Category: Suicide
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I wish I had kept the beautiful me. Instead I lost all of her. -
I had my biweekly benefits interview today (apparently they tried to tell me to stay home and do it by phone. Oh well). These sessions are really more of a catch up and a subtle prodding at my mental state to make sure I’m not planning to take any baths with a toaster. Which several days ago was a not unattractive option for me. I was crying a lot.
(I know you are tired of hearing me talk about crying. Again, I’m sorry. I opened a mental Pamdora’s box and I can’t seem to find the lid).
Fortunately the mood passed. A good thing, I hope. The future can seem ominous, especially at year’s end. Suicide rates go up at Christmas for a reason
What I wanted to write about was a slight follow up from yesterday: little things. Little victories. I was seen by a work coach who doesn’t really know me, so we did the edited “this is what I want in life” chat. I don’t know what I want in life really, other than to create, so I usually stick to the one area of art I actually have some published work in: photography.
I had a photo used as part of an advertising campaign for the Sony RX100 MK2 model camera. It was a collaboration with hitrecord.org, a community I was a member of at the time (I still am, but take part in little of it anymore. My last check for my work from them was 27 cents. What can you say to that?)
Anyway, fifty of us were featured in their ad campaign. It was the most money I ever made from art: just over a thousand pounds. I bought a second hand Samsung laptop since my desktop was dying. It was the best computer I ever owned.
I gave the abridged story of this tiny triumph to my work coach. She did the politely impressed response. I shrugged, muttering I had done little since. I had a screenplay considered for broadcast here in the UK, and was featured in a few other hitrecord.org publications. It amounted to nothing in the end.
I know I sound ungrateful, and I don’t mean to seem so dismissive: I’m proud of my little achievements. That’s not the problem.
I’m ashamed thst I failed to turn them into anything but this utter mess, my failures. This life of emptiness and pennilessness. I failed. I am a failure, a loser, it’s that simple.
Little things can be good, but what we take (or don’t take) from them can be bad. Useless as I am in life, I took nothing but stupidity from mine.
So it goes.
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A sentence that means so many things to so many people. Sometimes it’s just pure physical exhaustion. A long day of work, frustrations, road blocks. For others, it means mental exhaustion. Minds are not light switches, they go at their own pace and so often are beyond our control.
I mean the latter. Mental exhaustion.
I’m tired of staring at an empty future. I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of hate surrounding me, surroundomg all of us in one form of another. I’m tired of hoping for a glimpse of humanity – just one, a tiny peek of actual people behind the bureaucracy we call the government – that maybe they would give us our disability benefit money a day or so early. A hope that ended in predictable disappointment. I have my two weekly appointment Tuesday, which means taking the train to get there because my town has no benefit office of its own anymore, and I have 30 pence in my bank account. It’s £6.50 to get to the town with the benefits office. I will be penalised if I don’t attend for a good reason.
I hope a family member can lend me the money but there’s no guarantees there.
I’m tired of letters asking for money that, thanks to the benefits cut, I simply can’t pay. I have been working with a company to consolidate my debt but the gentleman I was speaking with has gone quiet – Christmas holidays. The credit card companies, it seems, do not take such holidays.
I’m tired of the utter lack of desire to create. All I can wrote, it seems, is about misery. My misery. Unsurprisingly, that’s not a popular topic. Not that I had much audience to begin with.
I’m tired of having nothing to take my thoughts away. I don’t care of it’s an addiction, it’s my escape. I need the silence. A few nights ago I found an old Valium and cried with joy. I slept like a baby.
As Jimmy Darmody (via the immensely talented Michael Carmen Pitt) said: “I am what time and circumstance has made me.”
I’m tired. I’m sad. I feel little emotions other than quiet despair. The world remains apathetic. It always is. It always was. The world that cared, that one only ever existed in my imagination. And time kills all such fantasy.
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Written for a prompt on hitrecord.org.
I won’t tell you what my inner monologue has to say these days. That would seem to run contrary to the prompt, so I’ll clarify a bit: I’m not going into much detail on my current inner monologue because it is a dark place. Anyone who knows me will know what I mean.
