If I’m no longer here, I’m sorry.

Hi everyone.

I know that actually, none of my friends or family know about this writing page that I have but I’m hoping that it’s something that they find when I’m gone.

It’s not the happiest thing, but there are some bright spots amongst the decrepit. It’s also funnily enough, a great tracker for my mental health throughout all of this. You’ll find that a lot of it is a glimpse into my own mind or how my mind worked at the particular time. There’s happiness, sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, pain, torment and yearning. It’s got a lot, in different written mediums. I hope it serves well to one day highlight how I was and give a better insight to who I was as a person before all of this.

I’m not sure if this is a suicide note or anything. I’m sorry if it feels as such. I might come back tomorrow morning, feeling refreshed and okay and ‘private’ this entry. I might leave it up and return to it when I feel exactly like this. I might never post this.

Regardless, as bitter and worn down as I feel right now, I know that it’s all fog. I love and have loved a lot of people in my life. Sometimes I’m scared it didn’t really come through as I wanted it to. I’m sorry if I didn’t express it enough before, and I’m sorry if it takes me some time to adjust after. I love so deeply, I think I lost myself somewhere along the way. I think I threw myself into everything without really thinking about it properly. It’s not to say I wasn’t selfish too but…well.

I hope that what I feel like doing doesn’t come to fruition. I think about it a lot, but it’s the pain that scares me the most. I looked it up once. I came across an article that listed all the ways to do it, with reminders and warnings that every single way was painful. At the time, it immediately became a hopeless endeavour. Why would I want to cause more pain than I feel? That the last moments should be torment when I feel that already? It doesn’t make sense.

I’m also scared that it won’t work and that I’ll be left wishing that it did because of what happens after. It’s concerning. I’m too scared of the pain and too scared that I’m too scared to do it properly to ensure that it works. It’s a problem.

So maybe this is nothing. Just venting, letting off some steam. But just in case, I felt that I should at least write something to make it easier to understand.

I’m sure people will say: ‘She had such a good life and future ahead of her, why did she do something so senseless?’ or something along those lines. They’re probably right. Unfortunately, with my condition, I don’t really see that clearly. As I said, it’s like fog, it’s hard to discern when I can’t see what I have or can have if I clung on a little longer.

I called a mental health centre, at my uni and just a general one. I’m on a waitlist. I don’t know when I’ll have an appointment. I tried a helpline, I suppose I didn’t try very hard but I was redirected because for some reason I wasn’t registered at my current address despite having filed to register at my general practice. It didn’t really make sense, but I was really tired so I just let it be. I should really have stopped doing that. My sister always says that my health comes first. (I think she meant predominantly physical health but I’ll take what I can get.) I think I just assumed that outsiders knew better when they lightly dismissed me. I’m not a health professional, I didn’t study to be in this position. I’m going on the assumption other people know better for me than I know for myself. Maybe someone will read this and think I should have pushed harder. Probably.

I’m tired though. Really exhausted from being this way. It’s painful slogging along a half-life. I don’t think I’ve been this devastated before. I have felt this before but not for this long, with nothing in sight. It’s kind of sad and funny. How did I get here? What happened? 

I really don’t know. I also do, it’s complicated.

There were points where I was close to talking to people. But you see, I’m under the impression no one really wants to talk about this. Not to this extent, not to this depth. The comfort I sought was for something deeper than making me feel better in the instant, within the day. I can’t really ask my friends or family or strangers to help with the tormented depths of my mind, they’re not psychiatrists or therapists or counsellors. They’re just people, with no training on this stuff. I can’t really say that I’m unhappy. There’s nothing they can actually do.

The thing is, no one can really spare the time. People are working now, or doing Master’s degrees or they have a million other things to worry about. It doesn’t make sense to make me their problem. I think I remember telling the operator on the phone that I didn’t know how to healthily present my feelings to other people. That’s what I wanted to work on: ways to help me communicate my emotions and wellbeing to people healthily. I think there’s a way to do it, but I’m not sure. I just wanted people to be there for me but for it not to weigh on them too much that it’d become too much of a problem. I know it’s exhausting otherwise, and a bit burdensome though I know many people will say it’s not. It can be, it can be really emotionally distressing looking after and worrying over someone like me.

