…after a fashion

I’m going to be brutally honest.

I haven’t posted for such a long time because I just couldn’t shout the words loud enough to be heard from the big black hole I’m in.

The last four to six weeks or so, it’s all overwhelmed me. I’m anxious and lonely and feeling hopeless and tired. Bone achingly tired. A tiredness that comes from the spirit and leaks out into the body, not from honest hard physical labour.

I found myself standing on the station, bags heavy, day long, at the end of the platform, watching the trains emerge with a gusty blast from the underground tunnel. I considered the mechanics of suicide. I do that often. It isn’t that I am suicidal – just that I’m morbidly curious. How fast does a train need to be going to kill you as opposed to just hacking off your limbs? How far ahead do you leap? For how long does it hurt? Personally, I think that is an awful choice of death, if only because of all the innocent people that will be traumatised. There are less selfish ways of going.

But, like I said, I ponder these things. And as I stood there, watching the train emerge, too slowly to be effective as a means of a quick death, I had a moment of clarity. I think I suddenly realised what suicidal people want. Peace. The peace of just stopping. Of being so tired and being able to stop.

I’ve always believed there is something better just around the corner (so I careen madly around corners, blind but hopeful). But in that instance it made sense. Stop. And I found myself crying, quietly, unnoticed at that late hour on a busy city station.

I’m tired. I’m lonely. I’m finding it impossible to make friends anymore. I just want to feel like someone, somewhere, enjoys my company enough to seek it out. And for me to feel the same way about them. I want to laugh. I miss laughing.

I need all my energy just to get out of the bed and have a shower, to turn up to work and put on the façade of being reliable and competent and agreeable enough that I don’t inadvertently insult anyone while I’m there. Smile, work, smile, work, but it doesn’t scratch the surface.

So, I’m in a big hole, wondering if it’s worth the effort to keep yelling. I focus on all the positive things about my life, but it’s getting harder and harder.

This isn’t normal. This isn’t entertaining. It certainly isn’t worth writing about. So I keep quiet.