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It wasn’t always that way. My inner monologue was full of movie ideas when I was six or seven – a child with a vocabulary of a teenager, an active imagination and few friends interested in hearing about any of it. That didn’t bother me back then. I rehearsed my lines in my head, rewrote my drafts, offered commentary on how I was doing. We had a lot to say to each other.
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I learnt quickly never to say it out loud though. I knew early on I was a bit different to the other kids, and certain behaviours wouldn’t fly with them, but it didn’t make me sad. Not yet.
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My monologue started to get angry when, once again, maths defeated my understanding. My flaws, my weaknesses, my deficiencies were starting to show and my monologue, like my teachers, hurled criticisms at me.
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Monologue, once my most jubilant cheerleader when teachers and other students loved my short stories, suddenly became a stranger.
Monologue, the one who had wondered if that man Stephen King (my dad was a huge fan, so he was the one “adult” writer I knew of) would like my stuff, called me stupid. A loser. A freak.
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Darkness crept in more and more as I got older and, it seemed, the world became ever more hostile toward me. Sometimes people would catch me muttering under my breath – monologue and I discussing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or dinosaurs or art or acting – whatever I had on my mind that day. What a weirdo.
Why are you always embarrassing yourself like this? Demanded monologue. I didn’t know.
You’re stupid, she said.
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As I sat on the classroom step alone during lunch break, a long time before things got bad, I asked a question monologue couldn’t answer at the time: why didn’t the other kids like me?
Later on, she had a whole list.
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Many years later, at 14, monologue asked me a question I couldn’t answer: why won’t you just kill yourself?
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She still asks. Sometimes I answer. But that’s between just me and her now.
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I live a stone’s throw from the cemetery where my mother’s relatives are buried (dad’s family favoured cremation). I see their headstones every time I walk down the lane leading into town. I give a glance of acknowledgement. For a long time that was my sole concession to their presence.
As years went on, the family plot grew: once it contained just Grandad (he died of bowel cancer when I was four. One of my earliest memories was seeing him, jaundice from liver failure, on his sick bed), then it housed Grandma (passed away 2002) and my still born cousin Thomas. More recently, my uncle died in a car accident, buried in a plot of his very own, always easily recognised by the Middlesbrough FC regalia adorning it.
In 2011, my mum very nearly joined them after doctors failed to spot a ruptured appendix. Death, once a subject that was usually in the back of my mind, was everywhere. A lurking threat to my family. A shadow clinging to our heels.
To me, death was a subject I mostly thought about in times of stress, when it seemed like a good escape route. I never thought to wonder whether I would be buried or cremated (I’d chose cremation simply because it’s cheaper and the cemetery is overcrowded). Unlike emergency exits in buildings, death isn’t easy to locate when you’ve decided life has screwed you over one last time. All I’ve got to show for my efforts is minor liver damage.
It is one thing when, as I do, have suicidal thoughts. That is under my control, and I can decide “not today, Satan” and carry on.
You can’t stop it taking away others. It seems unfair, almost taunting, to take the life of someone who had everything to live for and deny the suicidal person who actually wants to leave. A cruel joke.
Today, I did something I rarely do, and spoke to my grandparents. Or if you like, I spoke to a slightly tilting piece of granite like a mad woman. I apologised to my grandfather for a very private reason. I joked he’d picked the right grandchild to favour since my sister is the only one of us who actually has a stable life and he adored her. And I cried. I’ve cried so much recently, somehow a floodgate opened inside me and everything I have repressed over the years has come out in unpredictable bursts. I accepted my terrible failure of a life and confessed my deepest sin: I still don’t want to be here.
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I burned my hopes and dreams. Rest in peace, naive little me. -
An extremely toxic friendship I had with two other people ended four years ago in circumstances best described as volcanic. None of us were innocent, we did wrong by one another in various ways, so the results were inevitable in that regard.
However, while my behaviour was certainly not good, one of them intionally targeted me at an extremely vulnerable time in my life. I was publicly struggling with suicidal ideation. We were pulling apart for various reasons, and I know we would’ve gone our seperate ways regardless. But they still deliberately struck at my most vulnerable.
