August 9, 2019
guarded(ian) angel
People shouldn’t have to recover from their recovery and yet every time I am put in a stabilizing hospital I am again injected with venom… the very reason I arrived; a nearly palpable indifference I am forced to feel towards both the human condition and humanity itself. The unfortunate truth is that these hospitals are simply life downsized to an institution, a microcosm for life if you will. The anger, the corruption, the incessant medication and of course the self sabotage that ties us all together in one way or another. Even worse, I cannot be placed in these situations without feeling absolutely ruled by both my disgust and empathy. It all comes back to the truth… I don’t like the humanity I spend my life trying to understand and care for.
I don’t even care to pretend anymore. I do believe in all the niceties I am fed. I see them. I am kind, articulate, perceptive. I am actually one of the few things I felt I would miss before I almost fell to the insignificance I worked so hard orchestrating. In fact, in hospitals I may be the sickest of them all and yet I am the one who helps people. I sacrifice until I can’t because that’s the only thing that breaks my numbing apathy. It’s not stable though… it always leaves me alone in my contempt, my confusion. Yet for some reason… since I was a child… I cannot dispose of my empathy. I see people suffer, I see people I despise suffer everyday, and I still help. People tell me to stop caring, and yet they’ve put me into a hospital, they want to fix me, just as I want to fix others. We’re all suffering from the same feeling yet I am overwhelmed by what I see so much so that I foolishly rebel. I foolishly let my moral objections ruin my life, morality has always ruined my life.
I’ve noticed in hospitals and well everywhere, half of the people I meet love me, the other half are afraid, don’t want others to talk to me, be my friend. I still haven’t fully understood why. I feel these are truths that will either never be revealed or be revealed when I am gone. It feels as though people do listen to me and that scares people. I do make sense. I feel every single person alive feels some level of this confusion. I believe that is why suicide is so controversial. If we start regulating suicide in the same way other countries do… we would have to acknowledge it. We’d have to allow it without thinking of it ourselves. I understand that is hard for people but that is also a facet of my disdain. I believe thoroughly… actually the only thing I believe completely is that suicide is a right, my own suicide above all else is my right. If someone has displayed for years and several treatment plans that they still want to die then keeping them alive has probably grown to the point of near excruciation or complete boredom. Forcing someone to live in my opinion is as morally caustic as forcing someone to die. Our lives are more our own than our environment. It is our inherent environment.
The only point of fear I have is that I am wrong. Not because I’d die. I’m going to die one day. I’m afraid that I do affect people… and that I could be wrong, I could be making everyone worse. I mean being caring, helping others, it’s only drove me physically and mentally weaker every day. Granted if I took everyone’s advice and did become a psychologist I would stick to the book. Even still for as long as I live I will continue to deny to certain actions, certain qualities. Then again, what’s the use? There will never truly be a profession that doesn’t have some level of hypocrisy. Life itself is hypocrisy with a pulse. My empathy will always come back… it always comes back. Just as my life just did, just like it always has. I have cheated death so many times. All my life I have been saved, brought back from the dead, I have survived every near death experience, every accident, every attempt. I wish I understood why. I am not worthless but I don’t think I’m worth this. If someone cosmic is keeping me here, I wish they would stop. I don’t think I can become like everyone else. I don’t think I will ever be compliant. I just don’t believe I can keep justifying life. Not forever.
I just want to kill my empathy above all else. I think we all do because humanity is a hive. Our consciousness are all interconnected. We are all over thinking, sabotaging a little or a lot and of course hurting something else in a ridiculous way just to afford some elegant waste. I think it all comes down to narcissism. Consciousness is inherently narcissistic. Mindless self reflection, all day, it’s no wonder so many of us are dependents of something. For me I just can’t take how opposite I feel of everyone. A piece of me is in everyone… I relate to everyone in someway and yet nearly everyone makes me miss myself within just a day or so of constant interaction. I don’t think it is because I am introverted either. Many are. I am just so so different. This is why all my poetry has been about one person for so long. There is only one person who doesn’t make me miss myself … because they understand me, I understand them. Truly there is nothing about them I don’t understand. Every failure, every tear, all the selfless empathy for certain friends. I understand. It’s hard to stay mad because I understand and I feel they took advantage of that. Still though I have to remind myself that we are not the same person. I just never knew where they end and where I began because I am convinced there’s not a joke I could say or a grotesque feeling I could admit that they wouldn’t understand to some extent. My brain is flooded everyday with memories I don’t want to forget and yet I know to survive I have to forget them. Just like my altruism, it remains another thing that life forces me to suppress or even dispose of for good.
