Rounded Apathy
Longing to return to stardust
- Aug 8, 2022
- 772
Let's see if my battery survives this one...not sure what constitutes needing a TW but there are likely a few in here. Dunno what they'd be called but please use your own judgement if you're sensitive. This this ended up so fucking long that I honestly don't imagine anyone will read the entire thing anyway...
Not really sure how to write this thing, but hello to anyone out there reading this. I found my way to this site by way of another similar yet quite different one which was useful at first, mainly in that I was able to externalize some struggles, but I found the community element very sparse. There are just a few very active users who post regularly, commenting is inconsistent, and I soon found myself hurting for one of the core things there that I do in "real life". Anyway, I guess I'll try my hand at laying out what things have happened that have all combined to lead me to the here and now, being on this site for this reason and writing about it. I've been wanting to get these things out in a place where I can look at them again as sometimes I get so wrapped up in the feelings I forget to take stock of the fact there are (in my opinion, at least!) some decent reasons behind them. I guess I'll tell the story in chronological order of a combination of the things themselves and when they began to turn me toward demise, as they're not necessarily simultaneous. Oh, and for reference I'm a 32 year-old Canadian.
Well, the first thing was most likely my best friend dying of suicide when we were 26, and I was living on the other side of the world. He'd suffered with a shoulder injury for years which he was waiting forever to have addressed (re: Canadian healthcare - this will come up again). but he managed for the most part - the turning point was the surgery. It didn't exactly go right, and I never found out the full extent of the issues during and after as we only talked twice after he had it; once not long after, and once a few days before he left. I knew things were off but couldn't get a hold of him. Friends in common knew but didn't know just how bad, or exactly where he was at the time. No one could just go to him, it seemed. Then he was gone. I became an automaton when hearing the news and have a stark memory of being able to answer the good old, now-hated question "how are you?". I spontaneously became a vegan. I felt bad about eating because for the most part things had to die for me to live. I felt there was this awful, innately evil aspect woven into existence itself and it took a very long time to learn to live with that.
I was flown home some months later for a memorial on the generosity of two friends who paid my travel expenses and the week was a blur, in no small part due to the jet lag. This is a period when I consider most of my final, older high school friendships to have died or begun to do so. Everyone knew the reason I was back, and the utter lack of support immediately after my departure was dumbfounding (this also happened with my family, but I didn't choose them and was just another example for them to show their deficiencies, so whatever). There were five old friends, three of whom I didn't hear from for I don't remember how long after my visit, one of whom sort of reached out nearly half a year later, and one of whom, well...you'll see.
I survived this trauma mainly due to not dealing with it, which was inherent given where I was and that I was occupied in life, generally satisfied otherwise, though I wanted to leave the country (in Asia) I was then living in. I also was seeing someone casually which absolutely was useful, though I was at an impasse; I wanted to become more serious in the relationship but expected my needing to gtfo of that place would mean its end, as my dating partner was from there. Fortunately when I finally floated the subject it seemed we were on the same page, so it was a double win; getting serious and getting out! Hooray. Just had to wait many more months for them to arrange all the things before leaving long term, given being entrenched and all. Fine with me - with an exit date in sight, I could continue making the most of things and even worked to improve them a bit. Branched out in work more and had some of the most fulfilling professional, and dare I say personal, experiences still to this day.
So then that one friend. When I was back, she'd tried to forcefully get me to talk about the circumstances of my friend's demise, which I honestly still never really found out. I mean, I don't think she knew it was a suicide, but whatever. I was at her place and she tries to get it out of me, I uncomfortably say I don't wanna get into it, which is clearly unsatisfactory; thankfully her partner was there and got it and made her drop it. Well, she decides to finally come visit me, and I'm all "sure it'll be great". But what happens? The second day of a multi-day trip I had organized myself and specifically held off on taking myself so she could join, she all of a sudden shoves the topic back in my face while there's no one around at our hostel. What the fuck. Anyway I tried not to let that totally ruin the trip (her generally shitty travel companion demeanour took care of the rest of that), but we never recovered from that one (ie. I wrote to her telling her how not okay it was and she never replied, over three years later, hah).
So not long after that I started noticing some blood on the toilet paper after I'd take a crap. Never a good sign, right? but it would happen once or maybe twice a year in my life for a day or two, never really knew why, so I just left it be. But it didn't stop. Weeks, then months. I was getting worried but I didn't have health insurance anymore as I was planning to leave. I was also terrified of doctors who couldn't speak English and had a bad reputation for incompetency examining my ass. But eventually I decided well, I'm about to travel around Asia where this could go even more wrong, so I better at least get looked at before I go. This was year's-end, so I had to plan this for the new year (as that's the one time everything shuts down there). My partner was away for this time so I decided to take a little trip myself.
Dec. 30, 2017 may have been the last day I was really alive. I had been in my destination for a while and took a lovely ferry over to this quaint little rural island and just walked around amid the beaches, cats, and citrus plantations. It was beautiful. I'd had to leave the hostel early that morning to catch the ferry, so I hadn't taken my #2, and it didn't happen that night. Whatever, as a kid I only went every few days (though it was daily for many years at this point), so I wasn't worried.
The next day...jeez, I just froze up thinking about and am needing some time to write. Phew. It was like I simply shat out a handful of broken glass. The amount of blood was horrifying. The pain continued, though differently, and I had to check out and move to another hostel - I could barely a few minutes without keeling over. But somehow I managed, and called my partner to say...something was very wrong. 2018 came, and it happened again. Then the next day. And the next. Every day feeling like passing a razorblade into the toilet, and for hours after, as if a hot soldering iron had been left on inside me. After getting back and waiting several more days for things to reopen post-new year, I made it to a clinic which did an unnecessarily invasive and painful exam which ascertained I had, not some kind of exploded hemorrhoid which I'd presumed, but an anal fissure. What..?
No amount of explanation can make someone understand this, other than the analogies I've given. I eventually found a support forum where it was described by other sufferers in some maybe illustrative "worse than" ways, against other things they'd endured; two of my favourites were worse than being shot and adult male circumcision, and worse than cancer involving chemo, double mastectomy, and life-threatening illness hospitalizations.