It’s funny. I think I used to be okay at communicating that I was having a bad day. I don’t know when that all went away. Or at least, I knew that I could say I was having a bad day and expound on that. Now I just say I’m fine or I’m okay. I am fine and okay, I’m sure a part of me is in order to reply in the first place. Plus, the person on the other side is probably lying through their teeth and saying they’re okay too. It’s just a cycle isn’t it? Two people who are drowning and unable to help themselves, much less each other. I have a lot of connections like that. Just floating, desperately floating until we get too tired to continue treading water and just let go. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. It feels empty. I’m sorry I can’t be more sincere, it’s hard.

I hope if anyone remembers me, that it’s positive in some way. It doesn’t have to be mind blowing, it can even just be neutral. But I hope that it can be something that isn’t tinged by what might happen to me after this. I hope that the little time people knew me, that it was at least a positive experience. I hope I wasn’t too dreadful to be around, especially like this. I hope I was someone who was a bit too obsessed with the sound of ice and dice, or someone who loved to write with a couple long novels being written or planned, or someone who really loved cats and wanted one of my own one day, or someone you recognised based on what I wore, or someone who you wanted to know better or someone who meant something to you, somehow. I hope my existence wasn’t as hopeless as it felt while I was living it.

I was bitter and lonely in my last days (if these even are last days, we’ll rain check this if it’s not). I’m sorry I was so absent in the last years of my life. It turns out, I’m not quite good at balancing work and social life, but to be fair we were all in lockdown and I was being exploited but that’s a completely different conversation. Regardless, I’m sorry I wasn’t more communicative. It’s ironic, I did come back sometime in May this year and say I’d try to be more emotionally open and then turned around and did the exact opposite. I think I wanted to be but I realised that it was a bit harder in practice. I was also not sure that people would care for it, really. People are lovely but they don’t really care. It’s okay, it’s inherently a part of existence. You live for yourself, that’s okay. That’s the reason for persisting, if not for yourself then who, right?

But anyway, I wasn’t sure if people would be receptive to it. Especially since I wasn’t actually getting better. The only answer I had to questions about ‘how I was’ were lies because I didn’t have the heart or gumption to say that I was depressed. I can’t count how many times I lied to my friends and my family. I wish it was easier to talk about it. I wasn’t sure if anyone cared or understood. As you can see, it’s quite long and I haven’t even said what it is that pushed me to this point. I think there were people I mentioned some issues to but it was surface level and all they could say was they’re sorry to hear it and that they loved me. I was too deep in the hole to feel the sincerity. It wasn’t enough, it’s not that it’s their fault, there’s nothing else to say. As I mentioned, no one is a trained psychiatrist, counsellor or therapist unless it’s in their job title. There’s only so much you can do for another person, so it’s okay. I just wish I could have seen clearer to know that I wanted just a little bit more and to ask for it, instead of waiting and giving no real signs that I was unwell. I wish I was a bit more shameless and just asked for the validation and love that I wanted instead of teetering around it like I was scared of it. Why should I be scared of something that I want so desperately?

I suppose I was also worried that if I phrased it wrong, that I’d instantly realise that it wasn’t really all that sincere. I have the idea that if you ask for something, that what you get is an inferior version of what you want, simply because you asked specifically for it, so they’re just giving it back to you in your own words instead of their own. If that makes sense. So I didn’t ask and I just said ‘thank you, I really appreciate you listening to me’ and moved on. I meant it somewhat, but I always felt unfulfilled after. But there’s not much I can ask when I know what I’m getting. I can already imagine what you might say, and it’s something I’ve said to myself a thousand times before already. It means nothing to hear the same thing from someone else, at least that’s what I think. If I can already imagine our interaction in my head, I don’t really need it to happen in the exact same manner in real life. I’ve already experienced it in my head.

