfully there was no mythical beast to worry about here.
The maze was a rose garden of eternal twilight. It was beautiful.
Not everything beautiful is harmless.I was pursued the entire time by whispers: taunts, threats, mocking laughter. Why leave at all, what if the whole world is like this?
Because if I never left, I would never know what the real world truly was, beyond the red and green stillness that concealed, that misled.
So I persevered. I found sunlight at last, and other people. No more thorns tearing at my skin to keep me inside.
It’s a hard world. But it is the real world. I couldn’t stay in the dark forever.
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Bloody Roses 