Needless to say I began to lose it. I didn't want to eat cause I'd have to shit. But if I didn't eat my shits were these horrible balls of dark matter that paradoxically bled less but hurt more. How much to eat, when, what? It was in this period when, for the first time, I thought "if this doesn't stop, I don't know how I can continue living". And of course we just pressed on with our plans to travel. God I don't know how I did that. I must have really wanted to get tf out of there.
I spent most of the early time bedridden, as for the first half day I couldn't walk. Evenings I came alive and did whatever I could. Saw another doc abroad, learned most conservative treatment options, at least those done in the west, were unavailable and the only option was surgery. Fuck that. I came across the trick of using a warm water tub as a toilet to relax the muscles which I started doing to some benefit, but in the end what I believe "cured" me was a bout of traveller's diarrhea which turned my stools to mush. Never had I been so happy to be sick. Two months of the excruciating But oddly, it didn't really stop. I wasn't going to the bathroom randomly but as soon as I woke up I'd have to go, then again after breakfast, always ragged and mushy. Sometimes there'd be a third one a bit later on. (This ended up continuing for over a year and no one could identify any particular cause, tests and stool samples be damned. But I'm jumping ahead).
Anyway all this poopin' was still better than feeling like I'd die every time I was on the toilet, or would rather, so I was livin' it up. Till my partner hit some financial snags on our trip, we end up heading back to where we were to start for a while, and then completely out of nowhere, I'm suddenly being broken up with. Like, absolutely unexpected. I'd been thinking "great, we traveled together without murdering eachother, what a milestone; I'm so excited for the next chapter, maybe Europe then settling in a place we like,together". Naaahh. It's just fucking over. So having absolutely no idea what to do, some of those generous friends again called me back and would help put me up for a couple of months. Problem with that is suddenly I'm facing the demons of my dearly departing friend as I'm in that town for more than three days. I'm seeing him everywhere, still shitting my guts out on the regular, wondering wtf is wrong now; fortunately I'm surrounded by social opportunities so I can often ignore these. Also crashing in a house with a video game I'd wanted to play forever and is very engrossing, so I kinda just entered that world for six weeks as best I could.
As summer ends I decide I'm just going to Europe myself because I am on autopilot and barely functional. Thoughts of dying creep up now and again, but I have things I wan't to do and accomplish so I will do and accomplish them. But just as the season is winding down, I notice...a ring. Inside my genitalia. Uhm. WHAT. This cannot be good. So on top of the poop tests I'm getting requisitioned by a patchwork of walk-in doctors as I don't have my own, I'm not getting this looked at. One thinks it's ringworm so gives me this cream. So I'm using it while visiting relatives here before going abroad again, and suddenly the skin is breaking. I now have an open, ring-shaped wound in/on my fucking hardware. Doc there thinks it's herpes. Cool. I quit the cream, eventually it calms down, but the ring is still there...and expanding. Is it going to ruin things? Is this fucking cancer? I don't know.
So once again I head into the world with this...thing wrong with my body. I have a decent time, visit a friend abroad, stay at a monastery, do a Workway...during which time I suddenly have this awful burning sensation when peeing. And my sides hurt. "Great", I think, "this is it. This fucking thing is killing me". But apparently it's just a UTI, so I'm laid up with both the infection and the meds unable to really carry my weight on this project, at which point I decide I need to stop and get some proper medical attention if possible. Luckily that one friend who contacted me six months after my bestie's passing is able to connect me with the family doc, so I head back at the end of 2018 to try and get fixed up.
After a nice time ringing in the new year with my better buddies, I'm once again waiting for the holiday schedules to end and, first day of 2019, realise that I do not want to be alive (bad time of year for me, it seems...). But now it's horrible fucking winter in my homeland meaning freezing, piles of snow, wretched wind, isolating, and worse I'm not with my friends in my uni town but the big impersonal city I grew up in where I only have this one friend, coincidentally not far. I tell him I'm not okay and need some interaction and support. I get absolutely none. The doctor runs a new battery of tests and nothing finds anything conclusive. I try a different cream to no effect. I'm still shitting super abnormally and physically feel there could be a repeat fissure often given the intensity of some movements (fun fact: they can be caused by many things, including both constipation and diarrhea!). My body is not well and no one knows what's happening, I'm horribly alone and isolated and the weather makes me feel like I'm in a prison in the house. As I go to bed every night I think I do not want to wake up to have to live another day of this. But it comes. And again. (Aaaand battery's giving out!)
Fortunately one of my two good pals invites me to visit and stay at their shared home in Central America which I jump at the opportunity to do. Fuck yes, get me out of this miserable season I have avoided for four years. I get sick again (of course), but I remember the feeling of wanting to be alive. I message my ex getting some closure, but not enough before the replies stop coming. Oh well, I do some volunteering, and have a continued okay time at life. But money's running out, and I get sick again - so bad I feel like I am in danger (shitting literal water now. Like, clear and everything. Yikes). So I quite and return again to my uni town. I get some short term work, make some new friends, am haunted by the demons even more now that I'm there twice as long as last time. But I'm engaged so stuff is pretty okay (and my bowel movements return to normal. Did the new pathogen force out some old one? Did I just need routine?), till the contract ends and my flatmate simultaneously is mostly gone. Bad times ensue. I buy a 3DS to fill the void which helps a bit. I decide to move out west because not another fucking winter but I am burnt out on travel and kinda poor. Set up another workaway to start and figure I'll figure the rest after it's over and I can see if I like it.
Good times working, bad times living alone in my (admittedly cozy) trailer on the family's lot in the middle of nowhere on the island. Literally do not see another person some entire days, sometimes more than one in a row. I just want some genuine connection of a kind that seems missing but I can't quite identify. Anyway, with the gig ending I get an option to house-sit for a family member's house in the city where I think I might move, so I say perfect, this'll let me suss out the place and maybe set up something. Hah, hah...
