EPTBackground - why am i suicidal?(can be skipped)
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Almost six years ago i moved to a different country(Norway) to live with my girlfriend. I graduated from college last summer(June 2012) while in autumn 2011 our first child, a daughter, was born. Now the main issue is that i have been unemployed since i graduated. At first i was just home with my daughter until she got into kindergarden(have to wait in queue for a spot, takes a while) and she didn´t get in until January 2013, so up until then i wasn´t able to work, i had to be home with her.
We moved to a different city the summer i graduated and my girlfriend got a job fairly quickly(working in IT, she has a masters degree). After my daughter started kindergarden i simply put was looking for a job. I have a bachelors in various media stuff so i was looking for anything like that, design, producing, holding a mic - whatever, anything i was qualified for. The city we live in is a bit smaller then the capitol where we lived earlier, Oslo. And needless to say it´s in Oslo my entire industry operates and i even had an internship for six months during college at one of the best VFX studios and i am quite sure i could´ve landed a job there once i graduated had i still lived there. This has made me hate the decision to move her but also made me hate my stupid decision of going into media, i should´ve gone into comp sci or some other IT stuff.
So i didn´t get a job, and weeks turned into months - still no job. People didn´t reject me based on qualification it was simply that the few small businesses that did what i was qualified to do, weren´t hiring and the market wasn´t that big here. Now anyone who has been unemployed, and doesn´t want to be unemployed, knows that it sucks. After a while you feel terrible, you feel like a burden to your family and your self confidence starts to slip away(mine is completely gone by now). My girlfriend has been working all through my college period since she was done with her masters and scored a nice job asap. I like to believe we just about did 50/50 on the bills at this time since i worked part time and had student loans and scholarship that went to just living simply put. However when we had to travel and such she would chip in more since i simply wasn´t very able to. As such she has been semi supporting me for pretty much our entire relationship. She has atleast made the most money so to say.
Now, i understand her when she says that she has difficulty dealing with being with someone who's unemployed, she struggles to cope with it, it annoys her and whatnot. I get this, it would annoy me to probably. However, when we argue, and we argue more and more about me not having a job the longer time goes on, it's like that Dane Cook clip about women being brain ninjas. She loses all sense of restraint and just says a bunch of stuff, hurtfull things that degrade me and stomps on my confidence(she knows i feel like shit for being unemployed for instance) and i know she doesn´t mean these things, i say stupid shit when i´m angry too. But the problem is i have started to believe these things she says. Just tonight she said that she was ashamed of me infront of her coworkers and lies to them saying i have a job, when i infact don´t. This hurt, tremendously. Hearing that the one you love is ashamed of you, that they lie about who you are - that's just killer.
I already feel like her entire family(whom we spend a lot of time with) thinks i´m a useless piece of shit for being unemployed. All of these feelings now got "verified" in my mind and i feel even more like garbage. My self confidence is just rock bottom. So in short i feel useless, like a burden and us arguing doesn´t really help either, infact it makes it ten times worse since i feel so guilty affecting my family with it and all that. If i was single and had no kid this wouldn´t bring me down this much. But the guilt coupled with everything else has just destroyed me and i have constant anxiety, can´t sleep and i don´t want to socialize either since i feel that everyone just thinks i´m a useless piece of shit. I also have no friends whatsoever since i went to college far away by commute so i didn't socialize much(2,5 hours by train - one way) and i´m not home in Sweden much so all my friends there have simply moved on and faded away from my radar.
The good news is that this is an easy fix, i am very certain that once i get a job i will feel a lot better and the arguing will stop. Just today i´ve applied for four jobs so i am fairly active in the job hunt and have lowered my standards considerably, i´m just one step away from scrubbing toilets. Yet i have done this for some time now and still no job which kills me. Now i am not some conspiracy theorist thinking the entire world is against me, the government sucks, recession is at fault bla bla etc, i know i will eventually get a job. I just need to get a little bit lucky and have them pick up my application out of 50 applications.
