Sunday 5 November 2017

My one big mistake was to ask for help

The one simple truth about human society is that everybody is expected to just take whatever they get thrown at them. Wasn't born into a rich family? Your problem. Born blind or crippled? Your own burden to bear. Got severe psychological traumas as a result of fighting in a war, getting abused and so on? Tough luck.

If you can't make it on your own, then at least have the courtesy to not bother others with it. If you rid the world of your inconveniences, then so much the better. The thing about mental health and suicide is that nobody talks about it because the former is a personal issue and the latter an acceptable solution to society as a whole. Or so the subconscious and sometimes explicit reasoning goes.

Why waste money on those who cannot help themselves, after all?


In hindsight I was completely and utterly naive to expect to receive help from doctors and psychologists when I first asked for it, now nearly thirteen years ago. My intersex condition was just an ego thing. I should have kept it to myself. It didn't bother me too much, beyond the questions I had about who and what I truly was.

I shouldn't have started that fight. I should have saved that energy and time to work on what truly matters in life: survival. Getting a job, keeping the money flowing so that you can purchase property. Instead I wasted all that time caring about useless things such as my identity and self-worth, only to have both and along with it my mental and physical health trashed.

Now that I have to fight for a new job and a place to live, I am not capable of doing either. My energy has been spent. I'm too hurt and injured to continue fighting. It's just all more of the same. Yet a job is at least manageable. Without a sense of self-worth and the burden of critical thought finding a place to live is easy too. Just need to save your strength to focus on the acquisition of property and wealth.


Instead I focused on the luxuries in life, including figuring out my identity and the physical configuration of my body. In hindsight it might have been so much easier to just ignore my misgivings and stuck with the 'male' label, embracing the binary society. Survival first, and all that.

I made this mistake and now I'm paying for it. My failed suicide attempt a few years ago should have been a warning to myself, that I had to change things, but I stubbornly refused to just give up on those delusions. Having the courts actually agree to the assessment that I'm a hermaphrodite and not male must have emboldened me.

At this point my health is deteriorating without any prospect of medical help, I live in a hell hole of an apartment without the energy to change anything about this, and I'll soon be out of a job.

The only responses which I'm expecting to this situation are variations on 'I'll pray for you/I hope it works out', 'Here's a list of houses/jobs you do not have the energy/self-worth to look at' and my absolute favourite: 'Suicide is never the answer'. Oh yes, it surely is. For both sides, even.


The past days have been a complete struggle for me to continue living. This morning was the worst so far, putting me right back where I was just over six years ago during the final weeks before my suicide attempt. The same sense of devastation, of not seeing a way out, of feeling overwhelmed by life and the demands being placed on me. Those sudden glimpses and insights into that wonderful feeling of peace and warmth that I felt before I took the final steps which should have ended my life back then.

I gambled that things which would work out for me if I just got that identity and intersex issue resolved, but what should have take a few years, tops, turned into a decade and soon thirteen years. I gambled and lost.


I do not know how I'll get through the coming weeks, or months. It's quite possible that I will not make it. I'm not fully in control of my thoughts, or my body for that matter. Likely it's this dissociation, this DID, which keeps impulsively trying to harm this body of mine. Fun things like my hands trying to strangle me and me fighting back even as I'm choking. Or deflecting a knife that's headed for my abdomen, because there was this sudden impulsive thought that made me go from cutting up vegetables to trying to gut myself.

Well, I say 'me', but it's not 'me'. I feel fragmented. There's me and many other identities fighting for control. And this 'me' is losing. I wouldn't be surprised if I start suffering more blackouts the coming time.

Yes, I'm having major issues. Yes, it would probably be best if I put an end to it. Cull the weak. Not bleat for help that will not ever come.


It's gone on for far too long already.


Maya

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