Tag Archives: suicide

Self-harm and Hamas

You shouldn’t be here really. You should be on social media. Imagine what you’re missing.

Perhaps there’s a vital petition for you to sign so you can prevent the extinction of the pangolin without leaving your bed. Maybe a close friend of yours got engaged, the bitch. If you’re lucky there might be a link to a video that’ll explain how to improve your life in some small yet meaningful way.

By ending it, for example.

Continue reading Self-harm and Hamas

A spot of immortality

Death’s a fucker eh? Always haunting us, stalking us, tapping us on the shoulder to turn us round only to kick us in the bollocks when we do.

Death isn’t a thing in itself, it’s an absence of a thing; of everything. There’s nothing hiding in the shadows, and there’s no arsehole with a cowl and pointy weapon waiting to slice off the parts of you that stick out. There’s just the end: sudden or drawn out, sticky or dry, a terrible tragedy or welcomed like a long-awaited number 107 to get the fuck out of Borehamwood.

I don’t expect to live as long as anyone of my age, and as far as I can tell I’m fine with that. I used to exercise a lot, but then my calf muscle made a sound like a small balloon being stood on and now I visit a gym a couple of times a month through habit alone. I don’t eat particularly badly, but I drink like it’s air and the water’s rising towards the hull of the upturned boat. I stand in front of the yellow line just to annoy the announcer. Everyone assumes I will die first, and as far as I can tell I’m fine with that.

It’s a safe assumption because I sometimes think of ending it all to avoid the decline I can already feel sniggering its way into my body. Things are failing and my health is never getting any better than it is at this very moment. Last week I hurt my shoulder doing up a shoelace. My digestive system is so fucked I’m thinking of patenting Rennie that tastes like stomach acid, just for the continuity.

That’s not to say suicide ever strikes me as a serious option, and yet paradoxically I know that when the day comes that the doctor peers at me solemnly over his half-moons, shaking his head in time with the counting of his own blessings, someone’s dog will soon be finding a particularly pungent treat in the fields around Wharncliffe Viaduct. I don’t spend much time thinking of topping myself, and yet if things go the way they’re bound to it’s almost certain one day I will, because the cunts who run things won’t let me go on my own terms.

Death doesn’t follow me around like it does some people, and I don’t know many people who’ve died. My grandmother fell down the stairs in 1986, though she’s died many times since, whenever I needed a handy funeral to get out of some nightmare work obligation like pretending everyone’s on Dragon’s Den so the boss gets to legitimately call all his employees simple-minded wankers. A couple of people I’ve worked with have grown some dreadful cancer everyone expected them to shrug off at their age, mistakenly as it turned out. I once knew a bloke who hung himself when he was falsely accused of stealing some chickens, which strikes me as an overreaction.

Much like everyone else I don’t fear being dead, because as I understand it everything was perfectly all right before sperm hit egg. You worry you’ll miss people, and miss events, but I never met Genghis Khan and I never had the plague so I’m fine with that. And you worry that everyone will be devastated at your passing. Oh how altruistic of you. I bet you’d love to spare them the agony with a spot of immortality, wouldn’t you?

But I definitely fear the idea of being in unstoppable pain or never-ending nausea, just eking out the days until whatever ails me gets its way. I think about it a lot more than I should, that one day I’ll realise I’m just not going to survive this one and I’ll be too late to do anything about it.

Because politicians and the religious guardians of our morals who couldn’t have given a shaman’s shit about me when I was standing will parade past the hospital bed to explain how it’s vital to stay alive, there’s always hope, there have to be safeguards and all that shite. They’ll have me hooked up to machines for as long as there’s wind to power the turbines they despise. They’ll watch me pitifully as I scream silently into the oncoming void that all I want is a missile battery to take them all with me and spare others this inexplicable misery. They won’t hear me and the missiles won’t come, unless I’ve somehow ended up in Gaza obviously.

And seeing those imagined days stretch out before me, against my will, is what makes me consider hauling my dismantling body to a nearby tall structure in a heavily populated area the moment I catch a glimpse of what looks like blood disappearing around the U-bend. If we can’t check out humanely at a time of our choosing, it’ll take a few of us making an almighty mess to change some minds.

Not that I care what happens to the rest of you. I’m going first. See you nowhere.

The treatment process

According to Face-crap, which got its intel from the Telegraph, the great and the good that are the UK government are planning to sanction benefit claimants who “refuse treatment” for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, because, apparently, “cognitive behavioural therapies work”. So say well-off, middle-class wankers whose only experience of depression has been Fortnum & Mason being out of the ’57 Merlot, without which their dinner party will be a complete write-off.

