Damned

About 18 months ago, I was telling someone that everything always works out for the best.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I don’t believe in damnation, but yesterday I thought:

I have been damned and Hell is on Earth, right inside my head.

My mother’s birthday would have been tomorrow.  She died on my birthday 7 years ago.  My birthday is next month.

I can’t relax.

I feel terrible about everything, but every moment I’m not working, I feel guilty in addition to feeling terrible about everything.  But, I don’t have anything to look forward to when I’m done working except for the guilty feeling about not working.    This makes me not want to work, so frequently I’m irresponsibly idle and feeling just horrible about it.

My only respite from hell is sleep, so my day often becomes a long string of little activities meant to fill up time, none of which are productive, and none of which are particularly fun or noteworthy.

I’m bored and feel awful all the time.

There is nothing to look forward to.  All my days are the same.  There is no such thing as a week or weekend.  Two hours from now or two years from now, everything will be just like this.  I don’t enjoy anything enough to offset the pain I feel the rest of the time.  There are no parties.  There are no trips.  There are no surprises.  There are no prospects for new friends.  I live in a room.  It’s better than living under a bridge, but I’m the only one here.  Under the bridge, I had the traffic.

My malfunction is permanent because I refuse to do anything about it.

A person in my situation should fill his thoughts with positive information from the outside until his own thoughts are transformed.  I don’t know if my father ever had a negative-thinking period in his life, but he would probably suggest reading inspirational books, or listening to inspirational recordings.

If I listen to Zig Ziglar telling me how wondering things will be if I just expect and start behaving wonderfully, then my first thought will be about my malfunction and how different I am from that ideal.

My malfunction is that I won’t do anything about this.

I’ve written before that my mind is split up into factions.  In my thoughts, I have always addressed myself in plural terms, “We should get something to eat.”  This has been going on since I was a little kid.  I wonder if the factions were there then, or if I created them by referring to myself this way.

Some of the groups in my head know what’s going on, that I’m completely fucking up my life, and they know what I should do to get things in order, but they’re out-voted by the negative factions that are heartened that perhaps we’re finally closer to the end than from the beginning.  That it’s stupid to turn back now for a long, mildly hard, irritatingly boring journey to something called “peace” — which is not joy, or excitement, or happiness, or fulfillment.  The journey to the end is shorter, and likely to be quite painful, which is somewhat exciting.  At least the end is the end.

So we have filibuster.  The result is that the course is set for hell, but we’re moving slowly… just festering slowing (which is more like rotting, I think).  We’re like beige paint drying into a darker beige.

I’m constantly blogging in my head.  Every idle second is filled up by words trying to explain how terrible my thinking is, how bad I am, and how awful things are becoming.  But, idle seconds are those between debates between the factions, a large coalition calling for termination of the program.  I’d like to kill myself right now, but I won’t, and that’s pure torture.  Here is the one and only thing that my brain voted as relief (or at least the end) and it’s been vetoed.  That’s just fucked.  So, we spend a lot of time trying to get around the veto.

A good suicide program is:

1. Completely idiot-proof.  A fucked up suicide leads to a worse life.
2. Isolated.  The world is full of horror stories where a family member witnesses the aftermath.
3. No residue.  The body should not be found next to something dangerous.
4. Results in death.  See #1.