The only thing that happens is, as far as I can guess, being drugged at a restaurant. After getting the final closure I need from the ex, I'm up on the PC job hunting one night after a meal out, very tired, abnormally so...then I suddenly become aware that I'm in another room. Uh, HOLY FUCK, WHAT?! I'm freaking out, I feel so heavy, don't have control completely over my actions...honestly I still have flashbacks to all this and pretty bad PTSD about it, so I'll have to summarize in that the paramedics come, I freak out, the police come, I freak out, I want them to kill me but am afraid of them killing me, and in the end they drag me off to the hospital against my will, where they shoot me up with a bunch of sedatives and antipsychotics, and I spend the night fucking sedated before being shoved out the door the next day with a map and bus fare.
I do not know how I got back to the house from a place I didn't know in a city I had just got to. I don't remember. I slept for a day after that, the main family took me back to their island place at my request and asked if I would pet/house sit while they traveled. Which I do because what the fuck else can I do? No one at the hospital is accountable, no one figured out what happened, this is just an eternal mystery the scars from which I must live with the rest of my life. So once again I'm all alone, but with some animals, and every day I'm afraid something horribly fucking wrong will happen. I'm afraid the old cat will die. The dogs run off one day and I'm afraid they'll die. I'm afraid whatever happened to me will happen again and I'll die. It's fucking awful. Thankfully I managed to land a job back in the city before the cataclysm so I have some things to focus on in prepping for that, but most of every day is a nightmare. I also have a little pain and blood on the toilet one day so naturally fear the fucking worst with that. It's funny, I had barely thought of the fissure after it had gone, but just that bit made it all come rushing back. Luckily it wasn't serious. This time...
Oddly enough, during all of this the carnal part of me I felt was dead after losing my ex is reawakened one day I go to this cafe and see this lovely server. It was like waking up. It was so strange and incompatible with everything else going on. Anyhow the family comes back, we hang out a bit, I find some short term accommodation in the city and start my job. 2020 comes (for reference). I'm working part time with kids again and it's wholesome, living with another family, but I'm hanging on by a fucking thread still. One day I overhear the parents where I'm living talking about how I'm not doing enough to find exactly what I want to be doing. Lovely. They don't know what's going on AT ALL and how the fact that I've gotten this much together in this amount of time is an incredible achievement for me. I move elsewhere, go to a sweet contradance, have a great time, feeling like I'm finding my place here, decide I want to try and re-enter the world of dating so get back on a site...then the pandemic comes.
FUCKER this is a CONSTANT CYCLE of one step forward THREE FUCKING BACKWARD! I lose my job! No more events! No dating! I don't have an established social circle and the people I do know get busy, hole up, or some other thing! I'm renting shared space with an elderly couple so beyond the terror of this new pathogen I extra feel like I can't do anything because I don't want to make them die! Holy shit!!!
So. I hunker down for a few months then decide to return to my own province. Cause ya know, I or one of my (dwindling number of) good friends could apparently just drop dead all of a sudden, plus it'll be cheaper to live without work. I find some random house and plan to just live there a while before returning out west. It's a lonely fucking house but I make friends with the roommate I had last year, who's also coincidentally been driven back here. Just as well, since the firend I visited in CA is in town for a similar reason, but something is different about our dynamic. They just talk all the time. About themselves. I can only participate in commenting on what they say, talking about something external to us both, or forcing something about me, which quickly gets rerouted. I don't feel like me being in the conversation is necessary. It could be anyone, or a wall. Still better than what happens with the other of those two friends; I'd expressed interest in trying a cannabis product to calm my increasingly shattered nerves, something I've heard can help but I know nothing about. She does, so I put all my trust in her for a trial run. She brings over this chocolate bar and gives me a piece that contains...well, about 4-10 times the amount of THC a first time user should use (who is also underweight and reacts strongly to things generally), and zero CBD. I end up out of my mind and the effects last three fucking days. The one beneficial thing about this is my ability to notice, even during the episode, the similarity between this state and whatever led to the hospitalization, which is somewhat empowering despite the rest being horribly damaging. I did not want that kind of experience, I have residual anxiety from it even now, and this person never owned up to their fucking up in being responsible for what happened. It also led to a worsening of my vestibular (balance and dizziness) problem (also no medical insight there) to the point where even some minimally shaly camera work in movies or shows makes me uncomfortable. Great. The beginning of the end on that one.
I have a hard time securing a place to live where I'd just left, so I manage to get to stay a bit longer where I am, despite having to live with 20 year-olds. I try the local dating scene, but it's a joke. Winter comes, dammit. I have a few days where things don't feel quite right on the toilet, but nothing goes wrong. Until ten days into 2021, and I go on a date that leads nowhere. Except for, the next day, a new fissure. Yep. While not bad at first, over the next 2.5 weeks I spend on staycation with other friends in town, results in one even worse than the first. Like, I am in pain no matter what but when laying down it's bearable kind of pain. I can't stand for more than a few minutes. It lasts longer, over eight hours now. I see another horrid doctor who offers advice that conflicts with what the helpful people on the forum say. I consider other options, but everything will take forever because that's our system (Canada: free treatment if you can live long enough to get it!). Covid makes everything worse and terrifying.
TWO AND A HALF MONTHS LATER I manage to kick the fucking thing, and have this newfound joy, wow I can walk two blocks (or more!) without feeling like, again, I'm going to die or wish I would! The freedom! But then I have another one like a month and a half later lol. Not as bad and only a few weeks, but after recovery...something is different. I don't care this time. I'm exhausted. I'm increasingly fearful that any fucking day could be the day I rip open again. I hate eating breakfast because after that is the movement. I'm back to being paranoid about my food. It becomes clear that the drug-friend is either not the person they once were, or never was who I thought, or some combination. Summer is ending yet again, and there's still no work in this town. I can't afford to live anywhere that isn't a student house, and I'd really like to get my colorectal situation looked into, and all the doctors have continued to push back my shit into fall and are back in the stupid giant city I'm from. So...I move there instead of back west.
