Takamagahara
Seeker Of Heaven
- Aug 8, 2023
- 142
I have personalized notes to send to specific people in my life, but if it's okay with all of you, I'd like to get a little bit of feedback or a review of the generic note I'll be putting up. Writing was one of the few skills I had that I felt really confident in, but I still wanted to make sure that everything sounded clearly enough.
I'm not going to CTB yet so this isn't a goodbye thread, but I'm absolutely committed to doing it this month and I'm a perfectionist so I get picky about stuff like this. I mostly want to make sure I stated my motives clearly and consistently, even if the pro-lifers probably won't understand what it's like to have lived like this.
It's quite long, almost 2000 words, so I've spoiler tagged it. Thanks for taking the time to read this and letting me know your thoughts.
I'm not going to CTB yet so this isn't a goodbye thread, but I'm absolutely committed to doing it this month and I'm a perfectionist so I get picky about stuff like this. I mostly want to make sure I stated my motives clearly and consistently, even if the pro-lifers probably won't understand what it's like to have lived like this.
It's quite long, almost 2000 words, so I've spoiler tagged it. Thanks for taking the time to read this and letting me know your thoughts.
Thank you for taking the time to read my final thoughts. Just to be upfront with all of you, this is a suicide note; if you are reading this, it means that I have passed away. If you are not comfortable with such topics, I advise you to close this page now before you run the risk of thoroughly ruining your day.
I had wondered if I should write this at all. After all, I'm dead. It shouldn't matter to me if I give people closure. But after thinking about it, I decided that in the end, I do not want anyone to see what happened to me and wonder "Why did he do it?" I don't want people to think that this was an impulse decision or to vapidly blame a nebulous and unknowable 'mental illness' that I did not have. My self-inflicted death was a long time coming, as inevitable as gravity–a product of choices and circumstances that have brought me to the end of my life as surely as the sun is brought to the sky. And perhaps someone reading this will understand the things that I speak of and find their own path towards the end of their pain, wherever that may be.
Only a few of my closest friends could have known how I've been barely hanging on, because opening up about thoughts like these in any level of significant detail–even to close friends–is usually nothing more than an invitation to be discarded for negativity. I am so sorry to all those who have been in my corner urging me on in life; I can only hope you eventually find it in yourself to forgive me. When every day is inundated with a ceaseless and voracious emptiness, I can no longer find it within myself to ask for another. People say that I will get through it; that it gets better. Then when? Next week? Three years from now? Thirty years from now? Have you any idea how much I've endured simply to arrive at today? The past has been dismal, the present feels unbearable, and the future will definitely and absolutely be much, much worse. Every path before me stretches out into an unending gray wasteland, and forcing me to take even another step with not even the faintest sliver of hope feels like an act of unrelenting cruelty.
Thankfully, I am no longer capable of thinking or feeling. I have been enduring a silent torture for a long, long time, and for the very first time in my life, I no longer have to be afraid of it. I will have died as I lived: as a failure. I failed as a son. I failed as a friend. I failed as a romantic partner. I failed as a musician. I failed as a writer. Ultimately, I have failed as a person, unable to even resemble someone of any merit or worth. The weight of my devastating ineptitude has brought my life crumbling down around me and left me alone amidst the rubble. If there is one thing I am grateful for, it's that my own misbegotten actions have ensured that the people I care about have already fully adjusted to a life and a routine without me, and so I can rest confidently knowing that they will feel no harm from my passing. My absence shall not leave any lingering void or painful hollowness. It is a truly rare thing among the suicidal to be able to move on with so strong a re-assurance that none will be affected in the short or the long term.
Since I was very young, I was always at least subconsciously aware of the fact that I had no place in this world or with its people. The values and languages of those normal, happy, and functional people who held fervent, in-born desires to see the next day were so unknowable to me that from the start, it never felt like we would ever achieve a mutual understanding. Isolation and alienation were my constant companions, no matter how well-fitted the mask I wore to fit in with everyone else who seemed so eager to experience life. I could not understand the banalities of their lives, the systems they soaked themselves in without seeming to understand why they did so. What was it that they foresaw in their futures that made them so eager to move forward? From the beginning, my future has always felt bleak. I cannot understand.
Despite this, the Sisyphean nature of the human condition has always driven me to seek some place of belonging—to find a group of people to call home. With toil and struggle, there were times where I had been blessed to find such people who managed to alleviate my feelings of alienation; those who could understand me and whom I could understand in turn. Those who wished to be with me just as much as I wished to be with them. Social chemistry is a deceptively simple thing, yet so wholly necessary to maintaining social groups. It is not enough to simply be loved—you must also be able to instinctively understand the other people enough to love them in turn. A mutual understanding that is rare and precious and all too easily broken.