Cognitive behavioural therapies don’t always fucking work. I know this because I spent three years being asked to “imagine the very worst that could happen” – fine, you cunt; the worst that could happen, right now, is I don’t get this job. The jobcentre tossers decide I “wasn’t trying hard enough”, or some such crap that makes an entirely arbitrary decision – based on whether the interviewer’s getting his leg over sufficiently, or the fact that her PA brought her a full fat latte this morning, when she specifically asked for skinny – into my fault. I lose my benefits, including housing benefit, I can’t pay the rent on the hell hole I call home, I end up on the streets and either starve, freeze or get beaten to death.

There – now the fucking therapist is as depressed about the state of the world as I am. Good. Welcome to the world as experienced by the working class, pal. And yes, I’ve taken my heavy-duty prescription medication like a good little boy, too – then stopped, and switched to valerian, which isn’t recognised because you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for it, or be seen by a psychiatrist with no concept of how anyone earning less than thirty grand a year could possibly survive, just to get hold of it. And you know what? It has the same effect; I still feel like I should kill myself, I just don’t have the energy to do it.

Job interviews still see me up half the night with stomach cramps, sweating and vomiting, then sitting there, on the wrong side of that fucking desk, shaking and trying to force a coherent answer out of the fuzz in my head; the shakes are just less obvious, so I look weird, rather than alcoholic. I still hear the voices telling me what people are thinking, what threats are out there, how useless I am – it’s just that they’re whispers from the next room, now, rather than someone sitting across the table from me. The other people in my head are still there – they just choose to stay in their rooms, quietly getting on with whatever it is they do when I’m in control of my mind and body.

I’ve “engaged and complied with the treatment process”, as they say in psycho-babble, and I’m still batshit crazy. The craziness didn’t get better when I was on the drugs-and-talking-cure trick, and it’s got no worse since I decided to use valerian to take the edge off everything and treat the people in my head like people that can be engaged with, rather than enemies that have to be destroyed.

Stop my benefits. Call me a liar, a lazy scrounger. Tell me I’m “making it all up”, that “society doesn’t exist to support layabouts like you”. Force me to take a job, any job – then watch as I get sacked, because, from what I’ve seen in the contracts I’ve had for the jobs I’ve done before, from what I’ve experienced first hand, employers are allowed to call insanity “gross misconduct”, and fire your arse without notice.

Whether or not you give me a pittance to live on, whether or not I’m working, whatever names you choose to call me, I will still be depressed. I will still get anxious about anything from the state of the world to the fact that Tesco have put the price up on the yoghurt I like. I will still have five other people living and talking in my head. I will still see things that aren’t there. Your threats, punishments and disapproval will not “cure” me, or make me “suitable” for the kind of twats who get to decide whether or not they want a nutter working for them.

I’ll carry on doing things that I enjoy in the times when my madness decides to take a day off. I’ll write, create, engage in debate, walk my dogs, take care of my partner. And on the days when the world’s inside out and back to front, I’ll stay in bed with the curtains closed, grit my teeth, and endure it until the darkness lifts. My life continues with or without your approval.

It’s Saturday

Perhaps these are the days I should treasure most, because these are the days that remind me why the words at the top of this website exist.

It’s Saturday. I have nothing to do, today or tomorrow, which is Sunday and therefore by definition the most tedious fucking day of the week. Saturday, and these are the things I don’t want to do: go out; go outside at all; stay inside; do jobs around the flat; play games; listen to music; watch TV; read websites; read a book; eat; drink; masturbate.

I’m a simple man with only a limited number of things on the daily menu, and that list has ruled most of them out. So, we’re back to the question that brings us together like cattle at an abattoir: what’s the fucking point? Yeah, with a question mark, so we know it’s serious.

When you wake up in the morning and you can think of a bunch of things you could do, but each of them appeals as much as a prostate examination from a disinterested male nurse, what’s next? Anything that requires effort seems to be out so the razor blades and high tensile rope are probably doomed to spend yet another weekend in the cupboard. I’m sitting here staring out into my small garden knowing that hacking the fuck out of a few bushes is a good way to combat the interminable pointlessness of my life and yet to be able to do that I have to get the key to my small shed, go outside, open the padlock, get the weaponry out and Jesus I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

There’s a bike in that shed too, taunting me. I think the tyres are flat. Oh well.

It’s 10.57 in the morning and behind me there’s a television with a man pissing on about how the shallots are the perfect complement to the pastry that’s just fluffy enough. There will be a mango moose in a minute and the worst thing is if this was a normal day I’d want them all dead, but even murderous thoughts seem beyond me on a Saturday.

You’re expecting this to resolve itself but it won’t. I will only leave this chair in the next two days to shit and sleep. This is my weekend and it stops on Monday when everyone else goes and sits in their little boxes to do the same thing they were doing on Friday. Meanwhile I continue to try to find things to keep me occupied but free of the dismal knowledge that it’s those special two days when everyone else is happy and I’m just fucking nowhere.

Apparently the one thing I can make myself do on a Saturday is explain the hollowness of reality through these very words, though I’m having to force my one typing hand to perform by hauling it across the keyboard with the other.

Behind me they’re making something with eggs and carrots and laughing a little too hard.