Fun times ensue: move for two months into a temp place via friend-of-a-friend only to find out upon arriving it recently had had a bedbug infestation (apparently gone up on the third floor where we are, but after a month, evidently not on the first floor!) and after living with them once in uni this was not a fucking welcome surprise at all. Finally see one doctor I'd been waiting for who absolutely violates my bodily autonomy and determines nothing, meaning the only outcome of the visit is that if I end up wanting/needing surgery I'm now in the system. Attempt dating again and am met with more lack of connections or shitty people when they do happen. Admitted I do find (shitty) work, do have a nice time reconnecting to certain areas from my youth that have nice memories, and end up moving to a decent place on the other side of town, but then I get another fissure. Yay. Get an internal exam from a doc in a different branch of specialization that doesn't show I have cancer in my lower bowel or anything else fucked up, See a different/ostensibly better doc who tells me the best things I can do are either more in the vein of complimentary therapy (ie. not free), or are such horrible procedures involving the (worsening) hemorrhoids that the pain would dwarf that of the fissures. Lovely.
I manage to kick it again but at this point am living in regular fear. Every fucking day I'm basically terrified until I do the deed, though some days it just happens right when I wake up which is alarming in its own right. Unless I don't feel anything even slightly uncomfortable during the process, which at this point is almost never, I'm pretty mentally checked out a long time even after getting off the toilet. I still can't find any pattern between eating habits and stool outcome. Despite all this I made another concerted effort at the dating scene and have had a handful of firsts, and one second, but nothing else. The one I thought had potential was too messed up from previous events to even continue as friends, once I helped psychoanalyze an unreadiness to even be dating. I have a couple more coming this week but honestly just want them cancelled on me because I expect they won't go anywhere. Oh, and the whole genital ring thing never really resolved; the initial one went away, but other ones would continue to show up and run their course. It's fucking creepy and makes me feel super unattractive. Plus the fissures. Beyond the fear they will get in the way of everything, how would I even go about introducing this topic? I feel like a fucking rotting container in a moderately young person's body and hate that when people see me they imagine I am well and healthy and blah blah. Oh, and a couple of months ago I just had this pain in the side of my head that never completely went away. It's minor enough now that I only feel it somewhat if I press fairly hard on the spot, but yeah. Cool.
Plus there's the whole other part of the familial sexual trauma (yeah, this actually happened years before everything but was only really an occasional annoyance till a couple of months ago). It wasn't assault, honestly I don't even know how to describe it. I just saw something I should not have been exposed to at a time in my life when that shit was not okay, and now being in this city means I've had to have more regular and direct contact and interaction with this person. It just to just come up occasionally in my mindscape, and now it's almost all the fucking time. So many people I see make me think of it. I feel so awful in so many ways even thinking/writing about it, though I know none of it is my fault, that my mind is just of this nature; it makes these awful associations which just get cemented. Especially when I have literally nothing to healthily distract me. It was about three months ago when this shit was all getting worse, and someone just made this gross comment in regard to this new interest I'd picked up, and it stuck. I thought about how every win I manage to score just gets fucking shot down and how this was such a prime fucking example, and it stuck. Now the image, the reprehension, the anger, self-loathing, disgust, shame, it's all just there all the time. If this is existence when not actually even close to any theoretical positive sexual situation I can't imagine what might happen were I to find myself in such a time.
My job of making and serving greenwashed food to rich people has become psychologically and physically intolerable and I'm going to either quit or try and take a med leave. I want to do something fulfilling that I'm good at and connects me to people but those kinds of things are usually volunteer work. Or I don't have some qualifications, or less than the plethora of other candidates. I'm afraid I'll start something and be waylaid by a fissure and will lose the job, or money I spend on a course or certification or whatever. And I don't have a lot of money. I randomly took up the hobby of craft cocktails but I don't even like to be drunk and it happens so easily cause I'm a lightweight and don't/can't eat nearly as much as I used to these days (seem to get distended and bloated when I eat, sometimes uncomfortably so from even small amounts of food), plus it's been doing things to my intestines I think. And I'm already sick of it because it's just me making shit by myself, for myself. I live in shared housing but am not at all connected with my flatmates, certainly not the way I need. I've made only a couple of friends in this city in the last fucking year and they are often busy. I have tried to open up to those in my uni town about how shit I'm doing and, surprise surprise, no one stepped up. I mean I didn't say how bad it was, just that, y'know, I conclude every day not wanting to wake up to live another...was just hoping people would make good on their offers of having some calls, playing some games online, but that's too hard apparently. Fair enough when you aren't spatially close connections fade. I get it, they have other things in their lives Doesn't mean it feels good. I don't want to go out and do random shit because a) I feel so drained mentally and physically so much of every day, b) how likely is it that I will be able to really connect in the way I need with any of those randos, and c) thanks to fucking covid everything now has this lovely extra risk of me getting this wretched illness that might make me hate being alive even more.
That narcissistic friend visited lately and it was worse than ever. Especially given they did get it when I said what I said to the others, and didn't seem to be fazed or anything that I was suffering so, only that it'd be shitty for them if I died. And that no one can help because when it comes to living, "I have to want it". Uh, you do know the connection between social isolation/connection and suicide risk right? You do understand that if all this shit that's making me feel like I don't want to be alive wasn't part of the equation right now, I might actually fucking want to be alive, right? Jesus Christ. Yes I've talked to my doctor about this; I don't know what you think me being on her case will do to the speed of the referrals she may or may not have made to the mental health professionals. This isn't the corporate America world that you now live in where everything can just be forced to happen. I have also tried therapy and it is a fucking slog to find someone who is actually good and whose style suits me. It's also god damn expensive and draining in so many ways. Aaahhhhhh. This was someone because of whom I used to think I wouldn't end my own life because of the shared pain over losing our friend all these years ago. The other was the one who doped me up and also blew up at me totally inappropriate about other shit that I forgot to chronicle but I've already been writing for literally hours at this point and have written far, far more than I expected...nearly 6k words, shit. It's late and I've used up my whole night doing this, but I guess that means it had to happen. Phew.
