On Despair.
TRIGGER WARNING. BITCHING AND COMPLAINING ABOUT MY LIFE
Have you ever been sewing a shirt, or a dress and gotten through a long line of stitches only to realize you ran out of thread somewhere along the line? Lifting the unfinished garment, you scan the gaps and unset seams only to find you ran out of thread quite a while back.
You just spent hours laying out a pattern, marking, ironing, matching ends and panels, front-to-front, or back-to-back. You deal with the decades-old, hand-me-down sewing machine, stringing the thread through the obstacle course, pulling it through.
You align the fabric under the feed dogs, drop the pressure foot and start sewing. Leaning hard over your work, satisfied you are making progress, you come to the end only to discover your bobbin threaded out, or your spool-line snapped.
Nothing.
All that careful setting up, all that assumed time and you’ve done nothing but press two pieces of fabric together and poked holes in it.
I’m not in a good mood. I’d go so far as to say I am in a miserable mood. A God Hating, Life Resenting, strung out, tied down, past hope, and even a desire for change mood.
Churchill called them his Black Dogs. A terrible funk of inaction and dispair for that Man of Words and Action and controversial figurehead. At least his Black Dogs fell in between periods of world renown and intensive usefulness. Great, now I’m supposed to have been Churchill.
So, you think you can write? Why bother? My God, who’d read it? I mean, honestly. Why do I have to want to do this? I routinely flunked English and Language Arts throughout my school years. I dropped out and missed the advanced English and Writing bits. What I don’t know is probably Dunning-Kruger-level incompetence.
And I don’t have the emotional sack to fix it. Writers Workshops? I have to take Anxiety Medication to go to the grocery store. Peer Review Workshops. HELL NO! GO AWAY! LEAVE ME ALONE! Enter Writing Contests. Posted Entry Fee represents Literally, One-Fifth of my monthly “income.”
I have “lived” with Anxiety and Depression for most of my life. Certainly, as far back as I can remember. I have depression-saturated memories and then child abuse. That’s about it.
My Depression and Anxiety are severe enough that I qualify for Disability. Your tax dollars at work because clearly, I can’t. I did once, for about six months, before I did something stupid and almost illegal and got myself embarrassingly, and deservedly fired.
Shooting myself in both feet. I knew I wasn’t going to last it out, the job. I think I hamstringed myself to get out of it. My boneheaded behavior worked and I got myself fired. Then, because, to live is to do, I decided to try Community College. In the 2,000s the living was easy, FAFSA-wise, and I got a free two-year ride.
I had so much money left over from my student stipend, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. It was about eight-hundred dollars. I asked the women what I was supposed to do with the remainder. She looked bumfuzzled at my question and said some people use it for rent, or clothes, or other things they might need for classes.
Oh. Do I know? Before my eight-month employment, I had two decades of agoraphobia and social isolation by choice. I didn’t have a clue. I made it through college, barely. I left crying a lot. Had issues with teachers who didn’t like me and just could not hide it. I graduated but did not attend Graduation.
I knew I wouldn’t. When I signed up for school they asked about cap and gown rental on the form. I said “No.” It didn’t mean anything to me. Before I went or two years later. College was just something to do so I didn’t feel so, useless, so utterly pointless.
That’s it. Pointless. My existence, by any human measure, has been quite pointless. It is said that the best sign of overall mental health is the ability To Work and To Love. I don’t seem to be able to do either, and the older I get, the less I care.
All those things I dreamed of and longed for have faded away. In drips, drops, and floods, these much Hoped For Things have slid away. Almost all of them, I find, it was just as well they never came true.
These people I wanted to meet or love. These things I wanted to do, places I wanted to go. Thank god I didn’t ever have the teeniest chance of having children. My God, what a sad, embarrassing, unfit, unuseful “parent” I would have been.
Mental Illness is not an ‘easy life’, if such a thing exists. I am fifty-two in July and have lived attached to my mother all my life. I’m more an appendage than an actual person. Yesh, I know what enmeshed means. I have had a lot of Therapy.
