#5: can't remember when i stopped “postponing the inevitable”

25.09.23 - Vienna

quick trigger warning: I discuss some of my past experiences with suicidal ideation and attempts in this post - so maybe don’t read any further if you know yourself to suffer averse impacts when confronted with those themes, or if you just don’t need that in your life today

I spent too many nights between my first and second year of university awake. I’d love to say this was because I was out partying, robbing banks, slaying vampires or generally just enjoying myself - but that would be dishonest.

All too often, after hours of lying awake in bed hoping the darkness would take me, I’d stop hoping. I would give up, get up, and head out into the dead of night. As an involuntarily nocturnal animal, I saw more of the city than I ever had in daylight.

Though the streets were almost totally deserted, I wasn’t alone. Other insomniacs, the less than sober party people, the individuals who couldn’t go home, or didn’t have any home to go to, and the foxes - all of whom were given a wide berth - weren’t great company. But they were out there with me nonetheless.

I traipsed about like a frustrated zombie, robbed of the ravenous appetite to live by, hoping to stumble into an adventure exciting enough to rouse me from my waking slumber. The theory was that some sort of shock would instantaneously rewire whatever fried systems were keeping me awake, catapulting me back into balance, and bed, immediately.

Those months, and those nights, were spent living with a lot of suicidal ideation. I had a lot of partially assembled plans firing across the ol’ sleep deprived skull meat. As frustrating as it can be to be a procrastinator, and a bad planner, those traits can sometimes be life-saving.

That ideation lead up to a few attempts on my own life. Spoiler alert for anyone excited to read my biography, but they were not successful. I am also not a very good assassin.

I still find myself trying to figure out which of those attempts were serious, and which weren’t. By my twentieth birthday, I’d been thinking about killing myself for so long already that none of it felt serious - despite my being utterly convinced that this fate, dying by my own hand, was an inevitability.

When it comes to wanting your life to end, and acting on that impulse in any way, it’s definitely best to consider every instance as serious, and make sure to get help where you can.

I eventually did, but it took a while. On the way there, I got way too close for comfort. So I still have to keep an eye on it, and I will always have to keep an eye on it.

This week, I found something surprising, which reminded me of that fact.

Back when I wasn’t sleeping right, I was gripped by two obsessions I’ve since left behind: a deeply selfish, misplaced and unrequited love affair, and going to the gym to lift heavy things.

Note that university, which was supposed to be occupying my mental space, and time, does not feature on that list.

The aim of the latter obsession was to get really good at lifting heavy things, so I could lift those heavy things in competitions, and prove officially that I could lift heavy things. 

It made a lot of sense at the time.

I got pretty strong, but I wasn’t very good at the competitive component. I was even worse at ensuring that my physical strength was paired with some semblance of psychological resilience and well-being.

That total lack of psychological stability brings me to the other obsession; a human person who I really shouldn’t have involved in that whole mess. And I knew that then.

I was convinced from the beginning that it wouldn’t work out with this person. And goshdarn was I correct about that.

My certainty didn’t stop me from putting every last bit of hope into them, relying on them as my reason to be, to live. I still regret so much of what I did putting pressure on them, and the things I did in my desperation to keep their attention. But that made sense at the time, too.

One of several major contradictions from this period of my life was that I genuinely did not believe that I was going to keep breathing (with extreme gym-douchebag-like intensity) for much longer. Every passing year served to convince me further that I’d take my own life before the next birthday could come around.

That sense was juxtaposed with incredibly misplaced dreams of powerlifting, loving this person, and doing nothing else, until I was very, very old. By limiting my worldview to those things, I could shut out everything else, which only ever seemed to lead to despair.

This person lived across an ocean. I made a bad choice, and followed.

The sport was making me set goals I could aspire towards. Because those goals were numbers - and (somebody check my maths here) there’s no shortage of numbers - there seemed to be a possibility I could keep striving towards those goals indefinitely.

Only the laws of physics, my body’s physical limitations, and my mind’s further constraining of those limitations, could stand in my way.

