Interference.

It's really hard to write anything right now without it coming across as a suicide note. Suicide is a running theme in my life, even if I have no intentions of actually doing it. It's not a feeling of wanting to die, it's a feeling of not wanting to live. Let's casually mention on an internet blog that when I'm downtown, it's near the river. It's a bustling little area of town and there's enough restaurants that the air is delicious to breathe in there. It's a good place to sit on the bridge over the river, contemplating to jump and end my life. I decided against it because the fall probably wouldn't kill me or even knock me unconscious, and at most would seriously injure me internally and then I would probably drown while in disorientating pain. At its worst I considered using my knife to dig the femoral artery out of my leg, but that sounded painful too. I have violent imagery of ending my life semi-frequently when I'm like this, and there's always phantom pain or wincing and grasping areas of perceived harm that dissuade me from considering it. A true sign of a hopeless coward is that they don't want to kill themselves if it's unpleasant or requires effort.

There have been many near-attempts at suicide in my life, but the only time tried to commit it, it was an attempt to overdose on vicodin and alcohol after I turned 16. My family got divorced and my mother was a psychotic alcoholic who blasted music all night and didn't do anything except desert us for the weekend and have random emotional outbursts that kept me in fear constantly, especially if the boogeyman of my father considered breaking back into the house to kidnap us again. My brother had to work 50 hours a week biking several miles to work early in the morning, we had to walk several blocks with our arms tethered with grocery bags from the supermarket, and yet were always hungry. My girlfriend and one of my few friends at the time grew increasingly distrustful of me because I didn't want to tell her that I got held down and teased by two girls while the third raped me behind a classroom. She grew more annoyed when I started talking to another girl after school who I felt more comfortable confiding in at the time because her personality was a bit more amicable and earnest and didn't judge me for looking like a goblin with face-deforming acne, much unlike virtually everybody else did at the time. Where touching my face firmly at a wrong angle would have blood and puss dripping down it at any given moment.

I was so lost in my own thoughts that the only friend I was confiding in with my problems committed suicide with me noticing a week later, and then my girlfriend got upset at me because she found out I was talking to said person instead of her, unaware of the fact that she took her own life. I snapped and got upset. She told me I was selfish and never asked her about her problems that often. I told her she did the same and that I desperately just wanted somebody to confide in and that she either needs to be that person or that we can't continue on like this. She couldn't because her own life was garbage, so I walked her to her house and we both said “see you tomorrow” and then nothing happened. I was failing out of school, people either bullied me and hated or me or wasn't even aware that I existed and needed help. Everybody important to me was too busy to care, too strained to help, or they were gone entirely. I was 95 pounds at 5'8” and was lucky to eat twice a day. A few days after mostly everyone forgot my birthday and my relationship ended, I tried to commit suicide by shoving handfuls of vicodin into my mouth like I was eating chalk and washed it down with cans of warm beer my mother left out. I threw it up a few minutes later after getting it down, and lied on the bathroom floor shivering for a few hours. When I got up, I was entirely numb, and most of those things that happened were shoved somewhere because I couldn't bear to confront it or acknowledge that it existed for most of the rest of my life.

Some of the only ways to motivate myself to stay alive nowadays aren't particularly positive emotions. One is hatred. I had a conversation with Mono the other day and she bluntly told me “You know the only reason you're still alive is because you hate your father so much.” And for a long time I've done my best to repress or convert the hatred and bitterness I've held onto my entire life. Anger is an ugly personality trait. It disgusts me. It makes me afraid to be around people. My father has never not been angry or bitter, and how he reflected this on his children has made me more and more resentful as time went on. I went from understanding my father's frustration with his life and inability to help things, to resenting him for it. It's like I'm going backwards for what's healthy personal growth. I have never been able to voice my own frustrations and self-loathing inadequacies in my personal life, now I feel that anger and toxicity has sunken in, corrupted the foundation. While I've been frustrated with my own weak piece-of-shit self, I was greatly frustrated with how people have always overlooked it, or how I had to put on a strong face and pretend that things were okay. I became angry at the fact that I couldn't help myself, that I was even denied the privilege to ask for it. That my father's boorish and frightening personality made him incapable of understanding the problems he was creating or made him unable to fix them, which led to his frustration bleeding out onto his children.