When I try to imagine anything else in my life, it involves things like Lotto wins and literary success. Neither is going to happen. Both are truly Pie in the Sky.
I wonder if I would rate on a schizotypal scale. I never could figure out those weird colloquial, poetical phrases. They say that is a sign. Not comprehending idioms. I remember taking an intake/personality test to get into a training/rehab program with a local non-profit. Another one of my, Let’s Pretend We’re Getting a Life, moments.
When they got to the sayings and idioms bit, I was stutteringly flummoxed.
“What does the phrase “A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss” mean?” the tech asked.
“I don’t know. I never understood those weird things? Maybe, if you keep moving you won’t turn green?”
Yeah, that’s what I said. When they did the image analysis bit, showing me pictures of various black and white images, one was a side view of a saddled horse. I looked at it for nearly five minutes and could not for the life of me tell what was missing.
I gave up and said, “I don’t know, it’s a boy horse and it’s missing a dick.”
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner.
Yeah, no. Rider, I think was what they wanted. When you don’t even see missing people, people probably aren’t your jam. Shy, sensitive, weird, chubby little girl, I must have been.
Why do I have to live like this? Am I being punished for something? Dear God, I hate you. Fuck You! Fuck You God, Fuck You! It’s that bad. I have not showered in four days, but I’ve baked three times. I have a refinishing project I’m fiddling with, before it gets to the I have no artistic skill to make this look nice stage.
I have a friend since second grade I talk to twice a year. Her life isn’t perfect, but it does involve jobs, children, hobbies, etc. I have three pen-pals, all going through very hard times themselves; divorce, abandonment, greedy ex, one with zero interest in his young sons, and a lady who just broke her hip, and is looking at the end of her life coming on fast.
They at least have had lives.
Things can be worse. I tell myself. Things can always be worse. I have four dollars in my bank account. To me, that’s pretty damn worse. I live easily enough on my $600.00 a month. Six hundred dollars is a lot of money to me.
But I read the menus at the most expensive restaurants in town and wonder if I had it if I’d even go. I like bland food and I don’t drink.
I wanted a three-hundred-dollar hairbrush. Because I’m an idiot. I ended up buying an Eight Dollar CONAIR at Walmart. It’ll do.
I “paint” when I can afford canvas boards. I like to think I write. No one is interested. Why would they be? Why do I have to want these things? Why do I have to feel bad, and ashamed over EVERYING STUPID FUCKING THING I CAN’T DO OR HAVE?!
Why do I have to feel social and intellectual shame because I can’t get into Oxford? WHO gets into OXFORD? Nobody in my family. Not the grades, even though everyone else in my immediate family was an AP student.
They still couldn’t have gone to an Ivy League-type school. My mother tries to comfort my pointless despair by saying, “Well, you are in a group with %98 of society.” Great, mediocrity on top of misery.
I have never been in a relationship. I no longer want one. Bit by Bit. All my dreams have faded away. Faded away with the ugliness of reality; poverty, physical unattractiveness, emotional despair, prickling fear and isolation born of childhood trauma, and who knows, my synapses.
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Unisolation only helps a little. I don’t like people and they don’t like me. I have become quite the Misery Guts and I just don’t care to foist myself on the unsuspecting anymore. If I publish this screed, I’ll put a disclaimer on it. Beware, Bitching, and Moaning.
I use a kick-start of Could Be Worse to try and even things out. The news is on. Some ass-hat got a gun and shot people at a music festival. That’s two people who joined friends and strangers to listen to music and died. Ain’t that America, For You And Me? Duck For Cover!
Shooter is in court. You know, I’m OK with the Death Penalty. If you’ve killed someone, snuffed out their life, and it wasn’t say a self-defense situation, maybe you forfeit your own. No, I don’t want a discussion on The Death Penalty. We’re all under a death penalty. It’s what comes before it that matters.
Mine matters very little and next to nothing has come before. I read a snippet online, man says we have to stop using the word VERY. Oh, Fuck You With Bells On.
