To get the important part out of the way up front, I have considered suicide seriously for over a year, and while I have no plans to do it soon, I may not last another year. I am a 29 year old male, isolated, apparently unemployable, and in a situation that is actively worsening with every passing day.
I have few friends (fewer than five), most of them I only know through the internet. This circle has grown smaller through the years, especially the last as my hopeless desperation is hard to hide and clearly makes people uncomfortable. I even attempted to discuss this with a “friend” I had known all my life, and he said nothing and cut all contact with me.
My social problems started in adolescence. I was never a popular kid, but at the start of 8th grade, I found that I couldn’t relate to my classmates at all. After that I talked to no one at school, and no one seemed to want to talk to me. The anxiety brought on by these difficulties led me to skip school almost every day. This, I suppose, created a negative feedback loop, with long periods of isolation further atrophying my social skills.
I barely squeaked by 8th grade, but ultimately dropped out of high school not far in. At the time, I had no interest in improving my situation, and I figured I would eventually kill myself after losing my home or things simply becoming too unbearable, whichever came first. Eventually, I enrolled in a crappy public college, I couldn’t afford anything better, and graduated earlier this year.
Which brings us to today. In the six months since I’ve graduated, I’ve had one job interview, which naturally I never heard back on. I have a part-time job at my alma mater that will never go anywhere, and part-time means REALLY part time – I currently work 10 and a half hours this semester. The field I studied in, computer science, means potential employers will see me as considerably less desirable the longer I go without landing a job, and it’s hard to imagine less desirable than one rejected interview in six months. Not only that, but I have no interest in doing much of anything, let alone pursuing programming projects of my own, so my skills are getting rusty. I don’t think I could pass a technical interview today. It is not unrealistic to conclude that I will never land a career in software, and I don’t have any idea what else I can do, if anything. Most job descriptions don’t call for depressed losers.
In a few weeks, I’ll turn 30. I have no one and nothing to look forward to. I live with my mother, and aside from the guilt I feel for taking advantage of her kindness, she can’t really afford to support both of us and keep up with the rising cost of rent. If push comes to shove, we could even end up being evicted. Realistically, my situation is going to get worse very quickly, it has gotten worse over the last year, and I’m too dysfunctional to fix it. I often hear that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but when the majority of a person’s life has been generally awful, and that suffering has been almost wholly self-inflicted, then is the problem really temporary?