Killing Me Softly

Something I have had to come to terms with in recent years is the fact that, for whatever reason, I have spent a large amount of my life deliberately trying to destroy myself. There is something within me that doesn't seem to like me and has been doing its best to wreck my life and, if possible, end it. Of course it hasn't been in quick violent ways, it has been in slower and more subtle ways. Using the weapons of addiction, depression and selfishness, it has battered me and still continues to do so. Now I know about it, I try to fight it and stop it from doing anything before it has a chance to act, it doesn't always work but, in the main I've been successful. The thing is that coming to terms with this, and I'm still not completely sure I have fully, has been very difficult and I have realised that it doesn't mean that I can cope with it or deal with it or stop it in any way, I try to but I know that it may well be the fact that I will never be able to stop it, but hopefully I can learn to live with it and deal with it on a day to day basis.


Since having my heart attack, about 10 years ago, I have come to realise that I am not afraid of death at all. I am scared of dying alone, and also worried about how I die and who finds me, but death itself does not scare me in any way. Maybe it's partly to do with the fact that when I lived at home with my parents, my mum and I used to talk openly about death and dying. We had many conversations about what she thought about death and how people deal with it, also about her advancing age and her death. I didn't have the same sort of conversations with my dad, but my relationship with him was never exactly the same as my relationship with my mum. I always felt close to both of them, as I did to all my family, but I always seemed to be closer to my mum when it came to things like that, we could talk about just about everything.


I can say that I feel it every single day but there are a number of times a month that I miss the family members that I have lost, and I miss the family that we had, or at least I always thought we had. One of the problems of being the youngest of the family is that you often don't get told of things, especially if those things are "bad" things, you are seen as being too young to understand or they don't want to bother you with it, at least that's the way it feels (of course sometimes it feels more like you're just being ignored or left out of things). I know that I have a TV and film fuelled dream-like vision of what I have always thought somethings, like Christmas, should be like and I also know that, not only have those things never been like that, they also will never be like that, mainly because life is not a Bing Crosby or Perry Como or Val Doonican TV special, and I am starting to think maybe my "memory" and thoughts about how our family were are the same, not real.


Gradually, over time, all these things eat away at you and then, if you have that self-loathing thing going on like I have, you start to use them as a weapon against yourself. The thoughts go similar to this: "I am stupid! I must be to continue thinking that things like Christmas could and should be just the way I think they should. More over, I am more stupid for continuing thinking that way even when I know it not possibly. I am even more stupid for getting disappointed ever time they are not the way I think they should be in my 'visions'. Maybe it is my ongoing stupidity that is the reason I want to destroy myself. Well, I'm so useless I can't even do that properly. So I am useless and stupid, why would and does anyone like me, I am not worth the love people show me so what does it matter if I destroy myself?" The strange thing is that, even though I know all these things, and I know that the things I tell myself are not true, it doesn't stop me thinking or feeling them, or help in any way with knowing how to or actually doing anything to stop.