More news. A neighbor kills four people because an eighteen-year-old with mental/intellectual disabilities “exposed himself to the shooter’s young daughters.”
He said, ‘He Snapped.’ He has a face tattoo that says, SAVAGE. Then there are people who make my pathetic life look a little bit better.
Titanic submersible search ongoing. I wonder if it will turn out to have been a hoax to make a plot for a movie. Pretty high risk for literary material.
Good God people. Going to those depths is as dangerous as going into space. If you have to sign a waiver that mentions DEATH three times. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
Me, I’m hoping we get into a car accident. I’m an organ donor. My organs would do a lot of good individually, whereas they have been pretty nigh worthless in one human skin sack.
I mean, nothing. Suffering, stress, humiliation, despair. Few opportunities, combined with a high enough level of awareness that I comprehend just how screwed up and screwed I am. Abject poverty. Scatty-tense emotional state. Intractable despair. A body that elicits nasty comments, tight-lipped nursing, and semi-hidden, open slam photography, straight to Meme Town.
I can’t work. I can’t love. I keep to myself and try to use as little electricity, water, air, and general resources as I can. I also stay out of other people’s way, trying to take up as little space as possible.
So much of my life can be measured in an inverse ratio. What I am not. What I don’t have. What I can’t do. Perhaps it seems significant because of the over-saturated, greedy, blinding plethora of STUFF and OPPORTUNITIES the Western World I live in offers.
Yeah, no. I have had a stupid, stupid life. It might be drawing to a close anyhow. I am starting to exhibit signs of Dementia. You know, that might be a study in itself. If you’ve had a pointless, miserable existence, maybe losing track of it and forgetting all about it, the life I have and have not had, will be a good thing…
Think I’ll go take a shower. You have one too. We can all just take a shower and start fresh. Even if we don’t start anything. I’m trying to stave off walking around, disheveled in the middle of the night on the Freeway.
Not gonna happen. No bus fare. No stops near I 90. But my God the inclination… Just such a stupid stupid, Very Stupid Life.
Post Shower. House cleaning, water plants, paint dingus, clean cat bowls, open windows air house, do laundry…
You know, EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE when it comes to the Perception of Havingness versus feeling Ripped Off in LIFE. At Least, some things are. I mean, I Am In A House and Have Medicaid.
There are good people fleeing terrifying circumstances, walking THOUSANDS of miles to get to America to be able to have even a smidge of that. There are desperate people in Africa being loaded onto boats by unscrupulous criminals who rob them of everything they have to pack them cheek to jowl on unseaworthy death traps, promising them opportunities in Europe or the Americas that don’t exist where they come from.
Not everyone, I know. There are millionaires in Africa and people with nice lives, nice homes, and happy families that travel internationally for fun there, too. I’m just talking about what I can’t complain about. Running water, electricity, etc,.
You know, if we have a global, lights-out Zombie Apocalypse type event on earth, poor people. I mean seriously poor, living hand to mouth on the streets people will probably fare better than those of us who have gotten soft-used to modern conveniences and relative ease in our lives.
My easy isn’t great. Reading a local Be Here Now city and county what’s up magazine and end up being more pissed off. Woman working as an artist has a lake home and spends time with friends at another lake, out of state, over seas. In Italy, Seychelles, Tahiti… (Exaggerating).
Nothing like reading about young, attractive, mentally stable people living the life you want to make the house work all the more. I don’t know. House work doesn’t bother me much but I’m not an OCD daily vacuumer.
Our family used to have a lake cabin. A little four-room, built by hand, cinder block affair with say twenty-five feet of high bank frontage. They got the land for pennies when it was a chuck of uneven hillside at the end of dirt road out in Nowhereville, while the rich people were taking vacations in Europe in those TWA years.
A long-gone relative who owned the lake property couldn’t understand how the children and grandchildren would “share” after they were gone and it got sold. It’s a nine-hundred-thousand dollar property with two stories and off-street parking now. Someone else’s life.
