Memoirs of the Recently Deposed

And I am still breathing. 

Yes, I did what I do best.  I failed.  I can’t even die properly.  There was never really full conviction.  Well I wouldn’t be writing this if there was. 

I can’t think anymore.  Everything is such a mess.  Smacked my head against a wall 56 times.  Nothing unspooled.  Wouldn’t you like to know?  Always obliging. 

All the Valium.  All of it.  Veneer my brutalised brain.  My beautiful brain.  Precious within my skull.  Anxiety keeps you alert.  Keeps you running.  Keeps you alive.  Until it kills you.  It kills you.  Or it tortures you.  Insanitises you.  Pain.  Smack.  Pain.  Smack.  Pain. 

Smack. 

I know so little.  It’s all sifted through.  My mind is sand.  My memory is a beach.  The tide is coming in.  I am not good.  I am not bad.  I am an absence of empathy.  I only care about myself.  I have forgotten how to care about anything else.  The pain is everything. 

Three days of mostly-unconsciousness were the best of memorable days.  Even with vague memories of a stomach pump and tubes in places where you don’t want tubes to be.  To be unconscious is a blessing.  Some shade in a scorching desert.  I am ruined.  I did it to myself.  I couldn’t handle the deluge of bad thing after bad thing.  Now everything is bad.  A fog of badness.  Where even the good things appear bad.  Help me.  I need someone to help me.  I don’t think anyone can help me.  I am approaching a juncture.  A confluence with an endless expanse of a rift into nothingness.  And a trickle that brings me back.  It’s very hard to put a probability on it.  But the relief of the nothingness was so nice.  I want more of it.  Flicker.  Life.  Blues.  Reds.  Black. 

September 15^th

Fatigue so enveloping that even the assiduous anxiety must rest.  I spent the day in bed.  Again.  I dread dreamt of having to re-join the real world.  The idea of being able to look after myself seems preposterous.  It seems impossible.  Sometimes thoughts like this make everything clear.  Because impossible doesn’t allow for possibilities.  The life that I would never allow myself to live.  And it all seems so very inevitable.  Sometimes; but not all the time.  Sometimes I give myself 1% survival chances and other times I will even posit positivity.  The dread has been so draining.  Today I am very tired.  Thoughts of an unliveable future flutter in, like moths to a light.  I am belaboured and beleaguered.  I let them flutter.

September 16^th

It’s hard to be creative when you are in pain.  It’s hard to do anything, really.  Except eat.  Sleep.  Complain.  And stare at fractured argyle shapes through the moonscape holes in my head.  There are already seven holes in my head.  Was I on the other side of the pond, there could’ve been an eighth.  What’s wrong with the piercings here?

How have I come to the point when sitting in a chair is a really exerting experience now.  It feels like there is pain everywhere.  From the tips of my chronically-curled toes, to the bend in my knee to my fat arse on the chair.  There is pain.  I have no energy to hold myself up.  I just flop.  Like I’ve done with my career.  Life’s a joke, anyway.  It’s just not a very funny one in my case.  At least I don’t find it funny.  Actually, it kind of is.  Just how shit everything seems to be at the same time, so much so that I now have a keenness for fatalistic theory. 

September 17^th

A day is a very long time.  Five days is five times a very long time.  I had a clever thought last night.  I was going to write it down but the drug induced heavy-headedness was upon me and I couldn’t be arsed.  And now I have forgotten it.  Flushed down into the sewers of a billion forgotten thoughts. 

Imagine a life without thoughts.  A world without sex, class, colour.  To be identical.  It is our uniqueness and our idiosyncrasies that define us.  It is our differences that tear us apart.  Can you have perfect equality without uniformity?  I personally would love to be a thoughtless robot, not capable of happiness or sadness.  Benumbed to physical and emotional pain.  Isn’t that the dream?  To be incapable of pain?  

I don’t understand people.  I don’t understand how people can be satisfied with such pointless mundanity.  I want to shift mountains and raise oceans through my thoughts.  I want to fill the skies with a scarlet amalgam.  I want to bring the Moon crashing down on Earth. 