When it all came to a head, as it was bound to, that all broke down rapidly.

I fell apart. And it was much needed, even if it was painful.

Looking back now, as a much skinnier, much weaker, but much more emotionally stable person who hasn’t eaten chicken in several years, I can’t imagine being who I was, or doing the things I did. I realise that the person I can no longer imagine being could also not imagine being me, or even being here anymore.

I’ll be 25 next month, and I’m now really glad to report that. But back then, I knew for a fact that I’d be gone well before hitting the quarter-century mark.

After I broke down, I dropped out of uni and didn’t think I’d return. I retreated to my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, and started going to therapy. I’m incredibly fortunate to have had this as a possibility, and I don’t think I could be here without that help.

I wasn’t happy during that time. I was in therapy, sure, but I was drinking a lot. I was “safe”, but I was also actively seeking to end my life, again. There was one last attempt, when I was home. I hope, sincerely, that it will always remain the last time.

Just under a year after having gone back home, I decided that I’d return to uni and complete my degree. And this week, I found a list I wrote to compare the pros and cons of going back to university.

I’m ultimately very glad to have gone back to finish my degree. I learned to appreciate Glasgow in a new, more thorough, healthier way - but also ended up doing so through a series of COVID lockdowns.

Near the end of that degree, in the midst of one of these lockdowns, I also met my partner. I can never express how grateful I am for that meeting.

(It was in an online class. Our eyes locked across the zoom. Even if this wasn’t by far the best relationship I’ve ever had, and if she wasn’t the absolute apple of my eye, the pun alone would have been more than enough. Thankfully, the pun is just the cherry on an infinite cake. Yum.)

Meeting her made me want to stay in Glasgow for longer, to figure out if what we had was real. Almost three years later, we live together in Vienna, and every day I get to be with her is a thrill like no other. So jury’s still out. (Gotta keep her on her toes)

So, because she was going to stay in Glasgow, just as I was ready to leave, I decided to embark upon a postgraduate degree in Journalism. It made a lot of sense. Unlike those other decisions, this one still makes a lot of sense.

I was interested in being near her and being with her made me appreciate the city I’d been living in for years in an entirely new way.

As a very much secondary consideration, I was also interested in the prospect of writing for a living. I still am. I was a news junkie, and grappled constantly with current affairs. I still am, and do. I also thought that the seemingly inevitable economic, social and cultural upheaval of the coming century is going to need some people to write that shit down. I wanted to be one of them.

They say that journalism is a first draft of history, and I’d just finished a history degree. That’s a good hook around which to build an application, so I could confidently trick admissions officers into thinking I was competent.

You got got.

I’m very grateful for that postgraduate degree, even if I feel like what it gave me, primarily, are not the tools necessary for being a journalist, but precisely the opposite. I learned to identify and name the precise mechanisms which make modern news reporting, and media organisations working within this particular(ly fucked up) iteration of capitalism, incredibly vulnerable to corrupting influences.

Just over a year after having completed the degree, during which I have worked for a “reputable” media organisation in, I have no idea if I am likely to head any further down that path.

But whether I do so as a “journalist” or not, I’ll be one of those people, and I’ll keep writing shit down.

But I digress. (<— alternative title for this blog)

At some point between leaving Luxembourg, COVID in Glasgow, falling in love, finishing two degrees, heading to Malta and being spat right back out for a soft landing in Wien, I forgot about this list.

I thought that I had left Luxembourg with a sense of optimism, after months of therapy nudging me tentatively down a path towards recovery.

Well, apparently not.

First of all, what did I have against kilts? They’re very cool pieces of clothing. And enjoy watching them swiff about during ceilidhs very much, and my utter lack of ceilidh ability does not detract from that enjoyment at all.

Maybe more importantly, I was shocked when I found this list because I really believed I left Luxembourg feeling ready to start again. When I got to Glasgow, that’s what I thought I did. Apparently though, I was still convinced I was going to kill myself.

“I am postponing the inevitable.”

Now, that’s just fucking harrowing.

