(written on my last day in CRESST, 2016)
I’m not better.
I’ve been here for ten or eleven days, I’m not even sure anymore, and I still don’t see any reason for hope. I wanted this journal to be so much more than it is. Looking back over the last week and a half I feel as though I have wasted my time here and today they are making me leave, ending up in the same place I was when I began my stay.
I’m titling this final chapter The Last Day in honour of the TV show Red Dwarf episode of that title. In it, the mechanoid finds out that it’s his last day to exist, his replacement about to arrive on the spaceship he lives upon. His crewmates throw him a goodbye party, during which he experiences his first emotions and realizes that he doesn’t want it all to be over. The mechanoid finds a reason to hope for more in the future.
This has not occurred for me and I feel like I’m in a worse place than I was in when I first arrived. All that being here has done is reinforce the only reason I have to stay alive: my mother and the damage that killing myself would do to her. I have made a couple friendships in here and I have a new diagnosis but neither of those things change the position I am in. The psychiatrist recommended a book for me to get, so I could learn about my possible borderline personality disorder, but I tried to tell him I can’t concentrate long enough to read anymore. Because I can’t read anymore I can’t realistically go back to school again. It would just be a waste of the government’s money. I am beyond hope, a waste of effort. I am only treading water until I eventually succumb to the waves around me. It’s like I can taste the salt water splashing in my mouth even now and I’m no longer afraid of what that first mouthful of seawater would mean.
I don’t write this for the person who eventually reads it. I’m only trying my damndest to understand it myself, how a person’s need for self preservation could be so low that they would think this way. I know it’s abnormal. I know it means my brain is broken but I need to know if it’s broken like a car, and can be fixed, or broken like an old cell phone, worthless as anything other than spare parts or recycling. I’m not contributing to society and am actively dragging down those around me, living off of charity from the government simply because my brain has decided that it doesn’t want to function anymore.
Wait, that’s wrong. There’s nothing simple about it. There’s no doubt that I am complex as hell and my mental illnesses only compound that fact. I am intelligent and caring but I am also constantly in desperate need of attention while trying to avoid human contact. I am the very definition of a paradox, never to be resolved in any sense be it in the physical or psychological. I have no hope that will change at any point in the future unless a miracle occurs in the realm of psychology. There is no drug for borderline and the ones they keep giving me for my anxiety and depression are not working. Pristiq, the only one that ever worked at all is $130 a month and enables me to function for about 2 hours a day.
How can I be expected to exist like this for the foreseeable future? I need purpose and have none. I need a reason but cannot see one. I want to find something which would justify my existence but am failing miserably. Is that a fault of myself? Am I such a failure that I can’t even come up with a solution to the simplest, most basic question we all must deal with in our lives but I am having trouble even defining what that question is.
Perhaps it’s a question of what contribution I leave for the following generations. What if it’s how I help my fellow man in the present? Should I be fighting for a better understanding of our past so that we can have a better future?
I am lost and helpless.
And I have to go home.
