“All it takes is a beautiful fake smile to hide an injured soul and they will never notice how broken you really are.” – Robin Williams
After spending the last 48 hours fantasising about my suicide, I find out my sister’s friend, a guy I adored with the biggest heart... just committed suicide. Twenty-two years old. Such an amazing guy.
Sweet. Attentive. Engaging. Generous.
This post is dedicated to Yaroslav Sevryukov, the man who accidentally saved my life. Yaroslav is one of the rare few who I met and liked instantly… He was quiet, but I never found him an introvert, there was something gravitational about him, maybe I'm subconsciously attracted to the tortured soul. Anyhow, I've been feeling peculiar for the last 2-3-4 months, it's so difficult to pinpoint the exact moment the darkness starts to spread, it could have been as early as June, but I've only recently admitted to myself I was suffering from depression. It's amazing how it just creeps up on you, and before you know it, I was casually daydreaming about my own suicide... and, I guess it's pretty strange, but that gave me peace. A day or two passes and I get the tragic news of Yaroslav forcing all my hidden emotions to surface. What are the chances of that? I talk about a higher power, an ability to connect with other humans, was I unwittingly feeling what he felt? Or do we chalk this down to another coincidence?
“To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all”
― Sophocles
So, my pain relief comes in the form of privately daydreaming about my own suicide, how I'll do it (well, I always knew how – so in reality it's more a warped series of flashes of how not to do it) but also how, ironically, I genuinely feel I’ve enjoyed a good and full life - I wholeheartedly believe that, and my desire to commit suicide has nothing to do with the quality of my life or the people around me, well maybe the second bit isn't entirely true, but for the most part, I simply have the gift and curse of being able to access feelings of outrageously intense sadness and happiness in equal measure. The happiness at extremes are euphoric, and when you mix in a decent level of motion, like running or jumping on a trampoline, the euphoria eventually takes on a life of its own... like nitrous oxide in a car on The Fast and the Furious breaking me into a literal virtual reality where you can be anyone, be anything - no matter how absurd. You burn bright, fade fast, and unfortunately when you come back to life it's normally in a hospital bed. The sadness… the sadness at extremes is like carrying an anchor you have no chance of carrying. It's drowning in invisible waters, burning in flameless fires. The feeling swallows you whole and suffocates your soul. You see the world through the eyes of Anne Rice's Louis. Suffering. Suffering. Suffering. It's all you have. There is no discerning reason why, so you wear a mask, you feel you have no choice, you get so good at acting you’ll even enjoy yourself in the right company, carrying and hiding the truth like a cancerous tumor, protecting and bolting it from the world like a Dorian Gray painting, buried in a dream within a dream in an Inception-like steel vault, terrified to communicate anything remotely close to what you're actually feeling because the honest truth is, no one wants to hear it, not really, how is someone meant to respond to a genuine desire to commit suicide? The fear of scaring people away, not because they don't want to help, but because they don't know how. And that's when you've risked everything, friendships scattered in the wind because of confused feelings. Tell your best friend you're in love with them... it's a step you can never come back from. It might be the best decision you ever made, but what about the other 9 times? A fear of rejection magnifies your loneliness. Yaroslav, I am devastated for you and it is because of you I am speaking my darkness to the world, but who could you speak to? And because I know the feeling my heart breaks for you more, someone close to you asks you how you are and for a split second you think you're about to tell them the truth. You open your mouth to reach out, you're almost there, but instead a very convincing "I'm good, how are you?" is all you can manage... For the fiftieth time in a row... Another pang of regret with your choice to keep a friend, yet again, at arms length, but you reassure yourself it's better this way, how could they help? What could they possibly say? You'll most likely make them uncomfortable and awkward, then they'll fumble a hangup after going deathly quiet on the phone and you'll feel even worse than you did before. I had no one, but I was happy in my loneliness, happy to say goodbye, perhaps as you were, but it was your news that forced me to replace the dust with words... the mere thought you could be suffering in such a way in the run up to your death broke my heart, breaks my heart.
