Hopelessness

TW: Suicidal ideation/attempts, Self-harm

This will be a doozy, so buckle up and proceed with caution. This is not a feel good post.

Out of all the heavier topics I want to write about, this one hurts the most by far. When I think about all the struggles I’ve been through, my strongest memories are when hopelessness swallowed me whole. It’s unbelievably excruciating. In my mind, the human experience and hope are inextricably attached at the hip. When hope dies, life loses meaning.

I lived with depression and anxiety for a long time before falling into the void that hopelessness is. And it happened gradually. I was in a somewhat ignorant, limbo state about my mental and emotional health issues until I was 24. I didn’t know that I was depressed up until that point. My understanding of mental health started from basically nothing. The self-awareness I gained was a double-edged sword. Still is. For the rest of my 20s, it was “death” by a million cuts. The cocktail of misery I was drowning in was a delightful mix of things; I felt lonely, powerless, broken, and crushed by the weight of existing as me. I declared myself a complete and utter failure. I told myself I couldn’t be fixed by me or anyone else. Some days I was spared and only felt defeat. But some nights I was so overwhelmed by the need to not exist anymore that I could hardly think. It was so exhausting and I would spiral at the drop of a hat.

It’s also extremely isolating. To an extent, I was open about it with my therapist and a couple of friends I trusted. That only seemed to reinforce what I felt, though. They tried to be helpful yet I felt beyond help. Their words and efforts unfortunately backfired and served to remind me of how bleak everything was.

I’m pretty amazed I didn’t try to kill myself more. For whatever reason (which I’m grateful for now) I started out only wishing I could die for a couple of years. I wanted to disappear and be free from my suffering. It wasn’t until 2.5 years ago that the lightbulb turned on; I could do it myself. I won’t go into depth about it, but I made 2 serious attempts on my life. I planned and fantasized about it hundreds of times more. Some times I committed only to harming myself. Again and again, the culprit was always a lack of hope. I could influence my life in a lot of little ways to ease my poor mood on a given day, or reach out to a friend to feel less lonely for even a couple hours. But hopelessness? The certainty that life will never ever get better? By definition it does not give you options. That’s why it was so painful to experience every single time. The only solution I could find was to stop existing. I didn’t want to hurt anyone with my passing and I was so concerned that I wouldn’t make a successful attempt. That I would be saved or only injured before I could finally escape my bottomless suffering.

I am hopeful (ayyy) that I’ve put that feeling behind me. The driving thought was always “Nothing and no one can fix me, therefore why live at all”. While I still think I could use some “fixing” as it were, nothing about that is beyond my or anyone else’s reach. The story around my deficiencies and struggles has changed enough that I haven’t felt suicidal in a good 2 months. That was my everyday state for over 2 years, full of both passive and active thoughts.