Chris DeLine

“Giving of myself versus selfishness.
I am a powerful and competent person.”

That’s what I wrote — two lines — over three days. And now I’m writing a suicide note because I’m tired. I won’t kill myself tonight, because I’m lazy. And I won’t “relapse” because who has the energy. I won’t do anything because what’s the use? Inaction is… whatever.

I want to be alone, only in that I want to hide and have people come and find me. I want to feel like someone cares, but make no mistake: You searching doesn’t mean I care about you. I care selectively, sometimes based on things that you don’t control. Male or female, you are a nice person but you’re not pretty so I don’t like you as much as I would if you were pretty. I run away, you stop looking, and I react with feelings of loneliness because no one’s chasing after me telling me to put the gun down.

I am normal in that I don’t like what I do every day. People don’t like life. Life is living and to afford living we must work, and work is hard, but it grants us the ability to snatch something fun from the ether. Candy… days off… fun. From the ether. I give you my life, you give me a reason to live. It’s a good racket when it works for ya.

But things stop adding up around there. I don’t like work, so I stop working. Then I feel guilty because I can’t put my nose to the grindstone and suffer through the same set of circumstances that no fewer than one billion other people on this planet would die for.

Talking through my thoughts today it dawned on me that I’m getting worse at maintaining any sense of commitment within the context of this cycle. Commitment to myself or the task at hand. I start working, then grow tired of it. But over the last five or six years, the distance between hating work and quitting has become disconcertingly slim.

Let’s say that I go out on a limb and try hard to get a job again. One that pays fine and is fine. Again, we work because of the abilities it grants us. Also, on another level, work gives us satisfaction. It helps us say “Dammit, I tried today, and I didn’t give up. I came in, did my best, and by Gawd, I’m gonna do it again tomorrow, too.” Which is fine. But the fight isn’t there. The resolve has dimmed to a point where only darkness remains. The switch is broken.

I know the answers. If I were given the task of pulling someone else out of this hole, I’d know where to start, what to say, and maybe how to move forward. But nothing means anything when the answers are hollow. They work sometimes, and other times they even ring true. And? Where do we go from here, allowing the cycle’s ups and downs to dictate whether today is a “mental health day” or if we can actually get something done. Dammit.

I leave, I lose. You leave, I lose. I stay, I avoid losing for a while… how long though? Long enough to have a few more laughs, take a few more adventures down the same paths? Being scared to try is pathetic, but no more pathetic than insisting on remaining within a comfort zone to avoid the unknown. Good or bad, I’m fucked. We all are.

But what happens in the afterlife is unknown, as much so as what happens in this world or what the meaning of your own existence might be. We are all here to figure that out. Or we’re here for no reason. I want what I have until the thrill of having won is over. The stuffed animal at the amusement park looks brilliant and seems worth every last penny of the fifty dollars you spent trying to win it. But once you have it, it’s just a toy. It’s not a great toy, and certainly not something you’d have wanted if it weren’t given to you as an option. It was there. You lusted after it. And now you’re ready to move on.

Abandon toys? Women? Internet? Society? Then all I have is me, and my mind, which is a returning visitor that I already fear is visiting too frequently, the way things presently stand. I just want to turn off the guilt of living. None of us asked to be here, but some of us deal better with the consequences of being lied to our entire lives. What a drama queen.