But how will the world look at me now?
This kind of honesty has no place in our society, people will always be second guessing my feelings, my words... does he mean what he says?
And do I even want help?
Commencement: the end of one thing, the start of something new.
And this is why we become experts in misdirection. In the hope that we might get better, and then no one will have to know the dirty little secret. Maybe they’d still look at me normal, treat me normal. We’re taught what’s socially acceptable, and talking about suicide is not one of them. Why be suicidal when it’s so easy to pretend to be anything else. You’re meant to show your peers how awesome you are, how much money you make, what kind of car you drive. Not scare them away with dramatic, irrational, I-am-clinging-to-life-and-thoughts-of-suicide-get-me-through-the-day thoughts. You’re meant to show a girl how clever, successful, and desirable you are, not chase them off with a plethora of the nonsensical.
How will they look at me now?
How will they look at me now?
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace
“Didn’t I warn you?” It was true. I was warned. A modern-day Icarus, but Icarus died. I am doomed to re-live this ruinous circle with no way out. Beauty. Pain. Beauty. Pain. No. Not Icarus… I am Sisyphus. The sinner condemned in Tartarus to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill then watching it roll back down again.
Except I can end my suffering.
He cannot.
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
No way out, but one. So, what happened? Why have these alter-egos been dormant for so long? In short something changed in 2017. I saw an unexpected balance shift to the topside – I was cautiously warned by some, understandably abandoned by others, but the high gave me an impervious shield, one in which I felt like I would be protected in forever, but it couldn’t protect me, of course it couldn’t. I asked in Hell’s Rose how long could this feeling last… privately hoping forever.
Then finally.
Finally.
Like an exact science. All those stupid studies that talk about mania and depression. They were right, again, and in my naivety I thought I could break the circle and live in the mania irrespective of time ... boy was I wrong. I'm always wrong,
And suddenly...
There were no more fires. No more earthquakes. No more hurricanes, no more destruction. No more. No more. No more. There was only peace… and with it my undying unhappiness.
Was this the cost of my existence? In the height of my happiness am I wicked, unemphatic and unrelenting? I know some think so. And with this realisation… what choice do I have? Just like my friend had feared when I published my first wow-I’m-super-god-damn-happy post under the title Michael’s Diary, the high inexorably is no longer and all I’m left with now is an inexplicably heart breaking low. Heart broken, but no lost lover, soul crushed, but family intact. I broke into uncontrollable tears, literally uncontrollable tears whilst in Greece the beginning of September, but I brushed the experience away thinking.. "It must be my dad."
Today I realise it was so much more... Jesus I've even been hiding this feeling from myself for months.
“Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? . . . How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
- Leo Tolstoy
The all-encompassing darkness truly bewilders me. I don't even know the person that wrote Michael's Dairy 7 months ago. I can still smile and converse and joke. I was in Sweden recently, and I was lucky enough to enjoy the best time, but my actions were reminiscent of a concealed depression. I needed to drink, I was louder than usual, like I was trying too hard, desperate almost, come to think of it I wasn't too dissimilar in Greece, a sub-conscious goodbye? I can laugh, play, have fun, but I can't shake the comforting thought in the back of my mind, reassuring myself that this would be a good time to end it, and it was this thought that made life bearable, that held back the tears and allowed me to have fun. In Greece I hadn't realised this yet, and as I write this now I realise I might not just suffer from psychosis, but perhaps a dissociative identity disorder. I have the same memory, but different tastes, my music, and film preferences change, my thoughts dramatically change, even my core beliefs change, like my feelings towards god, The diligent and dedicated person who wrote Michael’s Dairy is different to the one who saw beauty in everything under Set Your Mind on Fire and a world away from the suicide obsessed **** writing this today. The michaels-dairy-michael would try to help me, but at the same time my nihilism would frustrate him, hells-rose-michael would have zero patience with me, he'd forget me as soon as he met me, perhaps disregard me as pathetic, and it's not off the agenda he'd hurl some hurtful abuse my way, whilst melocholia-michael would simply sit in silence with me. Well, one thing’s for sure, my numerous personalities are all dramatic. But unfortunately for me, a-suicide-note-called-hope-michael has retaken the reigns. This personality has been in hibernation for 6 years, but he's been dying to surface for months, he's not the most dangerous one, I think the personality who wrote 'Hell's Rose is the most dangerous, but this personality is the most dangerous to me. The personality obsessed with death is back and so now we come to it.