Because I don’t care.  I just don’t care anymore.  My life means very little to me.  Your life means very little to me.  Is caring an emotion?  If it is, I am completely bereft of it.  Except, I do care.  I want everyone to see me.  To feel how I feel.  To think how I think.  To not be alone inside this head.  Life is bleak for me.  For everyone, really.  I truly think the world will tear itself apart one way or another fairly soon.  It would be fascinating to observe, but I wouldn’t want to be a part of it.  Like any soap opera, I assume.  And even if it doesn’t, life is a one-way road to an unforeseen, messy end, or a prolonged, messy end.  I don’t understand how people are okay with that.  It can’t be right.  It can’t be okay.  And what are we best at in the face of unfairness?  We protest.  And the ultimate protest to life is it’s antipode.  The antidote to life.  Is it those little lights of a happy future that guide you through life?  Or is it the things that you let bind and bound you to the Earth?  The need to support and protect the ones you love.  I still love people.  But I can’t protect them.  And they don’t need my support.  Nobody needs me.  My death would be an embittering inconvenience.  But it wouldn’t, from a practical sense, affect anyone.  I am not bounded to the ground by gravity of emotion.  I cannot see those guiding lights. 

In the end, it just doesn’t matter.  My life means nothing.  Neither does my death.  Neither does your life.  Your children’s lives.  Your children’s children’s lives.  Walking through life from point A to point B.  You are a speck of sand on a beach of a thousand miles.  I wish I could understand.  I must be just too thick to.  Or maybe it’s my divine gift.  To see life the way it should be seen.  Not through eyes, but through pain.  Do you believe me when I talk of how much pain I am in?  Do you think it is hypochondrial affectation?  Do you even care?  If I were you, I wouldn’t.  Do you believe me when I say that I want to have my brain splattered on the ground like the upchucks of a bibulous youth?  Why isn’t my brain splattered on the floor?  It wouldn’t be too hard to achieve.  Except it would be.  And this is yet another thin that I don’t understand.  Why I am still here.  This unnameable, impalpable, unswayable tug in the back of my head.  The thing that stopped me taking the drugs that I knew would finish me off in my last overdose.  That lets train after train after train pass by while I forever malinger in this battle for life.  It’s like two polar-symmetrical magnets being forced together.  Like two tectonic plates colliding head-on.  And I’m stuck in the middle.  Unable to go one way or the other.

I want life, but not this life.  I want death, but not to die.  This is how trapped I feel.  An avalanche of misfortune hit me and now I am buried beneath the snow, not knowing which way is up and which way is down.  An earthquake crumbling the foundations of my life on top of me.  And I can’t breathe.  And then I can.  And then I can’t.      

When bad things happen, I revert to my standard, cosy repose of nothing mattering and “I’ll be dead soon anyway”.  When good things happen, I am suspicious of a malignant burlesque, foreboding of some imminent shit storm.  There’s been so much shit rained down on me, I am almost swimming in it.  Failed surgery after failed surgery.  Cancelled surgery after cancelled surgery.  The day beginning with pain and fear and ending with relief as I drug myself into a spasmodic sleep and the darkest of dreams.  With intermittent paroxysms of irritation, rage and hysteria.  There’s very few things that bring me joy or through which I derive pleasure from.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that I can do, or ways in which I can ‘develop’ myself while in my current physical disposition.  I simply don’t have the will or the want to.  I can try; but it’s like chewing on a carpet.  I listen to books in an attempt to exfiltrate myself from my thoughts through escapism and vicariousness.  But I struggle to develop feelings for the characters.  The geniality of ‘good’ personas pisses me off.  I often feel more affinity to the morally depraved antagonists.  I like it when the good people die.  Because I don’t believe in good or evil.  I see degrees of selfishness.  I despise those capable of true altruism because I know I could never be capable.  I know that I am not a good person.  I despise those who are selfish, because they turn the world as it turns today.  I cannot disinter a stronger word than ‘despise’ or ‘hate’, but if I did have one, I would use it to describe my feelings for those who derive their wealth, power and influence through fortune alone.  Because they were born from the right parents, or they happened upon the right words at the right time.  Detestation.  Maybe that could work.  I shall fling that vitriolic detestation at the physically superior.  The enviably healthy.  For I am envious.  For I am physically inferior.  And it’s not because they’re better than me or because I am worse than them, it’s because I have been unlucky and they haven’t.  I know that health isn’t the only problems people can have in life.  Of course I know that.  And maybe it’s bad enough for them as well that they want to flush their shit-stained life into the sewer of souls as well.  But it all comes back to the brain.  The brain is the torturer; the mind is the torturee.  Conflicted to affliction.  Afflicted to confliction.  Round and round.  Over and over.  Second by second by second.  The dripping of life.  Can you hear it? 