Hi, I'm Rounded Apathy, and while I don't necessarily want to die - it seems scary and I really just want to return to a rose-coloured former time in life - I do not want to be alive. In the last two months I've put more thought and time into researching how I may quit, which in itself felt liberating, but sadly I think I'm a long way off. I know anything not instantaneous is not the way because I know that in those moments of waiting for anything else to do its job would likely be intense suffering and/or regret, or make me change my mind, or whatever. Why am I here and writing all this? Beats me...maybe to get it out, maybe to hopefully connect with people who understand, maybe get some perspective or even validation...I don't really know. But this is me, and what's led me here. If you have read this veritable fucking novel, I am honestly impressed and thank you very much. I hope you are as well and safe in this moment and the future as you can be. :-)
Not really sure how to write this thing, but hello to anyone out there reading this. I found my way to this site by way of another similar yet quite different one which was useful at first, mainly in that I was able to externalize some struggles, but I found the community element very sparse. There are just a few very active users who post regularly, commenting is inconsistent, and I soon found myself hurting for one of the core things there that I do in "real life". Anyway, I guess I'll try my hand at laying out what things have happened that have all combined to lead me to the here and now, being on this site for this reason and writing about it. I've been wanting to get these things out in a place where I can look at them again as sometimes I get so wrapped up in the feelings I forget to take stock of the fact there are (in my opinion, at least!) some decent reasons behind them. I guess I'll tell the story in chronological order of a combination of the things themselves and when they began to turn me toward demise, as they're not necessarily simultaneous. Oh, and for reference I'm a 32 year-old Canadian.
Well, the first thing was most likely my best friend dying of suicide when we were 26, and I was living on the other side of the world. He'd suffered with a shoulder injury for years which he was waiting forever to have addressed (re: Canadian healthcare - this will come up again). but he managed for the most part - the turning point was the surgery. It didn't exactly go right, and I never found out the full extent of the issues during and after as we only talked twice after he had it; once not long after, and once a few days before he left. I knew things were off but couldn't get a hold of him. Friends in common knew but didn't know just how bad, or exactly where he was at the time. No one could just go to him, it seemed. Then he was gone. I became an automaton when hearing the news and have a stark memory of being able to answer the good old, now-hated question "how are you?". I spontaneously became a vegan. I felt bad about eating because for the most part things had to die for me to live. I felt there was this awful, innately evil aspect woven into existence itself and it took a very long time to learn to live with that.
I was flown home some months later for a memorial on the generosity of two friends who paid my travel expenses and the week was a blur, in no small part due to the jet lag. This is a period when I consider most of my final, older high school friendships to have died or begun to do so. Everyone knew the reason I was back, and the utter lack of support immediately after my departure was dumbfounding (this also happened with my family, but I didn't choose them and was just another example for them to show their deficiencies, so whatever). There were five old friends, three of whom I didn't hear from for I don't remember how long after my visit, one of whom sort of reached out nearly half a year later, and one of whom, well...you'll see.
I survived this trauma mainly due to not dealing with it, which was inherent given where I was and that I was occupied in life, generally satisfied otherwise, though I wanted to leave the country (in Asia) I was then living in. I also was seeing someone casually which absolutely was useful, though I was at an impasse; I wanted to become more serious in the relationship but expected my needing to gtfo of that place would mean its end, as my dating partner was from there. Fortunately when I finally floated the subject it seemed we were on the same page, so it was a double win; getting serious and getting out! Hooray. Just had to wait many more months for them to arrange all the things before leaving long term, given being entrenched and all. Fine with me - with an exit date in sight, I could continue making the most of things and even worked to improve them a bit. Branched out in work more and had some of the most fulfilling professional, and dare I say personal, experiences still to this day.
So then that one friend. When I was back, she'd tried to forcefully get me to talk about the circumstances of my friend's demise, which I honestly still never really found out. I mean, I don't think she knew it was a suicide, but whatever. I was at her place and she tries to get it out of me, I uncomfortably say I don't wanna get into it, which is clearly unsatisfactory; thankfully her partner was there and got it and made her drop it. Well, she decides to finally come visit me, and I'm all "sure it'll be great". But what happens? The second day of a multi-day trip I had organized myself and specifically held off on taking myself so she could join, she all of a sudden shoves the topic back in my face while there's no one around at our hostel. What the fuck. Anyway I tried not to let that totally ruin the trip (her generally shitty travel companion demeanour took care of the rest of that), but we never recovered from that one (ie. I wrote to her telling her how not okay it was and she never replied, over three years later, hah).
So not long after that I started noticing some blood on the toilet paper after I'd take a crap. Never a good sign, right? but it would happen once or maybe twice a year in my life for a day or two, never really knew why, so I just left it be. But it didn't stop. Weeks, then months. I was getting worried but I didn't have health insurance anymore as I was planning to leave. I was also terrified of doctors who couldn't speak English and had a bad reputation for incompetency examining my ass. But eventually I decided well, I'm about to travel around Asia where this could go even more wrong, so I better at least get looked at before I go. This was year's-end, so I had to plan this for the new year (as that's the one time everything shuts down there). My partner was away for this time so I decided to take a little trip myself.
Dec. 30, 2017 may have been the last day I was really alive. I had been in my destination for a while and took a lovely ferry over to this quaint little rural island and just walked around amid the beaches, cats, and citrus plantations. It was beautiful. I'd had to leave the hostel early that morning to catch the ferry, so I hadn't taken my #2, and it didn't happen that night. Whatever, as a kid I only went every few days (though it was daily for many years at this point), so I wasn't worried.
The next day...jeez, I just froze up thinking about and am needing some time to write. Phew. It was like I simply shat out a handful of broken glass. The amount of blood was horrifying. The pain continued, though differently, and I had to check out and move to another hostel - I could barely a few minutes without keeling over. But somehow I managed, and called my partner to say...something was very wrong. 2018 came, and it happened again. Then the next day. And the next. Every day feeling like passing a razorblade into the toilet, and for hours after, as if a hot soldering iron had been left on inside me. After getting back and waiting several more days for things to reopen post-new year, I made it to a clinic which did an unnecessarily invasive and painful exam which ascertained I had, not some kind of exploded hemorrhoid which I'd presumed, but an anal fissure. What..?
No amount of explanation can make someone understand this, other than the analogies I've given. I eventually found a support forum where it was described by other sufferers in some maybe illustrative "worse than" ways, against other things they'd endured; two of my favourites were worse than being shot and adult male circumcision, and worse than cancer involving chemo, double mastectomy, and life-threatening illness hospitalizations.