One wrote a screed about what a terrible person I was, accusing me of something I never even did (I won’t bog this down with details, but essentially I wondered if a woman was pregnant. Not because I thought she looked fat, just thinking that something seemed different. It was crass speculation, and I deserved a kick up the arse for it, but I didn’t deserve to be called a fat shaming misogynist either. Especially given I was anorexic from my teens till my late twenties and very conscious of not making anyone feel bad about their weight).
It wasn’t so much a slap in the face so much as being run down by a freight train. Perhaps the strangest part, the one I only realised in hindsight, was that although she wrote that terrible post, the one that made me want to run out into city traffic and get pancaked by a Park & Ride, she wasn’t the villain really. What she said was cruel (and at some point she deleted it, so I think she accepted she went way too far) but I don’t believe everything she said were own true thoughts.
She was acting on the behalf of someone else. She was playing the flying monkey.
Backing up a bit: I mentioned earlier that our friendship was already fraying, but up until a month before the implosion I was getting along swimmingly with Post Friend. We chatted, swapped jokes and memes and pics of the object of our affection – an actor we all liked. No hostility at all.
Our other Friend, the Woman Behind the Curtain, was a different story entirely. We weren’t gettinh along at all. She subscribed to radfem crap, and I’m very much a Liberal feminist. WBTC had been making increasingly obviously potshots at me in her Tumblr posts, which I mostly ignored, except once when I politely but firmly disagreed. She didn’t reply – like all bullying cowards, she can’t stand being challenged directly. Thus, my terrible sin was stating that branding the entire male population evil was really bloody stupid (that’s not even getting into the absurdity of saying such things when you belong to the fandom of a male actor, but anyway)
So what does this have to do with the Krakatoa style friendship explosion? WBTC destroyed my friendship with Post Writer on purpose. It’s that simple. Looking back, it was obvious something was going on. A few weeks before The End, Post Writer’s chats with me abruptly tailed off. Then she sent me an intentionally hostile chat message. I was stressed from work (I got up at quarter to six in the morning and only got home at half seven in the evening. Those were long, tiring days) and becoming increasingly furious with WBTC. I didn’t lead this shit, so I told Post Writer that I wanted the subject dropped.
I played right in to WBTC’s hands.
Of course, like all manipulating, toxic shit-stirrers, WBTC let Post Writer do all the work (essentially setting the scenario that it was Post Writer who hated me most, which even then I knew was bullshit), while adding a few squeaks of her own but otherwise laying low.
I wanted to die. I felt the world had ended. I didn’t have many friends anyway (still don’t, the life of an introvert), work was horrifically stressful, my mental health wasn’t just in the toilet, but down inside the scum of the sewer pipe before this.
I’d reached the end of my rope.
Obviously I didn’t. At the time, my mum was scheduled for serious hernia operations and I had time off scheduled to help her around the house while she recovered. My sister lived 200 miles away and had two toddlers to care for. My brother is estranged from us all. So that left me, the flightly disappointment. I’m not saying my motives for not commitong suicide were entirely noble though – there was the fear of failure (I’ve attempted before, thankfully without permanent damage, but I wasn’t keen on a third time luck scenario) and also just plain apathy. So what if I died? They wouldn’t give a shit. My family didn’t need the added expense of a cremation.
The story doesn’t end here. Post Writer has left me in peace, amd I credit her for that, even if I still find her playing Flying Monkey for a despicable sociopath inexcusable.
TWBTC is another matter. I deleted my Tumblr and kept my Twitter locked for months. Eventually I unlocked Twitter for something fandom related I wanted to do.
TWBTC knew about this venture within a week of me making my Twitter public again. In other words, she watched my account – a locked account – for months. Months.
There’s a lot more. A hell of a lot more. But I’m tired, and today over on Tumblr I said my final piece to TWBTC: I told her I believe she will hurt someone, and if that happens, I hope she gets the book thrown at her. After four years of her shit, and speaking to her many other victims (at least one a minor), I truly believe she is a danger. I wrote this post in the hopes that anybody who finds themselves in the clutches of a manipulative sociopath sees the signs and runs/blocks/severs ties in all ways. Believe me, these people are destructive in ways you can’t imagine.