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say, “My tooth is aching” than to say, “My heart is broken.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
It might sound like a juxtaposition, but I’m strangely optimistic about my death, it’s been like a dormant get-out-of-jail-free card, the joker up my sleeve, my secret weapon. It’s strangely comforting, knowing I still have a choice. I’ve noticed people talk about ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem’, but the truth is it’s not a temporary problem, it’s an abstract one. There is no obvious reason for my unhappiness. Sure, I felt like I was stabbed in the heart when ***** unceremoniously sent me an email, and I was hurt by ****’s treatment of me, I miss my father and wish I was a better son to him, but people go through these types of disappointments every day. The unassailable truth is my other personalities, well maybe it's just one, hells-rose, is a complete asshole and becoming conscious of this fact and some of his/my actions is gut wrenching. Hell's-rose was uncomfortably good at burning bridges and uncomfortably good at not caring, until, of course, it’s too late, and then the wanker just disappears and this shadow of a man is all that's left to sift through the ashes.
One day you wake up, and the veil has been lifted, the protection you wantonly bathed in disconcertingly dries up and you are left in, what can only be described as a post forbidden fruit moment.
Naked. Alone. Scared.
Painfully aware.
The anger is gone. The desire to grow, gone. Everything that makes life worth living, the surety. the belief, god, it's all gone, set-your-mind-on-fire-michael, saw the beauty in every blade of grass, his heart was full of love, full of god, but this person, sees only pain, feels only emptiness and death. Death... that bastard is all I've got now, at least in destroy something beautiful I still had grief and loneliness. Now my ears and eyes feign interest, but it is only in listening to death that I see any hope.
"A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it"
- Michelangelo
To David – I well up with tears as I write this. How could I do this to you? If the roles were reversed I wouldn’t be able to survive it. Well I’m struggling to survive it with you so maybe that’s not much consolation. My actions trump whatever words I could write to you now. How could I? The words 'I love you' feel empty, if I really loved you wouldn’t I be able to fight on? I think about how I felt in this last cycle, post China. Somehow, I got through it. But was it worth it? Yes, there were times years later I thought ‘thank god, I survived to experience this, people I met, things that happened’. There are some truly beautiful memories…*o****. but I’m tired of letting people down, I’m tired of pissing people off, I’m tired of not being able to change, I'm tired of saying sorry, I'm tired of hells-rose and I can never be rid of him. I’m tired of the circle. Can I stop letting myself or people down? Does it matter? Is my life poised to get better? Abandoning you like this feels wrong, we could still do something great together… hell I never even gave my ‘life’s-work’ fantasy-epic a chance to see the critic. I don’t think I could ever leave you, not really, but then that means I can’t commit suicide, and so the freedom that comes with that choice disappears with it. And now I feel the pain again. You are one person who has always been there, even when you’re not. You refused to leave me, over and over and over again – no matter which michael I was, and so now I must refuse to leave you.
Alas...
I must fight on.
Conclusively, this is not a suicide note, it is a life note. It is a desperate cry to reach anyone that feels alone, including myself. I feel alone, but I'm going to try to do something about it. I'm going to admit I can no longer manage my condition alone and go to a bipolar support group and I'm going to force myself to find people like me, and maybe we can support each other. I wish I could have reached Yaroslav, for he has reached me from beyond the grave. And in his death and my misery perhaps he can find peace and I can find light.
This post is dedicated to the beautiful Yaroslav.
With all my love, you'll be forever young in my heart.
1995 - 2017
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