We moved to a different city the summer i graduated and my girlfriend got a job fairly quickly(working in IT, she has a masters degree). After my daughter started kindergarden i simply put was looking for a job. I have a bachelors in various media stuff so i was looking for anything like that, design, producing, holding a mic - whatever, anything i was qualified for. The city we live in is a bit smaller then the capitol where we lived earlier, Oslo. And needless to say it´s in Oslo my entire industry operates and i even had an internship for six months during college at one of the best VFX studios and i am quite sure i could´ve landed a job there once i graduated had i still lived there. This has made me hate the decision to move her but also made me hate my stupid decision of going into media, i should´ve gone into comp sci or some other IT stuff.
So i didn´t get a job, and weeks turned into months - still no job. People didn´t reject me based on qualification it was simply that the few small businesses that did what i was qualified to do, weren´t hiring and the market wasn´t that big here. Now anyone who has been unemployed, and doesn´t want to be unemployed, knows that it sucks. After a while you feel terrible, you feel like a burden to your family and your self confidence starts to slip away(mine is completely gone by now). My girlfriend has been working all through my college period since she was done with her masters and scored a nice job asap. I like to believe we just about did 50/50 on the bills at this time since i worked part time and had student loans and scholarship that went to just living simply put. However when we had to travel and such she would chip in more since i simply wasn´t very able to. As such she has been semi supporting me for pretty much our entire relationship. She has atleast made the most money so to say.
Now, i understand her when she says that she has difficulty dealing with being with someone who's unemployed, she struggles to cope with it, it annoys her and whatnot. I get this, it would annoy me to probably. However, when we argue, and we argue more and more about me not having a job the longer time goes on, it's like that Dane Cook clip about women being brain ninjas. She loses all sense of restraint and just says a bunch of stuff, hurtfull things that degrade me and stomps on my confidence(she knows i feel like shit for being unemployed for instance) and i know she doesn´t mean these things, i say stupid shit when i´m angry too. But the problem is i have started to believe these things she says. Just tonight she said that she was ashamed of me infront of her coworkers and lies to them saying i have a job, when i infact don´t. This hurt, tremendously. Hearing that the one you love is ashamed of you, that they lie about who you are - that's just killer.
I already feel like her entire family(whom we spend a lot of time with) thinks i´m a useless piece of shit for being unemployed. All of these feelings now got "verified" in my mind and i feel even more like garbage. My self confidence is just rock bottom. So in short i feel useless, like a burden and us arguing doesn´t really help either, infact it makes it ten times worse since i feel so guilty affecting my family with it and all that. If i was single and had no kid this wouldn´t bring me down this much. But the guilt coupled with everything else has just destroyed me and i have constant anxiety, can´t sleep and i don´t want to socialize either since i feel that everyone just thinks i´m a useless piece of shit. I also have no friends whatsoever since i went to college far away by commute so i didn't socialize much(2,5 hours by train - one way) and i´m not home in Sweden much so all my friends there have simply moved on and faded away from my radar.
The good news is that this is an easy fix, i am very certain that once i get a job i will feel a lot better and the arguing will stop. Just today i´ve applied for four jobs so i am fairly active in the job hunt and have lowered my standards considerably, i´m just one step away from scrubbing toilets. Yet i have done this for some time now and still no job which kills me. Now i am not some conspiracy theorist thinking the entire world is against me, the government sucks, recession is at fault bla bla etc, i know i will eventually get a job. I just need to get a little bit lucky and have them pick up my application out of 50 applications.
The feeling of wanting to die
I've always been of those that consider suicide to be a selfish way out, always thinking and believing that no matter how hard things get, how bad you might feel, that death will not solve anything but only cause misery for your loved ones.
Now as mentioned in the background part, i´ve been feeling very very bad for a long period of time and an argument with my girlfriend triggered this in me for real, for the first time about three weeks ago but also tonight after yet another argument. First i will try to explain how this felt and the morbid fascination i have for it but also what made me feel a lot better.