As for me, I’m doing what I should’ve done years: going grey rock. No further responses. She could claim I’m the Zodiac Killer for all I care. I am done.
Goodbye to her, her machinations and her cruelty. Goodbye to all that.
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Street Rats (close up) I like this painting. When I was inputting the hashtags necessary to get this piece even a tiny number of likes courtesy of the Instagram algorithm, I couldn’t help but feel a surge of resentment. Because I know this piece will largely drift by ignored and unloved. In a fit of petulance, I added the hashtag #myartisshitwhocares.
Who cares indeed. Recently, I thought of another artist – another trustfunder who can sit around scribbling to his hearts content and catch the eye of the right people – and how his debut film was called Wolfboy. There’s some autobiographical aspects to his work, which is why I thought sourly that if he’s some renegade Wolfboy, then I’m the mangy stray cat sociopaths try to run over when they think no one is looking.
It’s childish and unfair to feel so resentful of another’s success, but when you’re busy ignoring yet another harassing phone call from the credit card company over a debt I can’t possibly repay on my pitiful benefits, sometimes my thoughts turn to such childish “it’s not fair” feelings.
Failure, you see, is tiring. Every time you look at a shitty sculpture or read a terrible novel, you are looking at something the artist spent days – years even – on. I might think Stephanie Meyer has the talent of a lobotomised ant, but she still wrote a book, got it published and made millions.
Which begs the question of what exactly failure is. I guess for me, it’s buying art supplies on Clearpay or Zip because I can’t pay for them outright. It’s spending hours on a personal piece and getting five likes. It’s staring at the stacks of unwanted pieces in the spare room that my parents would dearly love to chuck out to make room.
Sometimes, failure is just being alive and having nothing show for it. In fact, a lot of the time that’s what I would point to when I think of failure. A fool consuming resources on an overcrowded planet thinking her art – writing, photography, painting, whatever – might have some relevance one day.
But dying is frightening. Dying is hard. And who knows – someone might toss the mangy cat a treat one day.
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This is a rewrite of an older blog post. I think it flows better and truly hammers home the points I wanted to make.
I’ve never understood the phrase “life is a gift”. A child is something wanted, desired and treasured. A child is created without their knowledge or consent, brought squalling into a world of frightening brightness and disorientating noise.
We are forced to grow up in a world of rules that make no sense. If you are lucky, you can fit in. If not, you are ostracised very quickly, the kid hiding under their coat hood at break time, wishing to be invisible. The one people kick, toss chewing gum into their hair, the one who dreaded going to school. Eventually you just stop going altogether. You’ve tried telling teachers what you are going through and they shrug, they don’t care. They deny it is happening at all.
But of course, the teachers care about your sudden absences. They don’t give a fuck about your suffering, but truancy? That’s a big deal. Truants mean lost funding. Truants hit them where they hurt.
Everything you do is wrong. You can’t escape this prison, this torture that is is allegedly a rite of passage, but feels more like a form of the most thuggish hazing. You are smart enough to pass your GCSEs. When you go to collect your Record of Achievement though, your’s isn’t there. The girl with a similar name clearly took it, she being one of my many tormentors. One last kick in the teeth. They probably burned it in a field somewhere. They couldn’t resist taking that last shred of dignity.
And all the school staff could offer were condescending sneers and indifferent shrugs.
That’s school. After 20 years, I’m supposed to have let go of all this. Let go of my distrust, my flinching at loud noises, my shaking whenever around strangers, especially loud strangers.
society believes I should be able to simply find and retrieve my mental stability, sense of self-worth and social skills after years of torture as though they were nothing more than lost soft balls in a field.
Do you think those former kids feel that way? Are they terrified of loud noises, paranoid of others, live alone because their own company is the only one they can feel safe in. Do they take drugs to cope?
Doubt it. Their lives are just fine. Mine isn’t. I am their legacy. Not that they even remember my name, let alone have any concept of the shame they should feel.
Bloody Roses 