She was probably right. Mess of cousins with Happy Fifties Lake House Memories and who owns the property full time now resentment might have occurred. One by one they drive out and look at “what used to be.”
Relative. These people can drive out and look. I can drive. There is no bus stop close to “Bet You Wish You Lived Here Road. And like I said, no money. Not even bus fare. It does make me wonder. Is it better to have loved and lost? Maybe that’s worse. Longing for what used to be. To have had a taste and know you can never have it again.
Relative. Very, how would you like to live in Darfur? Innocent people having their lives measured in short years, months, and weeks as another band of angry armed delusional men determined to have what they want and Kill all the People God Wants them to kill moves through.
Just not enough misery in the world? Father’s Day is finally over. Hallmark Card Commercials. What to buy Dad for His Day ads from hardware stores, steak clubs, and sports memorabilia outlets. All I can think of is my mother’s perverted father, as I made his meals, did his laundry, gave him medication, cleaned up his urine, feces, and God knows what off the furniture, floors, walls, and ceiling (YES CEILING! YOU TELL ME!) for over a decade.
Him leering it me and throwing creepy, smiling glances during scenes of intimacy on the old Fifties Western TV shows I had to sit through. Get up, do laundry. (Take him to Dr. apps. Mom met us there after leaving work). Hair cuts. Picking him up off the floor when he fell. The nasty, questioning looks from the First Responders when we couldn’t lift him any more…
Guess how much I made. Fifty bucks a month. I’m Rich. I’m Rich. I’m Socially Secure!
Darfur. Asian Child Sex Tourism. Children in America who bought Hallmark cards or made their own for fathers who come in at night and express their “love and appreciation” with incest. Been there, done that.
Relative. My life IS depressing and Angst filled so my mental and emotional condition makes sense at least. That it has resulted in poverty, thwarted opportunities, zero intimacy, and isolation is par for the course o’ life, I think. What must it be to have not had a shit life and still suffer from mental illness? Or better (worse) yet. What would it be like to “Have Everything” you could ever want in life and still feel like shit?
When rich, famous, talented, successful people with loving families and all the comforts of life feel soul-gnawing pain and suicidal depths of despair. That must be a nightmare. Takes a really skilled empathetic therapist to look at that and not feel smucky about it. The Human Condition, when all is well, it can still be awful.
I don’t know. Can not wanting anything really be the answer? Buddist monks work at not wanting anything but Being to attain the highest state of transcendent existence. Most of them have all there basic needs met and live a comfortably sequestered life.
Nirvana. I looked it up. Sounds like a vacation. Turning the WORLD OFF. Not gonna work for me. Sounds kind of stupid. I mean, you’re frigging here, if you don’t want to be here, have my life. I have not really been here since I was fourteen.
Zoosadism, child molestation, famine, disease, religious bigotry, straight-up bigotry, homophobia, babies with cancer, environmental collapse, and political upheaval. Who wants to turn that on? And Buddhists have been trying to remove themselves from the world before it was a screeching metallic, 24/7, over-populated, micro-plastic absorbing, greed-a-polooza, worldwide dystopian dred match.
Imagine just trying to meditate away the setting sun, the sound of cart horses jingling and clip-clopping on packed dirt, the smell of steeping tea, the feel of rough-hewn fabric and dusty wooden platforms on your skin, and the awareness of your fellow monks trying to shut out these same things as he ambient temperature in the room drops.
GOP turning Fascist with a capital F, women and girls increasingly bleak outlook in Afghanistan, Israel and Palestinian fighting, that hair-brained ignoramus throwing our whole nation under the bus to protect his fragile ego…
No, I’m not willing to shut it out. Too many dangerous things happening in the world to turn it off off. That is probably part of it, but I don’t think I’d be willing to not care if I am shot dead by my angry neighbor with the TRUMP flag hoisted in front of his house ALL YEAR ROUND SINCE 2016… Jesus, Carl, You Can Have Him!
Not as depressed now. Scared. Pissed off. If there is anything that will make me feel better about MY life, it is seeing examples of lives I Don’t Want.
Least I got a shower.
