(cw: euthanasia & suicide) I haven’t written here for a couple of weeks, mostly because I was sick. Usually I get one migraine per cycle, but this cycle I had another one just a couple of days after I recovered from the last.
It is demoralising and depressing.
Being sick has robbed me of all the things I used to enjoy doing. Apart from health there is a momentum when it comes to working on creative projects. Once I get a migraine I am not only down for the entire span of time I am nursing one, I am also down for the days after. Depression and fatigue is known to be a common postdrome. So I lose my previously accumulated momentum, and it takes weeks to restart another one, if I do bring myself to do so. Then before I’m barely started, the next attack destroys me again.
It gets really frustrating and dark. So I tell my partner that I wish euthanasia is legal here. She takes it in her stride and doesn’t take it personally, even if I ask hypothetically if she’ll be there with me at the end of my journey if it becomes an option. I know I am asking too much of her, but I ask anyway, because I must.
Sometimes the only relief from not being able to end my life is to tell someone I wish there is an option to do so.
I am capable of laughing, of cracking jokes, of being lighthearted, of filling up my days with things I like doing, so it doesn’t seem like I am the person capable of writing a post like this. Sometimes she forgets, and I myself forget. Until the next moment that desperate feeling arises again. It is just a feeling, as illusory as an imagined narrative, as real as an impulse before it turns into action. Just because I intellectually believe I shouldn’t act on it, just because I refuse to hurt anyone who remotely cares about me, doesn’t mean that the feeling ceases to exist.
I think it will always be part of me, for better or for worse. It is already so much of my history. I don’t think it is something that has to be hidden or rejected. I don’t wish for it to be gone, like a shameful secret. It is what that keeps me alive in a way. The fact that I still yearn for relief, for something that makes me feel better than now.
I would imagine it may be disturbing for some people to read something like this. But I also imagine a society whereby people are free to express such thoughts, that perhaps just the act of putting them out there in the open is freeing them from the massive weight that may compel them to act on it.
My partner and I started dating because she sent a message to me (to ask to hang out, not to offer help) after she read a post I wrote about my chronic suicidal tendencies. I have always thought it was very strange of her to want to date a person who has publicly stated multiple times of her wish to die. Now upon writing this and thinking of this memory, maybe she was ahead of me all along. That she didn’t see it as a flaw, or something that I should be cured of, or something to be avoided. She saw it simply as a part of who I am, how I thought and felt, and she told me then she felt like I was one of the most alive people she’d ever known.
I thought it was funny and ironic, and I didn’t really know what she had meant. But now I think I understand, the willingness to feel such pain and desolation, in a way it is an extreme attempt to not let life deaden me.