Needless to say I began to lose it. I didn't want to eat cause I'd have to shit. But if I didn't eat my shits were these horrible balls of dark matter that paradoxically bled less but hurt more. How much to eat, when, what? It was in this period when, for the first time, I thought "if this doesn't stop, I don't know how I can continue living". And of course we just pressed on with our plans to travel. God I don't know how I did that. I must have really wanted to get tf out of there.
I spent most of the early time bedridden, as for the first half day I couldn't walk. Evenings I came alive and did whatever I could. Saw another doc abroad, learned most conservative treatment options, at least those done in the west, were unavailable and the only option was surgery. Fuck that. I came across the trick of using a warm water tub as a toilet to relax the muscles which I started doing to some benefit, but in the end what I believe "cured" me was a bout of traveller's diarrhea which turned my stools to mush. Never had I been so happy to be sick. Two months of the excruciating But oddly, it didn't really stop. I wasn't going to the bathroom randomly but as soon as I woke up I'd have to go, then again after breakfast, always ragged and mushy. Sometimes there'd be a third one a bit later on. (This ended up continuing for over a year and no one could identify any particular cause, tests and stool samples be damned. But I'm jumping ahead).
Anyway all this poopin' was still better than feeling like I'd die every time I was on the toilet, or would rather, so I was livin' it up. Till my partner hit some financial snags on our trip, we end up heading back to where we were to start for a while, and then completely out of nowhere, I'm suddenly being broken up with. Like, absolutely unexpected. I'd been thinking "great, we traveled together without murdering eachother, what a milestone; I'm so excited for the next chapter, maybe Europe then settling in a place we like,together". Naaahh. It's just fucking over. So having absolutely no idea what to do, some of those generous friends again called me back and would help put me up for a couple of months. Problem with that is suddenly I'm facing the demons of my dearly departing friend as I'm in that town for more than three days. I'm seeing him everywhere, still shitting my guts out on the regular, wondering wtf is wrong now; fortunately I'm surrounded by social opportunities so I can often ignore these. Also crashing in a house with a video game I'd wanted to play forever and is very engrossing, so I kinda just entered that world for six weeks as best I could.
As summer ends I decide I'm just going to Europe myself because I am on autopilot and barely functional. Thoughts of dying creep up now and again, but I have things I wan't to do and accomplish so I will do and accomplish them. But just as the season is winding down, I notice...a ring. Inside my genitalia. Uhm. WHAT. This cannot be good. So on top of the poop tests I'm getting requisitioned by a patchwork of walk-in doctors as I don't have my own, I'm not getting this looked at. One thinks it's ringworm so gives me this cream. So I'm using it while visiting relatives here before going abroad again, and suddenly the skin is breaking. I now have an open, ring-shaped wound in/on my fucking hardware. Doc there thinks it's herpes. Cool. I quit the cream, eventually it calms down, but the ring is still there...and expanding. Is it going to ruin things? Is this fucking cancer? I don't know.
So once again I head into the world with this...thing wrong with my body. I have a decent time, visit a friend abroad, stay at a monastery, do a Workway...during which time I suddenly have this awful burning sensation when peeing. And my sides hurt. "Great", I think, "this is it. This fucking thing is killing me". But apparently it's just a UTI, so I'm laid up with both the infection and the meds unable to really carry my weight on this project, at which point I decide I need to stop and get some proper medical attention if possible. Luckily that one friend who contacted me six months after my bestie's passing is able to connect me with the family doc, so I head back at the end of 2018 to try and get fixed up.
After a nice time ringing in the new year with my better buddies, I'm once again waiting for the holiday schedules to end and, first day of 2019, realise that I do not want to be alive (bad time of year for me, it seems...). But now it's horrible fucking winter in my homeland meaning freezing, piles of snow, wretched wind, isolating, and worse I'm not with my friends in my uni town but the big impersonal city I grew up in where I only have this one friend, coincidentally not far. I tell him I'm not okay and need some interaction and support. I get absolutely none. The doctor runs a new battery of tests and nothing finds anything conclusive. I try a different cream to no effect. I'm still shitting super abnormally and physically feel there could be a repeat fissure often given the intensity of some movements (fun fact: they can be caused by many things, including both constipation and diarrhea!). My body is not well and no one knows what's happening, I'm horribly alone and isolated and the weather makes me feel like I'm in a prison in the house. As I go to bed every night I think I do not want to wake up to have to live another day of this. But it comes. And again. (Aaaand battery's giving out!)
Fortunately one of my two good pals invites me to visit and stay at their shared home in Central America which I jump at the opportunity to do. Fuck yes, get me out of this miserable season I have avoided for four years. I get sick again (of course), but I remember the feeling of wanting to be alive. I message my ex getting some closure, but not enough before the replies stop coming. Oh well, I do some volunteering, and have a continued okay time at life. But money's running out, and I get sick again - so bad I feel like I am in danger (shitting literal water now. Like, clear and everything. Yikes). So I quite and return again to my uni town. I get some short term work, make some new friends, am haunted by the demons even more now that I'm there twice as long as last time. But I'm engaged so stuff is pretty okay (and my bowel movements return to normal. Did the new pathogen force out some old one? Did I just need routine?), till the contract ends and my flatmate simultaneously is mostly gone. Bad times ensue. I buy a 3DS to fill the void which helps a bit. I decide to move out west because not another fucking winter but I am burnt out on travel and kinda poor. Set up another workaway to start and figure I'll figure the rest after it's over and I can see if I like it.
Good times working, bad times living alone in my (admittedly cozy) trailer on the family's lot in the middle of nowhere on the island. Literally do not see another person some entire days, sometimes more than one in a row. I just want some genuine connection of a kind that seems missing but I can't quite identify. Anyway, with the gig ending I get an option to house-sit for a family member's house in the city where I think I might move, so I say perfect, this'll let me suss out the place and maybe set up something. Hah, hah...
The only thing that happens is, as far as I can guess, being drugged at a restaurant. After getting the final closure I need from the ex, I'm up on the PC job hunting one night after a meal out, very tired, abnormally so...then I suddenly become aware that I'm in another room. Uh, HOLY FUCK, WHAT?! I'm freaking out, I feel so heavy, don't have control completely over my actions...honestly I still have flashbacks to all this and pretty bad PTSD about it, so I'll have to summarize in that the paramedics come, I freak out, the police come, I freak out, I want them to kill me but am afraid of them killing me, and in the end they drag me off to the hospital against my will, where they shoot me up with a bunch of sedatives and antipsychotics, and I spend the night fucking sedated before being shoved out the door the next day with a map and bus fare.
