2003-07-04 - 1:08 p.m.

living hell

I wrote this piece when I was stuck in a lot of self-pity and feeling very miserable. I had basically sent myself to a living hell.

What is like to die and go to hell? Would you burn in everlasting physical pain? Would you be tortured by extreme cold? Unfortunately, hell is neither hot nor cold. It's worse--no temperature at all, no pain either. No sensation whatsoever.

It is like being stuck in a nightmare, the kind where you're terrified and can't move. In the dream, you want to reach out and turn on the light, and have it all be over, but you can't. In hell, you're petrified by the terror of not being able to have what you don't even want. You have no desire to turn on the light. Still you are gripped by the fear of *nothing,* at least not anything you care about, which makes it that much worse. Look at you�you can't do anything, can't feel anything, can't even think clearly. There is no one to care for you, not that you need them to. No one even cares enough to be nasty. Not that they could hurt you now. You have no sensation for them to get you through.

The most maddening thing is that you're still there. No matter where you go, even to the grave, there you are. When you die, absolutely everything disappears but you, when you were the only thing you wanted to have disappear. You hate yourself, you hate nothing, but that's all you've got because that's all you are. But who really cares, anyway?

But you do care. You don't like being lonely and wanting to be lonely, only imagining your death. You must get out before you are gone forever. You try to think of a way out�God, faith, love, what is it? But something in you holds back to the known, the comfortable, even if it is only nothingness. It's all you've got after all. Think--is there anything in the nothing, that perhaps you just don't see, but maybe it's the most precious thing of all?

Ah well, you�re lost, can�t find the way out, too tired to look for it. Tomorrow you�ll be better. You say this to yourself every night, then in the morning you wake up the same, although sometimes you get worse. These days, if you got any worse you'd be dead. You wonder, as usual, if you already are. Does it make any difference any way? Do you have to find a way out?

But you must! Get out while you still can! Do you want to be stuck here forever? NO!! Then take action! Now! What the hell are we going to do?

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I haven�t really changed since I wrote that, but I�ve accepted who I am. And in order to stop wallowing in self-pity you need to accept that you are wallowing in self-pity and be ok with it. And like I was then, I am still �sweet & innocent,� well-adjusted, a straight A student, and everybody always acts nice to me. (People usually are nice as long as you talk as little as possible while still being polite and don�t get in their faces.) I still have no friends. I don�t fit in *anywhere.* But I've accepted the darkness and learned to live with it (which kind of takes me out of the darkness). Or else in the nothing I see nothing and am nothing and but now I'm not desperately trying to struggle out of nothing so therefore I am no longer nothing.

Beware of the quiet ones, especially when they stop being quiet.

Today's comment: This is a pretty accurate description of the depression I went through, and the thoughts that helped, and are still helping, to drag me out of it. I've been plenty depressed since the "one year later" comment, but things haven't been quite the same ever since I got the idea of enjoying being depressed. It's a confusing concept, but it works. At least for me.