September 19^th

It is always the good that die young

You may have deduced that I am still alive, sadly.  Yes, it is still me typing these accursed words of filth.  Many times I have been told to relinquish this; to keep it to myself.  But then I can’t find a purpose for writing.  I need an audience.  Forever the attention-seeking twat.  Forever the dramatist. 

It was my fault.  Clearly, I didn’t have the conviction that I thought that I had.  I avoided the pills that I knew would do the most damage.  I do think it was more the fear of punching several holes in my stomach or becoming a cabbage than the fear of death itself.   Silly me.  Foolish me.  Stupid me.  And now I am facing the retribution of a punitive onslaught of shit.  Now, like a little child who has eaten too many sweets, I have had access to my pills, if not taken away completely, then heavily restricted.  The second wave of shit came in the form of having my eye surgery cancelled because of my mental state.  The irony is that the surgery was the one glimmer of hope that I clung to.  A path that could take me back to normality. 

It’s not all bad.  In fact, it has made things far clearer and much easier.  Because now there is no path back.  My mental state isn’t going to improve without the surgery, and the surgery won’t happen without my mental state improving.  A perfect oxymoron. 

There is so much hope now.  More hope than I’ve ever known.  The path in front of me is bright and only goes in one direction.  I have thought long about it.  Through the days in hospital.  Through the days in bed.  Turning it round and round again in my head.  What did I really want?  The answer comes straight to me.  A release.  From pain, from thoughts; from everything.  Having the surgery ruled out allowed me to take a step back and think more clearly.  If I had the surgery, and it was successful and stopped the flashing and restored some vision, then what?  I go back to working at a desk eight hours a day for the rest of my functional life.  Update my LinkedIn profile and upload crap on Instagram  And then what?  I get promoted, earn more money, find a partner, find a house.  The never-ending search for a better life.  Face whatever population increase, climate change and a populist deconstruction of a civil society.  And then what?  Have children, contribute to the frantic reproductive treadmill of more dissatisfied minds into a discontent world.  And then what? If the world doesn’t implode, include myself in the lavish gluttony of the societal elite.  Go to places that I hate.  Meet with people that I hate.  Do a job that I hate.  All the time smiling and telling everyone just how great life is.  And then what?  Get old, face a gradual hippocampus decay, and face the unavoidable path to death. 

I realised that I will never be happy.  Depression is so ingrained within me.  So buried under every layer of possibilities.  Pulsating through every conduit of thought.  Entangled in the foundations of my mind.  A stinking miasma of foulness enshrouding anything good.  Black tentacles always dragging me down and down. 

You may not believe me.  For you likely see me when I smile fallaciously and speak with brightness and a zest for life.  It was never real.  I have had severe depression since I was diagnosed at 17.  But  I was pretty miserable before in the couple of years before then.  Some people have depression their entire life.  Some depressions are incurable.  I think mine is one of those.  And must I drag myself through the stodgy slug of life?  Even if you offered me perfect physical health right now, I would still be askance of a happy, prosperous life.  Pessimism, negativity, cynicism.  They encompass me and devour me.  If you found the person in the world that hates me the most, I can guarantee that I hate myself many times more. 

That really is it.  The reasons why I want to go.  Based on the last ten years of life, I have evaluated and concluded that my depression is incurable.  It has certainly dipped and rose over the years, but it was always there.  It is a part of me and I shall cherish it until the end. 

The end.  Which now looks like it will be at the end of the euthanasia process.  I don’t have the pills and I no longer have the desire for that kind of death.  I want to do it in a legal way.  So far, I have paid the initial consultation fees and filled in two rounds of forms.  Sending letters back and forth from the continent.  Next is the hunt for medical evidence to support my case.  And essentially a personal statement about why it would be appropriate for me.  It’s just like applying for university all over again! 

I know that this will sadden and upset people.  To be candid with you, I don’t really care.  Nobody forced you to read this.  It’s disgusting and disgraceful for me to say, but I’m a disgusting and disgraceful person.  And I speak the truth, which just happens to often be disgusting and disgraceful.  And I don’t want your pity.  I don’t want your condescension that I am confused or unstable, or not in my right mind.  You will still think that.  I can’t stop you.  I can’t make you see that this is the best thing for me.  I don’t want you to support me, but would like you to accept that this is my decision.  I’ve had enough of being at the whim of doctors.  Enough of being at the whim of myself.  Enough of it all.  I appreciate how difficult it is to know what words to say.  Perhaps there aren’t any right words. 

Love Freddie