I Can't Take it, Part II

"You think you can just wish me away, that's not how it works."

--Nora

I Can't Take It

"You can't control me, Lace, I'm a voice in your fucking head."

--Nora

Future

I don't want to die, but suicide is the only future I see for myself.

Any Less Alone

"I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: 'It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.' "

--Tim Kreider

Cycle of Fear

"It’s more like the view from the top of the Empire State Building, of people as infinitesimal dots circulating ceaselessly through a grid. Eventually we have to descend back to street level, rejoin the milling mass and take up our lives; you lock up your bike and become hostage to the hours again. But it’s at those moments that I become briefly conscious of what I actually am — a fleeting entity stripped of ego and history in an evanescent present, like a man running in frames of celluloid, his consciousness flickering from one instant to the next."
--Tim Kreider

Real Life

"Real life, in my experience, is not rife with epiphanies, let alone lessons; what little we learn tends to come exactly too late, gets contradicted by the next blunder, or is immediately forgotten and has to be learned all over again. More and more, the only things that seem to me worth writing about are the ones I don’t understand. Sometimes the most honest and helpful thing a writer can do is to acknowledge that some problems are insoluble, that life is hard and there aren’t going to be any answers, that he’s just as screwed-up and clueless as the rest of us. Or I don’t know, maybe it’s just me."
--Tim Kreider

Dying Young

I have this overwhelming, deep seated belief that I'm supposed to die young. I've felt this for as long as I can remember.

It's just been a matter of when to do it.

Some Reason To Live

It's a horrible disease. I keep clinging to some reason to live.

If I go back to Stanford, the doctors will want to do more ECT, where the treatment is as bad as the illness--memory less, confusion, cognitive effects.

I think about my life, where I'm going, where I've been. At nineteen, I wanted a graduate degree.

Now, I can't pass a community college course without taking it multiple times first.

Everyone has hopes and dreams that don't work out. People adjust and move on. They find new interests and goals--or they make do with what they have. They live with the cold resentment and disappointment. For others, nothing is ever good enough.

I feel like life has just moves on without me. I get up every day, and people are busy going about the world, and nothing I do matters because I can't affect anything--I'm silently behind some glass--banging against some window--ignored by the rest of the population. I exist--but only as a ghost which no one sees nor hears. As goes my days. I can touch nothing but my cage.

And so is my deep sense of isolation.

Essential Absurdity

"THE operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity."
--Tim Kreider

Tinder, Your Welcome

I say, "Hello."

He-shall-remain-nameless says, "Gross."

"In general or something specific?" I wait then add, "Please--do lend me your criticisms."

He clicks "unmatch" so we can't chat.