Shitting Blood

Well, not really. Typically, when I wipe, there’s bright red on the paper. Sometimes a few fine dots, sometimes a splotch the size of a pencil eraser that makes it clear that holy shit I’m bleeding from my asshole. I had a doctor check it out, he says it’s a tear in the anus. How the fuck did that happen. I don’t recall sanding my asshole with cheap one-ply five times a day.

I looked up how haemorrhoids happen. One cause is prolonged sitting. That is probably it. For months I’d sit on my ass playing World of Warcraft for hours every day. I never thought that would lead to me grinding shit directly into my bloodstream every time I take a dump. I’m fucking twenty-three. This shit isn’t supposed to happen yet (no pun intended).

Then again, a lot has happened in the last three years. In 2014 I was hospitalized as a suicide risk. In 2015 I was hospitalized for viral myocarditis. Woke up one Sunday morning feeling like a truck was parked on my chest, went to the hospital and was told by the doctor that it was probably heartburn from all the meds I’d been taking for the gastroenteritis I had that week. But, she said, we’ll do some blood tests just to be sure. Then she comes back and tells me I need to be put in the ICU because my heart muscle is dying. First time I had morphine. It didn’t do anything to stop the pain. Anyway, made a full recovery; it’s like it never happened.

Writing

Man, I wrote some pretty good shit when I was depressed.

Well, good by my own standards anyway. Sentences that were actually interesting to read. Paragraphs that clearly conveyed a message, that related whatever part of the human condition I was experiencing. Articles that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Now, I’m healthier. Memories that use to feel like a shotgun blast to the chest now make me laugh. I still have depressive episodes, but I get light-speed angry instead of cripplingly sad. I consistently wake up early. I go to the gym often. I study much more than I used to. I bounce back from rejection faster.

But I don’t write.

Thanks to continual mentions by delicioustacos, I’ve been reading Bukowski. Specifically Women. It’s brilliant. The story of a man who lives only to exist. To drink and fuck women. A lot of women. With zero effort. A man who could openly admit that the majority of humanity bored him to tears and that the only thing that made this soul-crushing thresher of a thing called life tolerable was the escape of alcohol and easy pussy. Reading my own, old material, when I had serious mental illness that continually deteriorated, I feel the same kind of empathy that I do with Bukowski. That comfort that comes from knowing that you are not alone; that someone else shares your flaws. And it’s ok.

Is good writing borne of suffering? I don’t know.

Studying

Studying fucking blows.

I don’t get it. I can get up at five in the morning, every morning, and be at the gym by six. I can bust my ass pushing my body to failure for ninety minutes. I can keep lifting weights even though the mental fatigue is so bad it feels like I haven’t slept for two days. Like someone tied a gigantic weight around my mind and I have to renew my will to live before every set. I can do all of that, week after week, but I can’t fucking study.

I can walk up to random girls I’ve never seen before and ask them out even though every fiber in my being is yelling at me ‘dude just go home and jerk off don’t do this‘. I can endure rejection and anxiety and self-doubt; I can weather the emotional shitstorm that comes from not getting laid in a year and then trying it on with someone that I have no idea of whether or not they like me back. I can do that, but I can’t fucking study.

The point I’m trying to make is, is that I can endure pain and discipline and all the noble, self-inflicted hardship that comes with being ‘disciplined’ or whatever. Simply sitting at a desk and paying attention to a video and just watching and listening for more than ten minutes at a time, that, that is fucking murder. And I don’t know why.

It’s so frustrating. Like, I have all of this shit worked out in my head already. The reasons why I have to sit down and work to understand things and commit them to memory. The dream I have mapped out in my head is that I want to obtain a bursary to study a graduate degree in affective neuroscience somewhere in a first-world country. To do that I need good grades. To get good grades I have to attend class and study. The former is easy; just show up and sit there and endure the varying levels of educational skill that each lecture has for forty-five minutes at a time.

But studying, man. It’s fucking impossible.

God Bless the Internet

Thoughts: Dysphoria

So it turns out I am so fundamentally fucked up that I may have to be hospitalized.

Well, probably not. It was mentioned in the emergency therapy session I had today. When my father made the wholly reasonable request that he’d only provide me with more money when I could present receipts of all my expenses, I threatened to kill myself. I asked him, when you want to hang yourself with a belt, what do you do with the end that’s not noosed around your neck. He responded by calling my psychologist and scheduling an impromptu meeting. I have no idea how he remained as calm as he did.

Why haven’t I written a new post.

Because there’s too much to cover. I don’t know where to begin. Do I cover past, present or future? There’s so much shit going on in my life right now, to try and right some half-funny half-asspained blog post covering it all would be impossible.

Closure

So I get back from NY. I land Wednesday night; it’s 6-hour time zone change. Two weeks of unprotected sex, drug use, neuropsychoanalysis lectures and trying to figure out how the fuck the subway works. It was spectacular. Considering I nearly attempted suicide three days before I left, this kind of experience is supposed to turn my life around. Give me a new perspective. Show me what’s out there. And it did.

Well, kind of.

Friday afternoon I’m opening the door to the IT lab I always go to. I used to go there to fuck around: mindless internet surfing, video game binges. The electronic numbness before I’d drive home and get high and eat shittons of McDonalds. Not this time, though. I’m a changed man. I’m going to work.

This door has this little sensor where you have to hold your student card so it authenticates you and briefly unlocks the door. I pull out my wallet and hold it against it. Blue light, flashes, flashes, flashes, green light. I grab the handle and look up. Robyn is standing right in front of me, looking me in the eye. Out of fucking nowhere. She’s kind of smiling, gives me this half expectant look of ‘are you going to take out your earphones and say hi’. My knee-jerk reaction is to briefly plaster on a fake smile and open the door for her. She enters, walks to her desk, I walk to mine. I’m stuck thinking of her for the next hour.

What the fuck, I think.

NY in a Nutshell

My Mind’s Rusty

I uninstalled Dota. Again. Deleted Steam, Dota, and the few dozen Dota casts I had saved. I decided: no more escapes.

Of course, shit ain’t that easy. I’ve spent my entire life discovering and habituating methods of escape; they’re probably hiding in every thing I do from dawn till dusk.

I stopped inundating my psyche with gold and levels and kill-to-death ratios, and inadvertently used information instead.

NoFap and the Finish Line

So I stopped masturbating just over a week ago.

I wanted to cut out one of my escapes. You know, so I can get back to real life. I sit with screens and play video games or fuck around on the internet or watch porn so I can forget just how empty my days are. The despair peaks right at the end of the day when I get back to my flat. I’m tired. My adrenal glands are pumped dry by stimulants. I guilt-trip myself for having done nothing productive that day, that I effectively extended my stay in hell for another twenty-four hours. So I let my sober-self press the eject button. I roll a joint and get into bed. I watch a DotA cast while chowing down on a shitload of McDonalds I picked up on the way home. I feel like masturbating, so I do. I keep watching videos until I pass out.

What’s great about this routine is that, for the most part, there’s no pain. I breathe in the smoke and let the cannabinoids punch through my alveolar walls into my bloodstream. A few seconds later, bam, I’m gone. No more angst, no more despair, no more hopelessness. Just a space where I feel no guilt indulging in impulsive gratification. On the other hand, it’s a sad fucking way to live.