I’m comforted by the fact I find it harrowing, but also concerned that the belief still lives in some dark corner of my being.

I’m also concerned that at some point, I’ll find a document I’ve erased from my memory, listing “lederhosen” as a reason not to have come to Austria. Equally harrowing.

Once again, they’re very cool pieces of attire. A person who is very close to me, but who is (rightly) obsessed with privacy so won’t be named, absolutely loves them. Although in their case, the obsession is due to an alleged butt-flap lederhosen are “supposed” to have.

This flap allows those wearing the traditional garb to defecate sans the inconvenience with which we all struggle so much: pulling your trousers down.

None of the lederhosen - not a single pair - that I’ve yet seen in Austria, have got such a flap. But who am I to belittle your struggles, or to stand in the way of your dreams?

I know, for a fact, that now, even at my low moments, I don’t seriously think about killing myself. I also know that when the little fucker of an internal voice speaks up to berate me, many more of the other voices on duty at that moment chime in to berate that voice in my defence, telling it to go easy on me.

Eviction is not an option, so I’ve teamed up with the voices in my head.

I thought, before I found this note, that I could trace these team up efforts to the time before I chose to leave Luxembourg, but now I can see that belief was wrong. Because that feeling has made me feel like my memory can’t be trusted I’ve spent much of the past week trying to find evidence, in notebooks, scraps of paper, and the ridiculously disorganised notes app on my phone, which might indicate when that shift might actually have happened.

Why bother having a functioning recollection of your own life when you can outsource the contents of your mind to a plethora of scattershot, easily lost or perishable locations?

I left Luxembourg in August of 2019. My second attempt at a third year of uni started in September, and the first case of COVID was documented that December. This actually ended up being a fairly big deal - I don’t know if you remember - but it precipitated a global pandemic, a lot of fear, and unprecedented planetary weirdness. Not ringing any bells? Yeah, same.

The first lockdown wouldn’t be put in place in Glasgow until March.

The memories I have, between September 2019 and March 2020, are fairly few and far between. They’re not enough to fill a whole life up. I know that I had been given a cinema membership, allowing me to watch free movies (very, very cool gift). I watched almost everything I could. I went to the cinema almost every day after lectures, between lectures, instead of lectures, and I almost always went alone.

I was living in a studio apartment connected to other studio apartments with a common living room area, and I made a few friends. But I was mostly alone. I remember some parts of my courses, and a few friends I made through them, but I never went out of my way to spend time with those friends outside of class.

I had a few friends from before my year away, and though I am still close with many of them, I didn’t see them often.

I know I was lonely. And I genuinely have no idea if I was thinking about killing myself again. I know I wasn’t in therapy, I know I wasn’t drinking often, but I would drink a lot if I did at all.

When the first lockdown hit, it seemed like everyone was suddenly as lonely as I had been for a while. Seeing so much less of people was an adjustment, but honestly not one which could have been all that difficult for me to make. I can’t remember what it felt like. I don’t think I’ve thought about those early months in lockdown very much at all since then, and I can’t really remember what I was doing to pass the time.

There are lapses in recollection with seem to be part and parcel of depression.

It’s unsettling to think back to a time I thought was safe, after finding evidence to the contrary. It’s unsettling to think back to a time I thought was safe, immediately preceding a global calamity which would only exacerbate my loneliness, and find that my memory was wrong.

I don’t know how I got through that period, but I was lucky in that I didn’t have to face the brunt of anything more than loneliness, which I was already well practiced in facing. But I did get through it.

The fact I’m here now - as excited as I am to exist and keep existing - is proof that whatever self-directed ill will I once had does not have anywhere near the same power over me as it once did.

I hear that grating voice, still, but the rasp is faint. And it can be drowned out when my big bully allies - who are prepared to yell it back into the dark corners to which it has been relegated - step into the fray.

I thought I could pinpoint when the balance shifted, but I was wrong. All things considered, maybe I don’t need to know.

Because I do know this: 

I’m here now, and I want to be.

blog the fifth signing off