Right now, I am searching for a reason to live. I am constantly lonely and bored. I constantly struggle with apathy. Occasionally I feel a need to try to improve myself, but am unable to maintain motivation for such goals beyond a few hours. Work feels unrewarding. All of my efforts feel pointless. I feel worthless, ugly, stupid, and unlovable.
What do I want? The reality is that all I really want is to be left alone. I want to go to bed and stay there. I want to dream and never wake up.
The selfish, romantic dreamer in me hopes that, while lying and waiting for death, someone will come and rescue me. Someone who loves me truly, cares for me endlessly, and has boundless patience. Someone who will guide me and hold my hand through every difficulty.
I miss my angel, whether she ever really existed or not. The few times she’s come to me in my dreams and hallucinations were the only times I felt truly cared for and loved.
I want to be happy, but I don’t know what, if anything, could make me happy. Everything I have tried only brought me temporary joy and more struggles. I’d inevitably become overwhelmed with my struggles, and then I’d become even more depressed than when I started. This has been an ongoing pattern since I was a child.
I am now in a place of complete apathy. I have an intense reluctance to do much of anything. Doing things may lead to hope, and hope will only lead to further disappointment. I feel like I can’t handle anymore disappointments.
The only reason I even bother trying to work and maintain my job is to support my two housemates. Not that I contribute much, but at least I can ease the burdens I place on them. Plus I fear that if I allowed myself to die then it would cause them great distress. So I continue getting up in the morning for them. I fear that one day even my concern for them will no longer be enough.
Something that really helped me when I was feeling really apathetic - you don’t have to be hopeful about what the future holds, if you can at least be curious. You have all the time in the world to end your life if that’s what you decide to do. Are you at all curious that something in your life might change if you live another month? Could you be curious if anything in your life might change if you live another year? Was there ever anything good that happened in your life, and would you have missed that if you had ended your life earlier? Are you curious if that might be true about something that could happen to you in the future?
Don’t worry about having a powerful hope for being happy in the future. Hope is hard to come by and harder to maintain. Can you just be curious? Is it possible I will miss something interesting in my life if I stop living? If so, why not stick around for another month or two to see if something interesting happens that you would have missed.
When I was at my lowest, I struggled to have hope that my life could get better. But I enjoy learning and experiencing new things, and I could cultivate curiosity about whether anything in my life would be worth experiencing in the future, even if I couldn’t cultivate hope.
Another way to think about it is what I call life Bushido. Bushido is a Buddhist/samurai philosophy premised on the idea that you should do everything in life as if you will already lose or die. If you are going into a swordfight and you assume you will lose and die, then you have nothing to fear because you already know you will die. So you can let go of your hold-ups and just give it your best shot. If you fail, then you’re no worse off than when you started.
If you can reliably predict that you’re never going to find happiness or love or fulfillment, then you lose nothing by trying to get these things and failing. If you’re already doomed to not find happiness, then trying and failing will have the same end result, so why not give it a shot? If you lose, you’ll be right back where you started. If you have no reason to live, you have nothing to lose in trying. Make an online dating profile. Message people you might be interested in. If you go on 100 terrible dates and get rejected 100 times, you’ll be right back where you started and you will have lost nothing. But you will have gained some interesting experiences, and you will have gained some insight into your life.