Wednesday 1/29/20
It's early. I am tired and cold. I don't use the heat often to save money, so I'm wearing a jacket and my Vaccines beanie. Sadly, I wear the beanie a lot indoors even when it's not cold because it helps a little with my terrors and anxiety, like there is something--and this sounds awful--that cares about me and likes me a little. On account of the warmth I feel this way I think. It's not good when you think a hat is the the closest you come to receiving kindness. Not good. I feel my grip on life sliding away and I am more scared than ever. I think of death constantly. I think of myself in the past tense, as though I have already died. Yesterday I was talking to John and I said to him that he would have to agree that if he was guaranteed that this was how it would always be, that I would be better off dead. I said to him that fifty years ago--that is, before he was born--he was fine, he wasn't tortured every day, whatever he was it was okay. This isn't a life, there is no quality of life.
Constant pain and torture and working harder than anyone has ever worked and making the best art and work anyone has ever made--and so much more of it than everyone--and being this unique force of genius and only getting punished for it, hated, buried, living in filth and poverty, having no friends, not even getting lip-service, token level decency from the people one calls friends, isn't a life. I said to him, "the only reason to remain alive right now is if this changes, for it to be worth it then. But if we know it will always be like this, you have to admit, death is better. Unless you are being selfish and you just want to know I am here." And he said, no, he wasn't going to agree to this to someone who was on the verge of throwing himself off of a building. I wish he would have. Not because it would make me more likely to throw myself off of a building. But I just want to be honest about the situation. I don't want to pretend it's something else. On dating sites you'll get asked stock questions like "what makes you happy?" I'm too complex a person at any time to just say to you, even if it were true, "the wind at my neck in autumn in the woods of Gloucester." I'm too much of a totality for me to have answers like that to any stock question.
But the answer is nothing. I have not had a single second of non-agony in eight years. These people own me. They own my soul. Everything that could make me happy is predicated on not being in this situation while I am this person able to do what I can do. You know what I have been thinking lately? About getting a gun and shooting myself. And what gives me pause is my brain. That I would destroy in one fraction of a second this uniquely powerful brain, a brain humanity has never known. And it would just be smoking chunks and pieces, and all of the stories that were in that brain, all of those worlds upon worlds, their perfect ordering, all of their invention, their wisdom, would exist in one moment and then all gone in less than one second. These are the thoughts I wake up to. I try to hang on. That means creating. I create more, I get better, I have nowhere for the work to go, and when I create more and better, they hate me more.