I also wasn’t sure if people actually liked me. This sounds really stupid. I’m sure it was mainly my own mind working against me and irrationally planting in my head that people didn’t care about me and didn’t like talking to me and spending time with me. I felt it the most in the last few months. I was already detached mentally but I went great expanses of time without contact and then would come back and then detach again. At this point, people had already formed stronger attachments to other people who are probably less mentally distressing to be around. Conversations after my long absences felt stale. I felt like I was boring, with nothing really to say. To be fair, I didn’t have anything to say. I hadn’t done anything with my life besides watch things to escape, or write or prepare for uni. There’s nothing wonderful or exciting in my life to report and there’s only so much I can talk about one show. It gets repetitive and boring. Sometimes I think my mind would trail off without me and I’d forget what I was going to say and it would end up in some awkward fumbling that people would try to play off and move on lest it become awkward. I was also not mentally present enough to be helpful to other people when they needed it. I’m sorry about that, genuinely. I suppose my own worries are other people’s worries too. How can anyone come to me when I’m so clearly detached from my own body? Genuinely, I’m so absent that there’s no point, who knows when I’d fucking reply. I’m so sorry.

I’m not all that great either.

I suppose the great absences meant I became more invisible. It’s both a blessing and a curse. It means I’m less involved in draining conflicts, the past really haunts me on that but a curse because it means I become nothing. Blank, empty space. I’m not sure a lot of people will remember me now. I disappeared a while ago from wider circles. I disappeared again for those closer to me and now I’m practically a spectre. Maybe this whole ‘ending things’ ordeal isn’t so bad because I’m halfway there. It just hasn’t happened literally yet.

Anyway, getting back on track. I think I just assumed people didn’t like me. My perspective was that people would stop replying when I responded. There was always a long silence after I replied. I noticed it last week. It was so busy for the first time in a while, and it was the week I went away because I mentally checked out and then when I came back, there was nothing at all. I don’t know if it’s because I just incidentally chose the wrong times to disappear but it happened every time. It was uncanny. I think people just eventually get bored of me and tolerate me.

I really am quite boring as a person. I don’t really drink because it makes me more anxious (don’t know how that works but yeah, for some reason I get really anxious and shaky) and I don’t smoke (complicated relationship with that, I won’t get into it), and I haven’t had any relationships, I don’t date, I haven’t kissed, had sex, loved in any sense, and I don’t have any interesting hobbies. Writing isn’t exactly an exciting hobby until you’re dead you see! It was only when people died that they became interesting. It’s strange. But yes, I’m not really all that interesting. If I die, I’m sure people will protest that but it’s fine. As I said, people become 100% more interesting when they’re dead.

As such, right now, I’m just a spectre. People don’t care whether I’m here or not because right now, they assume when I’m gone that I’m going to be fine somehow, which is a noble thought. If I wasn’t suicidal, I’d think so too. But these absences are forced absences so that I can just detach myself from people in order not to overthink any interactions I have with people. I don’t know if that makes sense. Nowadays when I talk to people, I tend to feel really negatively about the experience after. It relates to the above, I’m just worried that they hated talking to me and that having spoken to me, it reinforces how much they really don’t like me in their head. Sometimes the conversations feel stale because I feel like I’m forcing myself to be as interesting as possible and to talk and fill in the empty spaces because I have nothing else. It feels ingenuine and so I feel bad about the experience after because it just didn’t feel like that before. I used to be buzzing after, hoping to talk to them again soon. But that feeling isn’t there. I love their company, I treasure it but it’s just…Me. I feel worse after talking to people.

It’s probably why I don’t like to talk about my feelings despite being someone who loves talking about their feelings. It’s complicated.

Whenever I talk about how I really am, I think they must really think I’m abhorrent. Like God…This is what she’s like? And honestly, yeah, I’d be kind of disgusted too. Why the hell am I like this? It’s just vile. 

A lot of what I really feel is that I’m bitter and resentful. That’s why it’s vile. I sound ungrateful because I am. I’m diseased but I’m also ungrateful, resentful and selfish too. Sometimes I think about the times I’ve dropped everything to be there for someone and wished someone cared about me that much just for a little bit. I want someone obsessed with me, like I was with so many people. But it’s obviously unhealthy to be this way. I know it is, but I still want it. That’s why it’s vile. Because these are supposed to be selfless acts of love and yet a part of me is selfish. It’s gross. I can’t help those feelings currently.