I do not know how I got back to the house from a place I didn't know in a city I had just got to. I don't remember. I slept for a day after that, the main family took me back to their island place at my request and asked if I would pet/house sit while they traveled. Which I do because what the fuck else can I do? No one at the hospital is accountable, no one figured out what happened, this is just an eternal mystery the scars from which I must live with the rest of my life. So once again I'm all alone, but with some animals, and every day I'm afraid something horribly fucking wrong will happen. I'm afraid the old cat will die. The dogs run off one day and I'm afraid they'll die. I'm afraid whatever happened to me will happen again and I'll die. It's fucking awful. Thankfully I managed to land a job back in the city before the cataclysm so I have some things to focus on in prepping for that, but most of every day is a nightmare. I also have a little pain and blood on the toilet one day so naturally fear the fucking worst with that. It's funny, I had barely thought of the fissure after it had gone, but just that bit made it all come rushing back. Luckily it wasn't serious. This time...
Oddly enough, during all of this the carnal part of me I felt was dead after losing my ex is reawakened one day I go to this cafe and see this lovely server. It was like waking up. It was so strange and incompatible with everything else going on. Anyhow the family comes back, we hang out a bit, I find some short term accommodation in the city and start my job. 2020 comes (for reference). I'm working part time with kids again and it's wholesome, living with another family, but I'm hanging on by a fucking thread still. One day I overhear the parents where I'm living talking about how I'm not doing enough to find exactly what I want to be doing. Lovely. They don't know what's going on AT ALL and how the fact that I've gotten this much together in this amount of time is an incredible achievement for me. I move elsewhere, go to a sweet contradance, have a great time, feeling like I'm finding my place here, decide I want to try and re-enter the world of dating so get back on a site...then the pandemic comes.
FUCKER this is a CONSTANT CYCLE of one step forward THREE FUCKING BACKWARD! I lose my job! No more events! No dating! I don't have an established social circle and the people I do know get busy, hole up, or some other thing! I'm renting shared space with an elderly couple so beyond the terror of this new pathogen I extra feel like I can't do anything because I don't want to make them die! Holy shit!!!
So. I hunker down for a few months then decide to return to my own province. Cause ya know, I or one of my (dwindling number of) good friends could apparently just drop dead all of a sudden, plus it'll be cheaper to live without work. I find some random house and plan to just live there a while before returning out west. It's a lonely fucking house but I make friends with the roommate I had last year, who's also coincidentally been driven back here. Just as well, since the firend I visited in CA is in town for a similar reason, but something is different about our dynamic. They just talk all the time. About themselves. I can only participate in commenting on what they say, talking about something external to us both, or forcing something about me, which quickly gets rerouted. I don't feel like me being in the conversation is necessary. It could be anyone, or a wall. Still better than what happens with the other of those two friends; I'd expressed interest in trying a cannabis product to calm my increasingly shattered nerves, something I've heard can help but I know nothing about. She does, so I put all my trust in her for a trial run. She brings over this chocolate bar and gives me a piece that contains...well, about 4-10 times the amount of THC a first time user should use (who is also underweight and reacts strongly to things generally), and zero CBD. I end up out of my mind and the effects last three fucking days. The one beneficial thing about this is my ability to notice, even during the episode, the similarity between this state and whatever led to the hospitalization, which is somewhat empowering despite the rest being horribly damaging. I did not want that kind of experience, I have residual anxiety from it even now, and this person never owned up to their fucking up in being responsible for what happened. It also led to a worsening of my vestibular (balance and dizziness) problem (also no medical insight there) to the point where even some minimally shaly camera work in movies or shows makes me uncomfortable. Great. The beginning of the end on that one.
I have a hard time securing a place to live where I'd just left, so I manage to get to stay a bit longer where I am, despite having to live with 20 year-olds. I try the local dating scene, but it's a joke. Winter comes, dammit. I have a few days where things don't feel quite right on the toilet, but nothing goes wrong. Until ten days into 2021, and I go on a date that leads nowhere. Except for, the next day, a new fissure. Yep. While not bad at first, over the next 2.5 weeks I spend on staycation with other friends in town, results in one even worse than the first. Like, I am in pain no matter what but when laying down it's bearable kind of pain. I can't stand for more than a few minutes. It lasts longer, over eight hours now. I see another horrid doctor who offers advice that conflicts with what the helpful people on the forum say. I consider other options, but everything will take forever because that's our system (Canada: free treatment if you can live long enough to get it!). Covid makes everything worse and terrifying.
TWO AND A HALF MONTHS LATER I manage to kick the fucking thing, and have this newfound joy, wow I can walk two blocks (or more!) without feeling like, again, I'm going to die or wish I would! The freedom! But then I have another one like a month and a half later lol. Not as bad and only a few weeks, but after recovery...something is different. I don't care this time. I'm exhausted. I'm increasingly fearful that any fucking day could be the day I rip open again. I hate eating breakfast because after that is the movement. I'm back to being paranoid about my food. It becomes clear that the drug-friend is either not the person they once were, or never was who I thought, or some combination. Summer is ending yet again, and there's still no work in this town. I can't afford to live anywhere that isn't a student house, and I'd really like to get my colorectal situation looked into, and all the doctors have continued to push back my shit into fall and are back in the stupid giant city I'm from. So...I move there instead of back west.
Fun times ensue: move for two months into a temp place via friend-of-a-friend only to find out upon arriving it recently had had a bedbug infestation (apparently gone up on the third floor where we are, but after a month, evidently not on the first floor!) and after living with them once in uni this was not a fucking welcome surprise at all. Finally see one doctor I'd been waiting for who absolutely violates my bodily autonomy and determines nothing, meaning the only outcome of the visit is that if I end up wanting/needing surgery I'm now in the system. Attempt dating again and am met with more lack of connections or shitty people when they do happen. Admitted I do find (shitty) work, do have a nice time reconnecting to certain areas from my youth that have nice memories, and end up moving to a decent place on the other side of town, but then I get another fissure. Yay. Get an internal exam from a doc in a different branch of specialization that doesn't show I have cancer in my lower bowel or anything else fucked up, See a different/ostensibly better doc who tells me the best things I can do are either more in the vein of complimentary therapy (ie. not free), or are such horrible procedures involving the (worsening) hemorrhoids that the pain would dwarf that of the fissures. Lovely.