He has made me feel inadequate, like I never was trying hard enough even though I tried so much it hurt sometimes. He made me feel weak because I couldn't manage my mental and emotional problems like a healthy individual who goes through abusive relationships, drives away his children, and is thoroughly unsatisfied with his life. He has called me a loser who should kill himself on more than one occasion, usually provoked by something as utterly trivial as not mowing the lawn. I won't forget it either. Because in my fucked-up headcanon I win either way. I want to live to prove him wrong and I can live to see him die, or I can kill myself with a part of me knowing that I'll ruin the twilight years of his life. And that is a capacity for spite and hatred that he has instilled in me. That's what I won't forgive him for. A lot of things in my life are my own fault, but the anger is a product of what he's done. He turned a happy child who wanted to try his hardest to please people he cares about into somebody who's willing to commit suicide just to spite him. And it scares me that I have the capacity to hate somebody that much.

There was something else I was living for, and I don't even know why. It's water under the bridge now though. I think one of the things I'm never allowed in life is closure, especially on my failed relationships with people. It blows up and they leave, I drive them off, or they die. I will never get catharsis or closure on them. It can never be amicable, they just want to get out or they're taken from me. Everybody is gone in one way or the other eventually. Sometimes there's someone who you don't even know why you're so obsessive over wanting their empathy when it's been made abundantly clear that they either don't have it, or they're unwilling to part with it. I suppose that's a part of it, it's a one-sided friendship or unrequited love where you value somebody tremendously to the point that it hurts, but you'll never have those same feelings mutually reciprocated even though you desperately want them. Where you care about somebody even though you're fully aware that there's probably nothing on the other side for you.

Maybe there is. Maybe they're just as fucked-up and scared and cautious as you are and no amount of prying will work. Or maybe they look at me and see how severe my abandonment issues are that I need constant empathy and reassurance, and how volatile I get and how quickly to lash out I can be because my mind runs itself into the ground contemplating why they don't care about me, even though deep down I know they're probably just scared. Maybe they just leave because I guilt them and make them feel like shit constantly and they start thinking that they're the problem and they're not good enough to help me, even though I just want something as simple as hearing them say that they care. Maybe they just don't have the time or energy for all of it and they have to take care of themselves. I can't begrudge them for it because I understand it, but it's still allowed to hurt like Hell. Or maybe it's just observers guilt rather than actual personal concern. Maybe they don't actually care because all they've wanted was a superficial relationship and they've been looking for a way out, and they always thought I was some psychotic fucking loser to begin with and they were putting up too much of front to ever tell me. Because if somebody's known me for so long without ever really acting concerned, and they're so quick to just up and get out without saying anything with all intentions of not coming back, they probably never cared to begin with. I can't say, because I won't ever know, because I can't get closure. So thoughts like this will pull my head apart until I want to kill myself because microaggressions when I'm horribly depressed will drive me there and people are aware of that so they want to get out as quickly as they can.

And it really fucking hurts. I'm allowed to be. It hurts like Hell to feel to feel this way about people you care so much about, that you've known for such a long time and were some of the only company you had during a dark period in your life. To utterly resent somebody you love and cherish and worry about as a person, whether they want to be that person to others or not. Who you once cared about so much that you'd be willing to remove that person from your life just so they wouldn't have to put up with your bullshit anymore, even if it meant being unhappy yourself. Where you harbor these feelings of anger and abandonment even though in the back of your head you can't blame at all for it. Most of my close interpersonal relationships inevitably end like this. I've driven away so many people in my life because they couldn't keep up, because I get burned out on pleading with them and begging them to stay, to constantly remind me that I'm not fucking garbage, and then I start insisting that they leave because I become convinced that I'm not worth it. I'm not good enough. I guess it becomes reverse psychology, because it would nice if they told me I was wrong and stuck around and that they aren't going to give up on me. But most of them leave. Most of them give up.

