The pursuit of happiness always sounded like a pipe dream. It’s written into our constitution as part of an instructional guide of how to succeed if you’re a white man. Setting the politics of it aside, the idea of pursuing happiness is appealing to everyone. Why wouldn’t it be? The problem is its impossibility.
In my own pursuit to enjoy even a fraction of my day to day life I have found nothing but soul crushing heartbreak. I don’t have the poetry of language to express just how devastating it is to try and improve only to suffer more as the few good days I managed to create only made the bad days worse. And I mean significantly worse. Trying to dig myself out of this rock bottom pit of despair is always a case of taking one step forward and two steps back.
The desire to text my ex-girlfriend grows stronger with each passing day. I find this frustrating for multiple reasons as I was made to believe that time would heal this massive wound I’ve suffered. My experience has been quite the contrary, as I find myself missing her more as time goes on. Additionally, as my mental state deteriorates I fear that my increasing carelessness will prompt me to eventually text her. Which I know would only stand to make things worse, but as days go on things become more and more of an incoherent blur. I’ve lost all desire to do anything. All reason to care. Now I’m left battling this horrible voice in my head while struggling to control my increasingly unstable emotions. Everyday I’m so full of… Loathing. Hatred. Sadness. Devastation.
Additionally, I feel more ostracized from society than ever due to my time in the loony bin. Now, whenever I see items we weren’t allowed to have, like pens and shoestrings, I’m filled with horrifying thoughts of self-doubt. I would never hurt myself or others with those things. Would I? My official indoctrination creates these self-doubts and further prevents me from recovering. It makes me wonder if it would have been better not to seek help. Now, my only desire is to collapse on the floor of my bedroom and lay there until my body decomposes.
I don’t eat much anymore as a result of both my medication and lack of desire to do so. Additionally, the help being offered to me is just as pointless as the help I’m attempting to offer myself. Therapy offers a helpful insight into WHY these things are happening. It creates a barrier between myself and the depression, as it’s described as a disease, rather than assigning it as part of who I am. However, all the inner understanding in the world doesn’t seem to make me feel any better and, at times, creates more self-loathing than if I were just left in the dark. Family members have attempted to help through means of shoving religion down my throat. This is as unhelpful as it is infuriating. Religion creates a dangerous form of group think that would provide me with some comfort in a collective, but this cultish following segregates entire groups of people for the simple fact of being different. Frankly, I don’t see how pledging my soul to a fairy tale and hating gay people is going to help. Finally, there’s my parents, who want nothing more than to reach inside me and pull this darkness out. However, without the ability to do so, they’ve been reduced to feeding me this lie of “things will get better.” They’ve been telling me this since I was 14. For 7 years, I was privileged to experience the great lie/form of gaslighting in all of human history. The fact is that things will NOT get better. Even if I can scratch and claw myself out of the hole I’m in now, I will forever be diseased and broken thanks to a driving force that is out of my control.
Leave a Reply