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I have no idea what to write when I journal. I feel like I should have something momentous, or deeply philosophical to say. Something profoundly meaningful or deep. But what I always end up with is that I have a hard time living. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone wakes up every day and debates the merit of suicide before they get up. Maybe we all balance the scales of life and death periodically throughout the day. I don’t think so though. I wish I was one of those people who could wake up in the morning, sun writhing through the windows, birdsong in the background and think,“it’s a beautiful day”. But I am not that person. It’s not that I wake up and think it is terrible. I am not doom and gloom, dark skies, and dark stories. I hear the birds, I see the sun, I just don’t believe it means anything more than anything else. Therein lies the problem. Maybe it is nihilism, maybe it’s depression, maybe it is just the lack of hope or the concentrated numbing I have spent my life perfecting. Whatever it is, I will get up regardless, I will put on clothes and probably pretend to care that I exist. I will make coffee and look the chaos of my apt, I will look at the mountains and think of what they mean to me, what they represent. I will go through the day as if what I do matters to anyone, to me. My thought process is hard to explain. It is survival. It is continuing on whether I want to or not, but in the midst of doing what I should, have to, need to, want to, I will insert moments of wanting. If I gave an example that I notice most it is driving. I will be driving and think what If I just drove off the road here, off this bridge, what if I turn this car into the tree, what If I speed up and drive off the edge. I don’t do it. Rarely. But the thought is always there, it is part of driving. When I was little I would just open the door and fall out, I would watch the edge of the road, watch the line going on and on, and then just open the door. The point is I guess that my days are filled with these moments. I cut vegetables and wonder if I should cut my wrists, my throat. They are random thoughts. I don’t spend time thinking about how to end my life, they are just there, part of me, part of my day, always. My whole life as far back as I can remember. At some point I decided to look at them as multiple opportunities every day to affirm life. To consciously look at them and make the choice to live. It seems more affirming than looking at it as a constant fight for it. I have instituted a policy in my life of reciting something I am grateful for every time I affirm my life. I think of the people I love and the things I love, and the things I survived, the people I grieve, and that I am alive. I breathe. I think of music. I move on from the moment. I don’t intend to kill myself. I wouldn’t specifically and sometimes entirely, because of the people who love me and how it would affect them. It is funny because at the worst of times I survive on the promise of someone else’s sadness, other people’s tears. Usually at a point when I cannot find my own.
Let me clarify that I am not super depressed most of the time, I am self destructive, yes. There are times I am depressed and I can tell you when this happens. It is bleak and all encompassing. But the majority of the time this isn’t what I feel. Those are periods of dark, the rest of the time it is just life as I have always known it.