Wanting an End

I have been fighting a losing battle for my life for ten years. Well, maybe not. "Fighting" is a strong word. "Fighting" implies I have been resisting the side of "death," but I have not. There has never been a moment in these past ten years where I have said with conviction "I want to live." There have only been periods, in the past few years, where things have not been so bad and periods when they have.

Some would call this "depression," that my poisoned mind is whispering lies to me. But I don't believe that. I don't believe that there is some foreign voice within me with which I do battle. It is only I who wants to self-destruct. I who wants to give up. I who wants to be punished over and over and over again until I am finally a battered broken husk wrung clean of wrongness.

I want those things. That is real and true. I am doing this to myself.

So why am I still alive? Because part of me has always wondered "What if?" What if things change? What if there are other answers? What if?

"What if?" has kept me alive for a very long time. A tortured living, but alive nonetheless. But I am gradually coming to realize that I am the only thing that can change. I am the only other answer. And I am stubborn, I am exhausting. If I am the only other answer, I am not a good one.

And so I have that old familiar feeling. And so now there is a voice in the back of my brain telling me, in the most seductive of persistent whispers, to kill myself. And so I don't think I'll do it. But I also don't want to spend another ten years making this decision. I need to decide to live or to die. If not forever, then at least for now. I want to end this agonizing debate. But then, if I knew how to do that, it would already be over.

So the voice whispers on. And I go through the motions of my life just in case. And I am making myself so unhappy. And I just want it to end.