I also can’t be bothered for self help anymore. I’ve spent all of my life self-helping. I’m quite tired of having to micromanage my own mental and emotional well being on my own. I just want a professional to confirm I have issues and to just let me know how I can actually get better without feeling like I have to drag along my dead body in order to get better. Mental health is so much work, it makes me laugh when people who don’t get it, think that it’s a walk in the park. Some people I know don’t have anxiety and depression. I’m so glad they don’t.

There were points in my high-school life where I wished I had superpowers, particularly those of projection so that I could project my pain and anxiety and panic attacks onto people who would mock me for it so they could realise how debilitating they really are. What a vile thought. But I think it all the same. I need people to realise that I am constantly fighting to stay alive in a body that struggles to live and a mind that struggles to die.

Suicide is an option to me now. It used to be a last resort when I was in high-school, a moment of weakness where I felt that dying was something I might do if things didn’t get better. Now I see it as something akin to ordering a latte at a coffee shop. I could do it anytime and anywhere and it wouldn’t change anything. I contemplate suicide while I’m talking to my friends, I contemplate suicide while I make plans to see a friend for something fun, I contemplate suicide while I’m walking to class. I contemplate suicide while I lie in bed, hoping to sleep somehow. It’s an option. It’s a conscious, rational option in my head.

That’s when I realised I was desperately and dangerously mentally unwell. It’s unfortunate that I so clearly recognise and am aware of how unwell I am because I am so helplessly aware and so helplessly unwell that once again, I’m battling between knowing that I have an illness and also thinking that the only way for me to get better is to be buried 6 feet under the ground without knowing the outcome and cost of my death. I always imagine that people would mourn me, I create scenarios all the time. I don’t quite realise that I won’t actually be there to witness any of that nor will I feel their mourning or pain because, once again, I’d be a corpse in a coffin or burned into ashes and filtered into the air. I’m painfully aware of how delusional I am to think in that way.

But I’m so lonely, I’m so sad and I’m so tired. No one is here. I’m not sure anyone cares. I think they might care less if they read this. I’m too scared to kill myself because I don’t want it to be painful and I don’t want it to go wrong. I’m scared if I try that people will view it as troublesome and dissociate from me even more than they already have.

I wish ‘you can talk to me’ actually meant that because it really doesn’t. You don’t want to know that I want to commit suicide, you don’t want to know any of that at all. You mean that if I have a bad day that can be fixed by some small motivational phrases, then I can talk to you. That’s what you mean, and that’s okay but please stop telling me you’re here to listen if you don’t mean it. I won’t come to you anyway because of everything I said above, it’s a pain to be a pain but I just wish I had an inkling that I meant anything to anyone.

I wish I knew if my friends actually liked me. I wish my family would care more about mental health instead of disparaging it in front of me. I wish I didn’t have a fucked up spine and a lump on the back of my neck that no one can diagnose. I wish the doctors would do something instead of dragging me along. I wish I could be seen quicker by a therapist so I wouldn’t be stuck in a waiting list to die. I wish I was physically attractive so my family could stop telling me to lose weight and that I don’t look beautiful anymore (compared to my highschool figure which I achieved from eating one meal a day and throwing away my lunch to pretend I ate). I wish I was physically attractive so my family could stop looking at me and thinking I’m not worth loving until I am. I wish I was worth loving for being me. I wish someone cared about me. I wish people would actually try to get to know me. I wish people actually loved me. I wish people liked me. I wish I wasn’t so mentally ill and damaged that I can’t tell reality from imagination. I wish I wasn’t mentally ill. I wish I was kinder. I wish I loved myself more. I wish I wasn’t suicidal. I wish I didn’t have to be this way. I wish I cared more. I wish I was a better person. I wish I was a better friend. I wish I was a better daughter. I wish I was a better sister. I wish I was a better cousin. I wish I was better. I wish so badly. I wish I was so much better than I am. I wish I didn’t have to die. I wish I didn’t think I had to die. I wish I didn’t have to write any of this at all. I just wish.