Of course I tried to kill myself. Any self-disrespecting depressed person does that. When you get depressed, you sign a legal notice that you are obliged to at least try to kill yourself once. As I am an overachiever, I tried to do it twice. However, I am generally an unlucky person, I didn’t manage to succeed. Most people would say that I am lucky to be alive, not me. I don’t feel grateful. People would probably think that I am pretentious and privileged: I have a decent job, I have a car, I have a flat, I make enough money for myself, I have a few friends who are close to me. Yet I am not happy, not in the slightest. Sometimes all of it just gets worse. It’s been 15 years with glorious ups and crashing downs, it never changes, it never goes away, it’s always at the back of my mind. I always relapse in one form or another. Sometimes I’d be fine, the next minute I’m thinking that I need to slash my wrists. Then I would think that people at work would stare a lot if I didn’t succeed. Cue to me standing in the middle of the night, staring at my reflection, trying to understand which one of us is real.
I lose my will to live again. I have no dreams, no plans, no end goals. I try to survive through, day by day, week by week, month by month. If there was an empty space instead of me, I doubt that someone would notice. Yet I still wake up, go to work, socialize, cook, clean, go for a beer with my colleagues. I just feel nothing most of the time. Interesting that people find me stoic, probably the consequence of being dead for so long.
“I must’ve died alone, a long long time ago.”
I try to consume as much as possible at the same time, I cannot afford a single thought. Because things get worse the moment I form a single, independent sentence in my head. Especially when I’m feeling that I’m walking on a thin line. Any single thought that would come from my brain is poison. I go to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water, I dissociate so strongly that I feel that it’s not me who’s doing it, as if I’m seeing myself in a third person perspective. This is not me. This is not who I am, it’s not what I look like. I raise my hand, the person with the glass of water raises it as well. I feel like a puppet master and a marionette at the same time. It’s highly confusing.
I blackout. I fast forward to me sitting in my car in pajamas, driving through a popular street in the city. A five second feeling of an open window, wind and a warm summer night. The next thing I know is that I wake up in my bed, in the middle of the night. I don’t understand whether the driving part really happened. Probably that I woke up in my sneakers was an indication that some of it was real.