Cracked Like An Egg

Well, it finally happened. Last night, I cracked, and completely broke down.

I’ve been pondering lately, that all I ever seem to write about in this journal since I reopened it is about going to therapy and taking prescription meds. Those of you who remember my old diaries, or have seen me write elsewhere, will know this is nothing at all like my usual self. Normally my journals are made up of cynically witty anecdotes about my ex-girlfriends and the crazy things that used to happen to me in my past, dotted with the occasional curse-speckled vehement rant about some random current event, or disjointed commentary on random moments that occur in my present life.

This year, however, it seems I don’t really have a present life, to speak of.

If I were to update frequently, or even semi-frequently, my posts would be unbearably dull. And I’m talking less interesting than the obituaries. Here’s a sample of a regular Day In My Life:-

"Today I woke up some time in the afternoon. I put a TV episode on and watched that while I worked up the motivation to get out of bed. Then, I spent the day watching more TV, and/or playing computer games. At some point, I ate some food. Then my housemate came home from work, we had dinner, argued a bit, and she went to bed. I stayed up watching TV and playing computer games until I thought I was tired enough to sleep. Then I went to bed. Four hours later, I finally dozed off."

Naturally, if I posted that or a very close variant each day, none of you guys would read me anymore. That’s sort of a given. And yet, nothing else ever seems to happen in my life. My life is, quite literally, meaningless.

(If you read on from here, you’ll have to forgive the "emo" overtones. I’ll try to keep this as neutral and factual as possible, but these topics always come off "emo", especially when posted to an online journal, hehe….)

Now, meaningless, I can handle. That’s nothing new to me. I’ve been wondering if there’s any meaning to my existence whatsoever on and off for many years now. And usually I can go by months or even years without letting it really get to me much. If the only meaning of life was just to exist and see it through, I’ve always thought I can handle that.

But lately, my existence has been getting downright painful. In 2003, I stopped smoking weed, and getting drunk. Both began making me chronically nauseous, to the point where just a few tokes on a joint or a few light drinks would leave me feeling certain I was going to throw up.

Last year, I stopped smoking cigarettes. On Thanksgiving I lit my last cigarette and haven’t bought a pack or lit a stick since. I continued to have the occasional drag of friends’ cigarettes until New Years Eve, when I quit completely. Now, even the smell of somebody smoking near me makes me feel violently ill. I was a pack a day smoker for ten years, been off them six months, and now I can’t even be in a room where somebody’s smoking… =/

Furthermore, I’m not an unhealthy eater – I’ve never been a huge consumer of fast food/junk food, sweets/candies, soft drinks/sodas, or anything considered hugely unhealthy. To be fair, I’ve not been a particularly healthy eater either – I use a fair bit of salts and oils and spices in my cooking, and so on, but compared to most people in the western civilized world who aren’t full on health nuts, I’d say I eat quite responsibly.

Also, I take my vitamins every day, plus a fiber supplement, and drink lots of fruit juices. All in all, I wouldn’t say I live an extremely healthy lifestyle, but I certainly don’t live a particularly unhealthy one, these days.

And yet, I wake up every single day, feeling tired, nauseous, and sore. Every day I haul myself out of bed, feeling like I haven’t slept at all, and just wishing I could sleep more. My temperature just never feels right. I always feel too hot, or too cold, or both at once. And I can’t remember what it feels like to not feel like I’m going to vomit. Every waking moment is divided into two stages for me lately – feeling slightly nauseous, like I might throw up, or feeling extremely nauseous, and certain I’m going to throw up. I can’t even eat anymore. Everything I try to swallow feels like it’s going to come straight back up again. I’ve been taking in barely enough sustenance lately to stay on my feet. I used to be a very hearty eater, now I’m living off barely a meal a day. And only that because I know I have to eat something. I fight my own body’s instincts even to get that down and keep it down.

And this damn nausea seems to take any excuse to rise up, too. The smell of smoke, as I mentioned. Any strong odor really – from smelly socks to canned pet food. In fact, not even just unpleasant smells – things I’ve always loved, cooking smells, strong garlic, perfumes and fragrances… all make my stomach churn now.

And, if you’ll pardon the medical TMI, I haven’t had a solid bowel movement in forever. Every time I sit on the toilet is agony. I feel like there’s a hole in my stomach lining and I shit out acid and bile with every movement. No, I do not feel sexy right now…

All this, on top of my usual aches and pains. I know a lot of you reading seemed to get the impression that I was only talking about headaches in my last entry. I should clarify, I have chronic problems with my back, especially my lower lumber spine, that nobody can seem to diagnose or treat. Also, a couple of years ago now, I broke a rib somehow quite randomly, and it seems to have never healed correctly – I have constant regular pain on my right side which gets better or worse sometimes, but never quite seems to go away. These things and others lead to a miasma of constant aches and pains, including headaches, but certainly not limited to them. The drugs I mentioned in my last entry were what I took that day for everything, and for a very short time, they relieved almost everything, except my headache.