First of all, imagine you have a knot in your stomach, a problem brewing(you have an important assignment due tomorrow which you´re gonna fail since you procastrinated, your car is broken and you dont have the cash to fix it etc) and multiply that a few times and that´s a depression. Now imagine the feeling we´ve all had when this weight disappears, the problem is solved and all the weight comes of your shoulders. The feeling of relief when your'e done with your university exams and you did fine, now comes summer holidays for a while - that feeling. Now, when i thought of killing myself this feeling came to me. Like a calm breeze it swept over me, the feeling that this would end all the pain and all my problems. I would finally be "free", and after constant anxiety and worrying this was a great feeling to have.
Normally when i have thought the thought "maybe i should just kill myself" a couple of "defenses" have always turned up in my mind. The strongest being that this would affect my daughter(she's 1,5 years old). Not that i won't see her again for my own sake(thinking of oneself is the first thing that goes away so to say) but more for her sake, that i would cause her pain. And as anyone that´s a parent can attest you cannot even bear the thought of causing your child pain, even the mere thought hurts you almost physically - it's that strong. However what made me realize that i was in bad shape was that when i thought of this affecting my daughter - i felt nothing. I did not feel this pain or empathy for her. It was just nothing, i did not care. I cared in a logical sense but emotionally there was nothing. Hence this "line of defense" was gone.
Then there is logic. Now i imagine if some people do not have a very strong logical sense that when the first lines, the emotional lines fail then they act upon their impulse. However mine hasn´t failed me yet.
So as i was sitting here, emotionally trashed and weirdly aware of my situation somehow logic came into play to stop me from doing anything. There was a logical voice in my head just going "you actually enjoy living even if you don´t feel like it now". And i truly did not feel like living atm, all the joys of life just made me feel nothing. I was still feeling terrible, i was still getting the feeling and sensation of relief thinking about it and i wanted nothing but the pain to end, but the reasoning made sense. I do normally enjoy living, i know i do i just can´t feel it right at this moment. It's logical hence it must be true.
So i started googling along the lines "how to let someone know you're suicidal" - something like that. Since i felt that i had to talk to someone about this but i wasn´t sure how to do so, internet to the rescue. And it did in fact turn out to be an actual rescue. The site that gave me comfort was this: http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/ it's just a short post but it's very non emotional, it´s a bunch of logical arguments and statements. The first thing that started to ease it over was this passage:
Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain.
That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could.
This talked to the logical sense i had a few moments before and it built on it, so being suicdal doesn´t neccessarilly mean i want to die? Everything piling up also made sense. That helped a lot and i connected that to my logical voice so to say since it was still there and this part also connected how that reasoning in my mind had gone "i dont want to live right now but i normaly enjoy living"
The post then continues with a few more arguments about why you shouldn´t kill yourself and what sealed it for me was this:
People often turn to suicide because they are seeking relief from pain. Remember that relief is a feeling. And you have to be alive to feel it. You will not feel the relief you so desperately seek, if you are dead.
Again, logic. When i read this i sorta woke up. I was still feeling bad, i still felt suicidal but my "emotional defense" came right back. Sure killing myself would end the pain, but i would not be around to feel the relief now would i? I literally said this to myself in my head going "my god, that i actually didn´t think about that, how stupid of me".
Now was this page worded this way on purpose, to intentionally avoid all the "oh but you have so much to live for!" crap and instead speak to a persons logical sense? Does everyone have this logical and rational voice of reason in the back of their heads but it simply doesn´t always shout louder then the emotional one?
I am quite fascinated by the split in my mind on this. How one part has all but abandoned hope yet through sheer reasoning self preservation prevails. Because if this logical sense or voice or whatever you prefer to call it would not exist, i am fairly certain something would have happened to me or rather me to myself. Whether it´d be an attempt to simply get attention or to actually end things i am not sure but i am sure of the fact that yes, something would have happened. One can also discuss that i really don´t want to die based on this voice which is obvious, i don´t want to die, nobody actually wants to stop living. But at times it feels like it´s the only way out.
So here i am, still feeling like killing myself, albeit a bit less then before emotionally so to say, but the logic in my mind is strong and prevents me from doing it which again is morbidly fascinating. Writing this felt good, it´s the first time i actually mention it to anyone, even if it's just strangers on the internet, so thank you for reading.