Each and every time, I bore witness to my newly found family breaking apart. Sometimes the causes were mundane–people losing interest in one another or moving away. Sometimes it was tragic–a suicide, an overdose, a drunk driver. Some broke apart for reasons I can only guess at. But either way, I have experienced being the sole survivor of my precious family countless, innumerable times.
A common and easily-conquered tale for others, perhaps, but for me, these collapses of my most beloved social groups were more than just a series of events. The consistency and constancy of these irreparable fractures were guarantees; an immutable pattern that served as an unavoidable reminder of my own alienation. I would never find the people to whom I could belong. I would never find the people who loved me as much as I loved them. No matter how tightly I might cling to them, they would always leave or discard me, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
At random, arbitrary points in time, they would evaluate their lives, and I would always be deemed unworthy of keeping. They would move on to a better life without me, or kill themselves without a second thought of me. They would forget me and all that we had been to one another. And I would be left alone, less than I was before; less than I had already been reduced to.
In time, I would discover the timeless paradox I had trapped myself in. Of course, I was aware that I was the common denominator. Whether I was truly at fault or not, I knew enough to recognize that something fundamental about my very existence was toxic to the people I cared for, even if I tried to avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy by always concealing and hiding my doubts and insecurities. If I chose to be myself, to behave in a way where I was comfortable within my own skin, then people invariably discard me. If I act the way I believe they want me to act, they are more than happy to keep me around so long as I maintain the act, even as my inability to become the mask I wore fatigued my soul to exhaustion.
My truest wish has always been something so simple, yet so utterly impossible to achieve: to love and be loved without needing to wear a mask. And each time I believed that I had found such people, I would always, always be proven wrong. They would move on. They would abandon me. They would replace me. I would be left surrounded by contemptuous and hateful mirrors, all demanding to know why I had failed once again.
In lieu of talent, skill, intellect, and charisma, the only thing I had to offer to the people I felt a connection to was love: unconditional loyalty and devotion. Reliability, reassurance, and effort. But if they did not want even that, then what value remained in me as a person? Am I not utterly worthless? Doesn't the course of my life provide ample proof that I have nothing to offer, no value worth keeping?
And so did I always find myself back where I started. The people who loved me were too different from me for me to reciprocate their love, and the people I loved ultimately wanted nothing to do with me, in one way or another.
I've been careless with my heart and it's given me nothing but a cemetery full of dead futures that will never be lived, and grief with nowhere to go.
Thus did I arrive here, at the terminus.
To my childhood self: I'm sorry that I never figured it out. Every single one of them lied; things never became any better. There is nowhere for us to go but away. But by fully realizing that and terminating the source of our problems—ourselves— we've finally set ourselves free.
I had wondered if I should write this at all. After all, I'm dead. It shouldn't matter to me if I give people closure. But after thinking about it, I decided that in the end, I do not want anyone to see what happened to me and wonder "Why did he do it?" I don't want people to think that this was an impulse decision or to vapidly blame a nebulous and unknowable 'mental illness' that I did not have. My self-inflicted death was a long time coming, as inevitable as gravity–a product of choices and circumstances that have brought me to the end of my life as surely as the sun is brought to the sky. And perhaps someone reading this will understand the things that I speak of and find their own path towards the end of their pain, wherever that may be.
Only a few of my closest friends could have known how I've been barely hanging on, because opening up about thoughts like these in any level of significant detail–even to close friends–is usually nothing more than an invitation to be discarded for negativity. I am so sorry to all those who have been in my corner urging me on in life; I can only hope you eventually find it in yourself to forgive me. When every day is inundated with a ceaseless and voracious emptiness, I can no longer find it within myself to ask for another. People say that I will get through it; that it gets better. Then when? Next week? Three years from now? Thirty years from now? Have you any idea how much I've endured simply to arrive at today? The past has been dismal, the present feels unbearable, and the future will definitely and absolutely be much, much worse. Every path before me stretches out into an unending gray wasteland, and forcing me to take even another step with not even the faintest sliver of hope feels like an act of unrelenting cruelty.
