After my first “therapy” session with F, I felt slightly different. As if maybe my current state and condition was not some inescapable dark abyss. How had I ended up in my current state?
Life. My life seemed to be a miserable, difficult, daily struggle with the darkness that I saw around me. How had I ended up here? Did everyone experience this same thing (I assumed not as then everyone would be suicidal)?
I had a laundry list of things that caused me trouble
- Failed marriages
- Difficult times at work
- Difficult making and maintaining relationships
- Feeling isolated
- Feeling like nothing I did ever worked out
- and on and on…
I had changed a lot of things over my life in an attempt to make things better. I moved, I changed jobs, I got divorced, quit drinking, quit using drugs, etc…
But things were still generally shitty and miserable. What more was there to change?
ME
Throughout my life, I had changed all the things external to me, gave up drugs and alcohol (self-medication), changed jobs 30 some odd times, moved… Yet here I was suicidal, what more can I change to have a different experience? The daily struggle with my own mortality had reached a pinnacle and I wanted to jump. I had done all the things.
Or maybe not.
All of the changes I made to feel less miserable were external to ME and my self. It’s a fine line, ME and the things I want to change. External or internal. External things are easy to change, you just remove them from your life and go on. Internal things that is were it gets dicey. If one only looks at changing external things it’s a piece of cake. My problems are because of you, and I’ll just remove you from my life, I hate my job I’ll get a different one. Internal things not so much, how does one remove the self? Well, suicide is one answer. Or at least it appeared to be from my vantage point.
But how do we change the self? Is it about finding the self? Is it lost? To be lost seems to indicate it is somewhere else, somewhere unknown. If we could only have a spiritual GPS of sorts on this lost self then it would be easy to find.
But maybe we aren’t lost at all. Maybe instead we have forgotten who we are.
Thus I began the process of remembering who I was.