It saddens me that this person feels I hate them, that I wanted to burden them with regret their entire lives. Why would I do that to my favorite person? Why would I want to? My death has always only truly ever had to do with me, I thought that was obvious with all the poetry and pain that preceded them in my life. I guess I am just growing tired of the same circumstance. Ever since I have been a child there has always been other people and circumstances keeping me from the few people that understand me at all. People who understand my humor, my perception, my opinions. Whether it be co workers, best friends or family. There was always some oppressive figure pulling us apart. The worst of all is that these people and I always get along and have more fun than whoever is doing the pulling. That’s life though, isn’t it. We all probably wouldn’t eat meat or kill people in war or do bad things if it wasn’t programmed into our biology. It’s like these relationships represent that good nature that exists for potentially no reason and people work like our instincts to ruin it all. I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why everything contradicts itself, I do, those helping me do, humans do. Life itself does. What is the truth? Which side is right? Are there no sides at all? I wish I understood. I need to understand.
If anything losing my child is what I ultimately cannot accept. I know it was my fault, my decision and my pain to carry. I don’t even know why there is so much pain anyway because I was an anti natalist my whole life, some part of me still is. We don’t know how to stop hurting each other yet half of us have kids. In fact the most daft and horrific people I know have them. They’re the ones who have them most. It’s like people lose their faith in life and need children to see or attempt to see life from innocent eyes again. That makes me sick because I was that child. Most everyone in the mental hospital was that child but somehow they’re selfish enough to have their own version of that child. Yet it all comes back to our biology, the thing that instills that need. It makes me confused and afraid because I didn’t stop being suicidal until I wanted children. I finally felt more normal because of it. It’s odd to not want them even odder to believe most shouldn’t be allowed to. Yet I know I am currently someone who isn’t ready and I paid the ultimate sacrifice. I know I made the right decision and yet I can only cry.
Every night I go to rest I can still picture them. Picture them young, picture them old. Picture two halves of my favorite people, making one. As my brain produces an image of them small, sweet, and sleeping on my chest my insomnia then breaks away and I fall into rest. I know however that I need to kill that image, but it feels like an act of killing them twice.
It all doesn’t make sense. If we shouldn’t be having children, why is there an urge that is impossible to deny ourselves most of the time? And why does losing them feel worse than even our own death?
I don’t understand anything. Everyone keeps saying I am so smart, I am so helpful. Yet I am confused by everything. Maybe I am just one of the few that is good at explaining that. I wish I could succumb to religion but what is the point if my views are already that altruistic? Even if I committed to it then science would wedge itself between and I wouldn’t be able to ignore witnessing the ways in which science disproves or proves better so many things. It’s like I am perfect halves of two things that completely oppose each other and like humanity as a whole I’m destroying myself in order to no longer have to endure the ache associated with trying to understand. If only we could just choose one side altogether or evolve back into creatures who were instinctive enough not to care. Either way it ends the same. We either eat each other physically or emotionally. Why is both science and religion ill fated? If you ignore your heart, scientifically you’ll succeed but you’ll go to hell. If you embrace your heart, religiously you’ll go to heaven but you’ll suffer more than need be.
My psychiatrist said to stay in the middle but the middle is who I am. I am something in the middle. Which is why I can help nearly everyone. Yet I remain in pain. I am losing faith, interest. I just don’t think I care. I am starting to see why there is an entire religion devoted to sitting still and not thinking. The more you think the more you see and all there is to see is contradiction.
All I do know is if I am really meant to be here and get past this then I will be forced to be reckoned with. I don’t think I am worthless, I just don’t want to think about it. My worth. Life’s worth. I’m tired of thinking about things. I’m just so tired and each year I lose something that made me feel related or energetic. I don’t want to think about that either but I have to take therapy for the next year. More thinking and words. You have to accept things. You have to accept the human condition. You have to accept everything. I already know all their words, I can recite speech we all recite to ourselves.
What if I can’t accept everything? What will society do with me? Again, I don’t care. I don’t care much about anything right now. I can’t afford to care so deeply. That is what depression comes down to. Caring less about some things, more about others. I’ll do what others want. I’ll change me, my favorite person so they can all sleep at night in less pain. I already do too much for others as is, this will just be another thing I endure. It already is. My story is like life’s story, both endings are the same. Two different paths to the same place.