imwithjonas's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bottomless and Empty Bottomless and EmptyI’m an “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it,” kind of girl. It’s about time to get out the matches. This runs the risk of being one of my heartbreakingly sad entries. I apologize. If you don’t want to read my sob story, then don’t. Good day. So the suicide entry might have been a little more relative than I admitted. I don’t think I would have noticed the television content so much if things hadn’t been going on subconsciously. I guess this is the part that warrants concerned phone calls from family and friends. Suicide is a touchy subject with me. I’m not a big fan. I’ve never had a truly suicidal thought in my life. I once said that not believing in God makes life more worth living. I might as well explain that a little better as it relates to my suicide theory. If there is no God, then the whole afterlife deal is wishy-washy at best. It makes every moment of life a little more precious. This is the once chance that you can be absolutely sure of having. You have to make the best of every moment. You can’t waste time wallowing in self pity, and you can’t waste time doubting your actions due to religious “principles.” Good and evil are still viable poles in this atheistic approach. People can still have morals and values. You should be kind to other people because this is their only chance, too. That is the best and truest basis for compassion that I have found. So, moral of the story is that you have to make the most of the life you have now. Suicide is a complete waste. I still make an exception in the case of physical illness. In my delightful Nip/Tuck episode, Julian said something particularly striking. I’ll paraphrase, because my memory is poor. If someone is in extreme physical or mental pain, I don’t feel I have the right to judge them. That’s pretty much how I feel. I would debate the mental pain, but the physical part is right on. I can’t blame Megan O’Hara for killing herself. A slow, painful death from cancer doesn’t strike me as pleasant. Mental pain is a little bit of a stretch for me, though. More on that later. I basically have three personal frames of reference on this topic. Once, some time ago, xStupidx threatened to kill himself. He said, “Thanks for all the help. You might regret that when I’m gone.” That’s slightly made-up, in that I don’t remember the exact words. But that is a very close representation. He was pretty much just mad because I got tired of his whining. I basically told him to shut up and get over it. When he threatened suicide, I pretty much told him that if he was willing to stoop to that level, I wouldn’t much care if he did it. That probably all sounds pretty cruel, but a) I was lying, and b) the only reason he said it was to make me pity him. If he had meant it, I would have been a good deal more sympathetic. But he didn’t mean it, and that’s not the kind of thing I take lightly. That was the beginning of the end of our 12 year long friendship. Other people who have meant more and less to me have made similar threats. Every threat depressed me tremendously, and a couple of them scared the hell out of me. But I also wanted to slap these people. The second reference is far more personal. When I was somewhere between five and six, my mommy was in the hospital. I recall my dad telling me that she had accidentally taken too many pills. It wasn’t really a family secret after that point. No one ever said, “We don’t talk about this.” I just never brought it up. About 10 years later, it dawned on me that “accidentally” was probably just made-up to placate the little girl whose mommy was sick. I hadn’t ever thought about that whole period of my life much. But after another traumatic suicide incident (to be related shortly), I put the pieces together. So, to the best of my knowledge, my mother tried to kill herself. It seems like I had a conversation about this with her in the recent past, but the memory has a quality to it that makes it seem more imagined than real. I’m not sure. It seems like she told me she didn’t really intend to die, and she definitely didn’t want to, but I don’t think that taking too many pills was an accident. I guess a lot of that is just assumption on my part. I don’t know. Someday I guess I’ll sit down and talk about it with her, if we didn’t do that already. Stupid memory. When I was 15, my uncle killed his girlfriend and himself. He was 28. He was only 13 years older than me. He was kind of like me, now that I think about it. He was generally pretty quiet, but he was absolutely hilarious. He shot his fiancée five times with a 20-guage shotgun. Then he took his own life with the same gun. My grandmother found their bodies. His fiancée was an incredible woman. She was funny, and incredibly outgoing. She was a reformed Mormon. I admired her for that. I never even knew they were engaged. I loved my uncle. We acted like kids when we were together. He threw my shoe in a 30 foot tall tree once. Grandma made him get a ladder and retrieve the shoe. We had apple fights. He paid me an unduly large sum of $25 to pull some weeds one summer, even though I never finished the job. His funeral was on my birthday. My parents didn’t want me to go. I wish I had made them let me. I wish I had gone. I miss him so much, some days. I hate that I’ll never know why he did what he did. I hate that he did it. It was the first murder in their tiny city in 16 years. It was the first suicide that ever touched my life in any meaningful way. I have plenty of reasons to resent suicide. That’s probably all that’s kept me from being suicidal. I said that I objected to the mental pain exception. I have had some measure of mental pain. From my point of view, mental pain generally passes. You can get over mental pain. You can get help and move on. I think that’s why I’ve never been suicidal. Even if I’m having an exceptionally bad day, when I feel my absolute worst, I can understand that it will pass. I don’t object too strenuously, though. I know that not everyone is like me. I try not to judge anyone. I just can’t understand people’s motives sometimes. There’s not really a point to this. It’s all just been on my mind lately. I spent a couple of mind-numbingly pointless days staring at the ceiling and just thinking. This is kind of the result of all that. I spent two days loathing and pitying myself. I spent two days in an unending bout of depression. I moped and whined. My life kept looking like a dry well. It was bottomless, empty, and abandoned. A great deal of false and self-deprecating introspection caused me an undue amount of pain. A little supervised and less caustic introspection helped undo the pain. An hour and a half of love, support, attention, and enforced optimism made life seem infinitely livable.
Today was blissfully pleasant. It was the glorious calm after the storm. I like this place. I’d be happy to stay in this mental state. I just hope I don’t always have to go through all the trauma to get here. At the very least, it’s been requested that I stop forcing myself to endure all this alone. Things are getting better. Some things never actually got as bad as I thought. I must have a natural tendency toward hyperbole. 8:51 p.m. - June 02, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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