Not only do you have to give everything that you have to drag yourself through a joyless day, but you get to the end of the day, feeling completely fucking exhausted and depleted, and you pick your head up only to look at another day on the tail end of this one, feeling like that day will be even more impossible than this one because you have even less to give, even less energy to try, and more anxiety of the pending pain that you know is going to come. It feels like you’re stuck in this downward cycle of groundhogs day where you go to sleep and wake up but it’s the same fucking shit, the same pain, only it starts to get worse and worse and worse and worse. And you feel like your mom can’t handle it, like you can’t handle it…like – there’s no hope of it ever getting better, and if it doesn’t, you can’t manage to keep waking up.
Literally me when I was 15.
I remember sitting at my desk and thinking – if this is the way life is always going to be, what’s the point of even living it? It’s like, I could write the script of my day: wake up, hate life, try to numb out, fail, fucking fail, feel like a piece of shit all the way until I fall asleep, wake up hating that I have to do it all again. Why keep going?
I remember that. I remember that pit. I know mine is different, but it smells similar. And it was a fucking sinkhole, dude. I hated it. You’re not crazy for feeling the way you’re feeling.
I love something that my friend @casers says, though, he says that self-hatred is actually mis-directed self-love. Check this exercise out. It’s like a 3m video with a couple short questions that if you are willing to engage in them can help change the way you think.
Additionally, there’s a blog that I personally wrote about when three of my friends attempted suicide in the same period of time, and what I learned about it. It’s got a couple of re-framing questions as well that are helpful.
I feel like it would have been impossible for 15 year old me to understand this, but as 26 year old me, I feel compelled to at least try. “Dude, life /does/ suck right now. And it feels like it will never end, like life will always be the same. But that belief – that the way life is right now will never change – is the piece of this I can prove is a lie. Your life will change…a lot…and often…and with change comes hope that you can try again, that you can make a change, that things can be different. You aren’t crazy. You also aren’t beyond hope. Keep going.”
-Nate