Everyone grows old, gets sick, dies. Well who doesn't know that?! Other people somehow manage to live with this rudimentary knowledge about life. Is it because they realize they have no choice? Fine, I can understand that. You make the best out of the situation. But then why do they insist that life is such a good thing? Did they forget the loved ones they lost and buried? Did they forget the pain they and everyone suffers? Why do they continue to have children? That's not solving the problem. That's just kicking the can down the road. Now it's their problem! It's like being in a concentration camp and deciding to create more victims for the Gestapo to gas! I just don't get it. I'm no different than I was when I was five and realized the truth about life and death for the first time. I never got over it, I guess. It seemed unimaginably horrible then and it seems every bit as unimaginably horrible now. How do people manage to live "normal" lives in the face of these grim inevitabilities? Either there is something wrong with everyone else or there is something wrong with me! I guess it must be me. The whole world can't be wrong! Then again, just look at the world! Even if it's wrong, it's right, just by virtue of being The World. But how do I get right? I just can't seem to. Sometimes I want to off myself, not because I'm unhappy, but just because I can't stand the suspense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the Gestapo's knock on the door. I'm always listening for the footstep on the stair. People don't seem to understand that you can kill yourself because you're happy. Because you want to avoid the inevitable, because you want to leave on a high note. Is that so unreasonable? As I see it, it's a perfectly cold-bloodedly mathematically reasonable solution to the problem—which is precisely why most people can't fathom it.
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Note on the above:
This is my basic philosophical stance toward life. I always feel this way. It's just that, ordinarily, it's a lot more in the background, not that a day goes by that I don't have cause to pause and reflect on how I feel. In other words, I think about death and it's "cure"—suicide—on a daily basis. But yesterday I think these painful thoughts were brought to the foreground and were made to feel all the more acute because of the injection of estradiol I'd received the day before. It was the first injection I'd gotten in a year. The injectable liquid form of estradiol 20ml had been unavailable due to manufacturing "issues" since last July. My doctor had me tripling up on the oral dose and while that is not the preferred method of taking hormone replacement—tougher, as I understand it, on your liver—it is probably not the massive influx of hormone all at once that you get when it is injected. I suspect, after a year, I wasn't as accustomed to getting that much hormone at once as I had been. Usually the injection just makes me feel a bit run down and a little headachy. Nothing too bad. Yesterday, though, I felt headachy, nauseous, jittery, and had periods of wild palpitations. I was super-emotional, panicky, and had feelings of impending doom. Actually, I have these feelings all the time but yesterday they were dialed up to 11. Panic attacks, anxiety, dissociation, PTSD…I've suffered from them all since I was a child. But I think the hormones amplified all that ordinary yuckiness I wasn't particularly suicidal... not any more than ordinary. In fact, I felt too crappy to be suicidal. Usually, the hormones makes me feel better (and hopefully two weeks from now when I get my next injection they will). Today, after a somewhat shaky night (until I got up in the wee hours and snuck a sliver of cold leftover pizza from the fridge) I already feel better. No problems have been solved. Life is still a horror. But I can deal with the existential crisis of being a mortal human being a little better today than yesterday. Meaning, I can ignore it for longer periods of time.