I manage to kick it again but at this point am living in regular fear. Every fucking day I'm basically terrified until I do the deed, though some days it just happens right when I wake up which is alarming in its own right. Unless I don't feel anything even slightly uncomfortable during the process, which at this point is almost never, I'm pretty mentally checked out a long time even after getting off the toilet. I still can't find any pattern between eating habits and stool outcome. Despite all this I made another concerted effort at the dating scene and have had a handful of firsts, and one second, but nothing else. The one I thought had potential was too messed up from previous events to even continue as friends, once I helped psychoanalyze an unreadiness to even be dating. I have a couple more coming this week but honestly just want them cancelled on me because I expect they won't go anywhere. Oh, and the whole genital ring thing never really resolved; the initial one went away, but other ones would continue to show up and run their course. It's fucking creepy and makes me feel super unattractive. Plus the fissures. Beyond the fear they will get in the way of everything, how would I even go about introducing this topic? I feel like a fucking rotting container in a moderately young person's body and hate that when people see me they imagine I am well and healthy and blah blah. Oh, and a couple of months ago I just had this pain in the side of my head that never completely went away. It's minor enough now that I only feel it somewhat if I press fairly hard on the spot, but yeah. Cool.
Plus there's the whole other part of the familial sexual trauma (yeah, this actually happened years before everything but was only really an occasional annoyance till a couple of months ago). It wasn't assault, honestly I don't even know how to describe it. I just saw something I should not have been exposed to at a time in my life when that shit was not okay, and now being in this city means I've had to have more regular and direct contact and interaction with this person. It just to just come up occasionally in my mindscape, and now it's almost all the fucking time. So many people I see make me think of it. I feel so awful in so many ways even thinking/writing about it, though I know none of it is my fault, that my mind is just of this nature; it makes these awful associations which just get cemented. Especially when I have literally nothing to healthily distract me. It was about three months ago when this shit was all getting worse, and someone just made this gross comment in regard to this new interest I'd picked up, and it stuck. I thought about how every win I manage to score just gets fucking shot down and how this was such a prime fucking example, and it stuck. Now the image, the reprehension, the anger, self-loathing, disgust, shame, it's all just there all the time. If this is existence when not actually even close to any theoretical positive sexual situation I can't imagine what might happen were I to find myself in such a time.
My job of making and serving greenwashed food to rich people has become psychologically and physically intolerable and I'm going to either quit or try and take a med leave. I want to do something fulfilling that I'm good at and connects me to people but those kinds of things are usually volunteer work. Or I don't have some qualifications, or less than the plethora of other candidates. I'm afraid I'll start something and be waylaid by a fissure and will lose the job, or money I spend on a course or certification or whatever. And I don't have a lot of money. I randomly took up the hobby of craft cocktails but I don't even like to be drunk and it happens so easily cause I'm a lightweight and don't/can't eat nearly as much as I used to these days (seem to get distended and bloated when I eat, sometimes uncomfortably so from even small amounts of food), plus it's been doing things to my intestines I think. And I'm already sick of it because it's just me making shit by myself, for myself. I live in shared housing but am not at all connected with my flatmates, certainly not the way I need. I've made only a couple of friends in this city in the last fucking year and they are often busy. I have tried to open up to those in my uni town about how shit I'm doing and, surprise surprise, no one stepped up. I mean I didn't say how bad it was, just that, y'know, I conclude every day not wanting to wake up to live another...was just hoping people would make good on their offers of having some calls, playing some games online, but that's too hard apparently. Fair enough when you aren't spatially close connections fade. I get it, they have other things in their lives Doesn't mean it feels good. I don't want to go out and do random shit because a) I feel so drained mentally and physically so much of every day, b) how likely is it that I will be able to really connect in the way I need with any of those randos, and c) thanks to fucking covid everything now has this lovely extra risk of me getting this wretched illness that might make me hate being alive even more.
That narcissistic friend visited lately and it was worse than ever. Especially given they did get it when I said what I said to the others, and didn't seem to be fazed or anything that I was suffering so, only that it'd be shitty for them if I died. And that no one can help because when it comes to living, "I have to want it". Uh, you do know the connection between social isolation/connection and suicide risk right? You do understand that if all this shit that's making me feel like I don't want to be alive wasn't part of the equation right now, I might actually fucking want to be alive, right? Jesus Christ. Yes I've talked to my doctor about this; I don't know what you think me being on her case will do to the speed of the referrals she may or may not have made to the mental health professionals. This isn't the corporate America world that you now live in where everything can just be forced to happen. I have also tried therapy and it is a fucking slog to find someone who is actually good and whose style suits me. It's also god damn expensive and draining in so many ways. Aaahhhhhh. This was someone because of whom I used to think I wouldn't end my own life because of the shared pain over losing our friend all these years ago. The other was the one who doped me up and also blew up at me totally inappropriate about other shit that I forgot to chronicle but I've already been writing for literally hours at this point and have written far, far more than I expected...nearly 6k words, shit. It's late and I've used up my whole night doing this, but I guess that means it had to happen. Phew.
Hi, I'm Rounded Apathy, and while I don't necessarily want to die - it seems scary and I really just want to return to a rose-coloured former time in life - I do not want to be alive. In the last two months I've put more thought and time into researching how I may quit, which in itself felt liberating, but sadly I think I'm a long way off. I know anything not instantaneous is not the way because I know that in those moments of waiting for anything else to do its job would likely be intense suffering and/or regret, or make me change my mind, or whatever. Why am I here and writing all this? Beats me...maybe to get it out, maybe to hopefully connect with people who understand, maybe get some perspective or even validation...I don't really know. But this is me, and what's led me here. If you have read this veritable fucking novel, I am honestly impressed and thank you very much. I hope you are as well and safe in this moment and the future as you can be. :-)
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