Anyhow, all this is just the tip of the iceberg of my everyday life lately, although I’ve been struggling along, coping with it all each day just barely, until just recently. This is why I started seeing a psychologist recently, something I’ve never really stuck with before. But despite it all, I feel like each day I’ve got a little less control and a little less hope and a little less sanity, until last night, as per my title above, I finally cracked, like an egg.

I’d gone out, with my best friend, to shoot some pool, but all the tables where we went seemed to have been booked out by a league game, so we just said stuff it, and went home. By the time I got home, maybe around 9PM or so, I felt utterly drained and exhausted. I came in, got changed into some warm comfy clothes, and just crashed onto my bed (mind you, I’d only been awake since about maybe 1PM that same afternoon, so no good reason for feeling that ruined not eight hours later!). Around midnight, I "woke up". I use that term loosely, because I really couldn’t seem to shake off the cobwebs. I was boiling hot, really burning up, absolutely convinced I was going to vomit, but notentirely sure I wasn’t still partially asleep. I tore off my warm clothes, kicked off my sheets, turned the heater down a bit, and tried to cool down and clear my head, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how awful I felt and how hopeless and pointless and utterly irrelevant everything was. I tried to get back to sleep, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about ways to end it all, weighing up pros and cons of various suicide methods, wondering if I should just get up, go run a shower, slit my wrists and just be done with it.

Now, I want to explain at this point, something that most of you won’t already know about me – I don’t believe in suicide. I never have. It’s not that I’ve ever had to deal with somebody I care about killing themselves in the past, or a religious belief, or anything like that – in fact, I have no rationale for it at all. I just don’t believe in it. I’ve never seen the point really – I guess maybe in retrospect, I’ve never felt that life could be so terribly bad that it wasn’t worth seeing what happened next.

But now, all of a sudden, like some Evanescence listening, bad poetry writing, angst written emo teenager, I find myself contemplating the razor, the rope, the overdose, weighing up pros and cons in my mind and all the little details, convenience of materials, quick delivery, presentation of corpse and whether or not I’ll get an open casket funeral…

But this is so not like me! I mean, from a dry, tongue-in-cheek cynical point of view, certainly, I’ve thought about, and even joked about, these things, countless times in my life. But to be actually considering the execution of such a plan with my own self as the subject, no, this is the first time I’ve ever even come close to considering it. And that’s a scary thought, because with that, one has to accept that, by textbook definition, that makes me "suicidal". I am contemplating "suicide". And in my mind, suddenly it doesn’t seem all that ridiculously unreasonable to me anymore.

I keep trying to fight this with logic, the way I do everything. I’m not usually one given over to emotion, I believe everything can eventually be resolved with the application of cold, hard facts. But in this situation, my logic is not steering me back in the "right" direction. I can’t find a reason not to. I can’t even remember why I’ve always thought of suicide as silly and tawdry and not an option for me. I mean really, why not? If every single day of my life is going to be like this, no changes, no answers, no solutions, no improvements, just pain, and discomfort, and stagnation and disease, then why the hell shouldn’t I terminate it and see what comes next? If I had a dog that was constantly sick, practically incontinent, that spent all day and night in fitful restless sleep and was clearly in constant pain, I’d do the humane thing, and have it put down. So what’s so wrong about considering doing the same thing to myself in the same situation?

I just don’t see any way out anymore. I used to feel like this painful time was just the struggle before things sorted themselves out. It has to get worse before it gets better, and so on. I used to think that if I became wealthy, or had an active social life, or whatever, I’d be happy. But now, I imagine being rich, and I see myself in a nicer house, with nicer things, and nicer cars, and still sitting here, albeit in a nicer chair, at a nicer desk, utterly miserable. I’m no longer certain that the problem with my life is on the outside and I just have to hang in there until things get better. The longer I "hang in here", the harder it gets, and the more I start to realize that the problem is in me, in my body and my brain, not out there in my surroundings. And I don’t know how to change me. I only know how to end me.

When I realized this last night, I burst into tears and cried my eyes out. I’ve never been so scared of myself in my life. I’ve always been the guy with all the answers. The guy who can take anything life throws at him and say "Is that the worst you can do?". Now, I’m choking on my own words, as I find out that it wasn’t the worst life had for me. It seems the hardest things to deal with in life aren’t about dealing with life at all, they’re the things that fester inside your own self until you wonder how you can deal with living.

Anyhow, I eventually took a xanax and fell back asleep, and slept almost 13 straight hours to wake up at my usual time of 1PM today. A quick internal diagnostic scan shows that my brain is back to its usual self – grudging complacency, reluctant acceptance, and a stubborn will to see another day through and see what crap tomorrow tries to throw at me. But I can’t help but feel at this point, that last night was the start of a downward spiral for me. I think things are only going to get worse, and my strength and resilience is only going to erode under the force. And I have a uncomfortable suspicion that I’ve come too far to get back now, and that if my life is going to ever hit a positive or negative extreme, it will be the negative when the day comes.

I just don’t have the answers anymore. Or the strength to keep waiting until they reveal themselves…