Other Links:
Confession
thejanechord
Diaryland
notifylist.com
2003-10-29
11:01 a.m.
Less than three weeks to my twenty-sixth birthday, and death is nowhere in sight. If I fall over dead in the next three weeks, I would not be surprised, seeing as how I never expected to live to my twenty-sixth birthday. But as far as I can tell, everything looks the same as it has looked for quite some time now: ordinary, uninviting, bland, and ultimately, extremely dull.
At least it’s not horrifyingly depressing.
There are times, yes, when I feel as though the world is crumbling down on top of me. But those times are not as constant as they once were. Those times come every once in a while, and I always know they’ll pass. It’s the wonders of medication. So, my largest complaint these days is that I can’t live without medication. I want to, but I can’t. If I ever decide to go off my meds, I’d better have several weeks away from everything because it will be absolute hell on earth.
And they say the drugs aren’t habit-forming.
Why am I so bothered by the medications? I’m bothered for the exact reason that I always thought drugs would bother me: they make me boring. I don’t have the raging fluctuations in mood that I used to have. For the average person, that would probably be a good thing. But for the highly artistic, creative type, leveled out emotions are terrifying enemies. It’s like someone took all my creative juices and put a leash on them so they can’t run all over the place the way they would naturally like to.
I hate the emotional leash.
I hate the wondering why I’m not feeling what I know I should be feeling. I hate that I lived the most developmental years of my life in a state of constant flux because it has become the state I understand and expect. That’s the state in which I feel most like myself. Sure, it was scary and out of control.
But it was me.
Let’s take, for instance, the fact that I never thought I’d live to twenty-six. With the drugs, this feels like a thought that I rationally understand as being somewhat out of the ordinary. If I were not on the drugs right now, I’d be absolutely losing my mind, afraid to leave my house for fear that any moment would be my last. And although I do not fear death, I do fear leaving behind unfinished business.
What would the world do without the next Great American Novel?
I find myself wandering the streets these days, looking at the trees and the skies, my mind zigzagging along at a rate somewhat more frustrated than the drugs would like, and I feel slightly disconcerted by the nagging thought of immediately impending death. But I don’t care. I really don’t care about anything. I’m rather like a walking zombie on these stupid drugs, and yet they are the only reason I’m alive.
Well, the drugs and the fact that I don’t own a gun.
In reality, though, I’m sure that the gun wasn’t what was keeping me from killing myself. Sometimes I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t started the drugs, and every time I think, “Of course I’d be dead.” I probably would never have quit doing illegal drugs. I probably would have continued drinking half a liter of vodka a night or several bottles of wine in an evening, wondering why cops kept looking at me funny and asking my friends if I was okay. I’d probably still be getting fucked up out of my mind and losing myself at bus stops in the middle of the night for two hours at a time.
Goddamn, I miss that.
No matter how far I come from those horrifying days and no matter how much I realize that collapsing in panic attacks and slicing open my extremities with knives just because the knives and the blood were pretty was not really normal, it’s still how I lived the most memorable years of my life. It’s still how I grew up, still how I think, still what I compare every experience to.
You know, it’s funny. People come to me with questions all the time, asking about what they should do since they hate the world and everyone in it, and I can’t really offer decent advice because I just don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve chosen the right path. I know it’s what people think I should’ve chosen, and I know it’s what I should tell people in the ethically proper sense of things. But is it really the right way?
I don’t think I’ll ever decide.