And it's not even like I know what I want anymore, either. Most of my ability to feel it has gone cold save a few delicate exceptions. An obsession over a few chosen people's empathy you'll never get makes you oblivious to others who could possibly help. There's a sense of frustration that there's something wrong with me because maybe a normal person would be more receptive, and a slight sense of anger towards others that they were too late to help. There are people who want to help but are on the opposite side of the spectrum of the people who aren't receptive enough. It's hard to appreciate the thought if they don't have the tact, they don't have the constitution or the prudence to make their effort feel like it's worth anything to you. Who are tone-deaf or too headstrong for their own good to realize that they're attempting to rationalize with irrational people, or they take drastic and blunt actions to get timid, distrustful, or easily hurt people to open up, not really aware that they might be a part of the problem. People like that remind me of my father; people with by-all-means honest intentions but are too far up themselves to notice that their obnoxious asshole personalities impede their abilities to empathize with others. Their frustration is understandable, but they should possess the awareness that they're ill-suited to help people with delicate constitutions. It's bizarre that some people I desperately crave their empathy because it means something important to me, and some people who are actually empathetic I can feel abhorred or turned off at their assertive tone-deaf attempts to connect. Beggars can still be choosers, I guess.

At this point I've felt like that the only reason I socialize is because it's expected of me. Because I have to. Because it's the right thing to do. Because they're superficial distractions from my problems. There are a minuscule amount of people who mean enough to me that I want to go out of my way to talk to. That I desire and appreciate their empathy from. Maybe they understand the significance of it, maybe they don't. Or they merely don't care. Mostly everyone else is just that; a superficial distraction. They hold little to no value to me otherwise. It's easy to drop or forget about them entirely if I don't desire using them to occupy time anymore. I wish they meant more to me than that, but I wish a lot of things meant more to me too. I've reached a point where I don't feel bad just dropping people out of my life, to sort of just stop “being around”. I think about it a lot.

My thoughts have a tendency to run themselves into the ground, overthinking situations and analyzing every personal interaction with people for every nuance, every trend, every weakness people could use to possibly hurt me or to run away and abandon me. I get lost in time obsessing over every single conversation I have with people who are important to me, in a perpetual state of anxiety when I'm depressed because all the conclusions I draw are the worst ones. I have entire strings of possible deviations in discussions I could have with people saved in doc files for conversations that I never even had a chance to have and are years old. Every conversation I have is watching a network of conversation topics blossoming in any given direction, and I'm the neurotic Batman prepared for virtually every possible outcome, except I don't have the added benefit of being rich or my parents being dead.

And when enough awful things are happening in my life at once, the entire system crashes and I can't take it slow anymore, I have to repress and outrun and forget everything. If I don't go catatonic and detach myself, it will drive me to very drastic solutions for my problems. There's so much noise occurring in my head when this happens that it's deafening. Just voices reminding me that there's nothing for me in life, that I'm alone with them for good because the real people left. Arguments with people I play out in my head that I haven't even had with them and I get upset for reasons I'm literally making up. There are sounds of nauseating, distorted guitar feedback and the nonsensical static chatter of indistinguishable voices. It's a mental tinnitus, and I can't stop it. I want it to stop, I know that some of these conversations I will never have, that I will never get closure on, but my head refuses to stop. It keeps going, it's still going. I'm still developing conversation strings for relationships with people that have long since gone cold and it's emotionally exhausting to play out every outcome possible because you start longing for the fictional happy ending that you're never going to get and hating yourself for it, or you're driving yourself to suicide over the self-inflicted malice that you believe people have for you.

I need people to disprove them. I don't care what people say anymore, I don't want them to give a shit about my feelings. You can say “I care and I'm worried” or you can say “you're fucking garbage, stop bothering me with this”, as long as they say something, anything so it can stop. The contemplating can cease, and the noise can be pacified for a brief instance. Because the longer the noise goes on, the more it starts to deafen me and have trouble hearing anybody at all through it. This is what's going to kill me. It's not a matter of “will it,”, it's a matter of “when”. That is the gamble people take making friends with those possessing mental deficiencies. It's managing a terminal illness. Every single day it's a fight to hold it off, I could commit suicide this year or when I'm 65, but it is what's going to overtake me eventually. Eventually I will stop caring about the noise and the attempts at empathy and it won't be able to be pacified anymore, and I will do anything to finally get the quiet that I desperately want.

I just want to stop thinking so much.