Thankfully, I am no longer capable of thinking or feeling. I have been enduring a silent torture for a long, long time, and for the very first time in my life, I no longer have to be afraid of it. I will have died as I lived: as a failure. I failed as a son. I failed as a friend. I failed as a romantic partner. I failed as a musician. I failed as a writer. Ultimately, I have failed as a person, unable to even resemble someone of any merit or worth. The weight of my devastating ineptitude has brought my life crumbling down around me and left me alone amidst the rubble. If there is one thing I am grateful for, it's that my own misbegotten actions have ensured that the people I care about have already fully adjusted to a life and a routine without me, and so I can rest confidently knowing that they will feel no harm from my passing. My absence shall not leave any lingering void or painful hollowness. It is a truly rare thing among the suicidal to be able to move on with so strong a re-assurance that none will be affected in the short or the long term.
Since I was very young, I was always at least subconsciously aware of the fact that I had no place in this world or with its people. The values and languages of those normal, happy, and functional people who held fervent, in-born desires to see the next day were so unknowable to me that from the start, it never felt like we would ever achieve a mutual understanding. Isolation and alienation were my constant companions, no matter how well-fitted the mask I wore to fit in with everyone else who seemed so eager to experience life. I could not understand the banalities of their lives, the systems they soaked themselves in without seeming to understand why they did so. What was it that they foresaw in their futures that made them so eager to move forward? From the beginning, my future has always felt bleak. I cannot understand.
Despite this, the Sisyphean nature of the human condition has always driven me to seek some place of belonging—to find a group of people to call home. With toil and struggle, there were times where I had been blessed to find such people who managed to alleviate my feelings of alienation; those who could understand me and whom I could understand in turn. Those who wished to be with me just as much as I wished to be with them. Social chemistry is a deceptively simple thing, yet so wholly necessary to maintaining social groups. It is not enough to simply be loved—you must also be able to instinctively understand the other people enough to love them in turn. A mutual understanding that is rare and precious and all too easily broken.
Each and every time, I bore witness to my newly found family breaking apart. Sometimes the causes were mundane–people losing interest in one another or moving away. Sometimes it was tragic–a suicide, an overdose, a drunk driver. Some broke apart for reasons I can only guess at. But either way, I have experienced being the sole survivor of my precious family countless, innumerable times.
A common and easily-conquered tale for others, perhaps, but for me, these collapses of my most beloved social groups were more than just a series of events. The consistency and constancy of these irreparable fractures were guarantees; an immutable pattern that served as an unavoidable reminder of my own alienation. I would never find the people to whom I could belong. I would never find the people who loved me as much as I loved them. No matter how tightly I might cling to them, they would always leave or discard me, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
At random, arbitrary points in time, they would evaluate their lives, and I would always be deemed unworthy of keeping. They would move on to a better life without me, or kill themselves without a second thought of me. They would forget me and all that we had been to one another. And I would be left alone, less than I was before; less than I had already been reduced to.
In time, I would discover the timeless paradox I had trapped myself in. Of course, I was aware that I was the common denominator. Whether I was truly at fault or not, I knew enough to recognize that something fundamental about my very existence was toxic to the people I cared for, even if I tried to avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy by always concealing and hiding my doubts and insecurities. If I chose to be myself, to behave in a way where I was comfortable within my own skin, then people invariably discard me. If I act the way I believe they want me to act, they are more than happy to keep me around so long as I maintain the act, even as my inability to become the mask I wore fatigued my soul to exhaustion.
My truest wish has always been something so simple, yet so utterly impossible to achieve: to love and be loved without needing to wear a mask. And each time I believed that I had found such people, I would always, always be proven wrong. They would move on. They would abandon me. They would replace me. I would be left surrounded by contemptuous and hateful mirrors, all demanding to know why I had failed once again.
In lieu of talent, skill, intellect, and charisma, the only thing I had to offer to the people I felt a connection to was love: unconditional loyalty and devotion. Reliability, reassurance, and effort. But if they did not want even that, then what value remained in me as a person? Am I not utterly worthless? Doesn't the course of my life provide ample proof that I have nothing to offer, no value worth keeping?
And so did I always find myself back where I started. The people who loved me were too different from me for me to reciprocate their love, and the people I loved ultimately wanted nothing to do with me, in one way or another.
I've been careless with my heart and it's given me nothing but a cemetery full of dead futures that will never be lived, and grief with nowhere to go.
Thus did I arrive here, at the terminus.
To my childhood self: I'm sorry that I never figured it out. Every single one of them lied; things never became any better. There is nowhere for us to go but away. But by fully realizing that and terminating the source of our problems—ourselves— we've finally set ourselves free.
