PERSONAL

0

4,580

Near Death

7 years ago6,383 words

I've felt for a while now that I was in some kind of sunset period of my story; that my life was nearing its end. That end - which will likely be self-inflicted - feels closer than ever, but is that such a bad thing?

I've never been mentally healthy or well-adjusted, but I've been deteriorating gradually during the last couple of years. Suicide has been incessantly on my mind, but there's always been a thread that connected me to life, made me hesitate when I considered it because of what I'd lose and who I'd hurt.

However, that thread has now broken. The only real-world friend I had has finished with me, and cut off contact.

This hurts.

I can understand why, I think. She wasn't exactly forthcoming with all the details, but it was clear that she was having strong doubts about me since long before we went to Korea together. While she stuck with me while we were there, I suppose my aberrant, anxious, annoying attitude to everything was the thick tree trunk that finally broke the camel's back. She stopped replying to my messages - she'd replied without fail in the past - and stopped messaging me, which of course made me worry what was wrong. Whether it was me, her, circumstance, I didn't know. Eventually she did get back to me to say bluntly that she's done with me, and that's that.

I've mostly been in bed since then, reflecting on things. My various inadequacies, the state of my life, my mistakes. The hopelessness of the future. The allure of death, and what might wait beyond. I suppose my lack of attachments and responsibilities gives me the luxury of such prolonged bouts of self-pity.

I've been planning to end my life tonight; I made the decision almost two weeks ago. I wanted to give it some time so it wasn't impulsive, so I could tidy up any loose ends if indeed there are any. I don't know, now that the day is upon me, whether I'll go through with my plan right now, but I'm certainly assuming that I'm very much in the epilogue of this story, that at best there'll be a brief delay before I do eventually take the plunge into the unknown.

Why I want to die

I know there are certain kinds of (almost always young) people who respond to the loss of a significant person in their life - usually a partner who's dumped them - with melodrama; "They're GONE! I can't LIVE without them!! Life is AGONY if I cannot be in their ARMS!! I'll NEVER LOVE AGAIN!!!". That kind of thing. Then they usually find someone else within a month and the cycle of intense, clinging 'love' and tormented despair begins anew. Maybe. I don't know. I'm speaking from limited experience.

There are elements of that in my mortal motivations - I do feel that my friend was rather irreplaceable, and my emotional dependence on her was (far too) deep - but it's only a part of it; the final push, perhaps. Mostly I'm considering it because an assessment of my mind and my life overall reveals few, tentative, largely hypothetical reasons to stay, and numerous overwhelming and very real reasons to give up.

It stems primarily from being poorly socially adjusted; from being an alien in this world, longing for belonging that I've never found. I'm aware that this is part of the human condition, this feeling of searching for a missing piece of yourself externally, but most people seem better able than me to succeed in finding at least something. They find 'their people' somehow - or at least a partner, or a group of friends, or even a place of employment where they have a slot in which to fit - and in doing so they acquire moorings to the mortal world. I've noticed that even other supposed 'outcasts' seem to find other like-minded outcasts in a way that I've never been able to... but I think that's mostly because of the way my mind works.

I long for connections more than anything, but I'm scared of making them. This isn't a healthy combination. It isn't that I fear commitment or anything; it's more that I feel that most people lack some ineffable quality that makes them particularly interesting to me. So I see relationships in terms of black and white. Either they do have that spark - and I can count the number of people who ever had on one hand - and I become overly, clingingly attached, and jealous if their connection to me isn't as exclusive and intense as mine is to them, or they don't have that spark and I fear the thought of connection because I assume... well, I suppose that it isn't possible. That interacting with them will feel like an energy-sapping chore, an unwanted responsibility, that they'll judge me for things I say anyway, that there's too little overlap between our desired life paths or attitudes for us to see eye to eye and feel like kindred spirits.

Or I assume a connection would be barren because they simply don't have anything that I particularly want. I've been saying for years that I want a partner, and that I don't even consider connections that can't lead to that destination, but I think it's more about longing for love... Wanting a partner is very much a part of that, but opposite-sex friendships appeal to me if there's a chance for intimacy like compliments and cuddles, whereas a more hard-hearted bond with another man doesn't really seem the right shape to fill the hole in my heart. I know that's single-minded, that by rejecting people who've tried to befriend me in favour of saving my energies for someone with that spark has only burned bridges and denied me of opportunities.

Mostly I've just struggled with this feeling of differentness though. I'm aware that we're all unique, idiosyncratic individuals and we're never going to find someone who's our exact clone, but there are several big things that feed into this disconnection. I've written about it all before, many times, but I suppose this feels like a summary of this life I've lived, if it is to be the end soon, so I'll go over them all again.

One is the feeling that I'm some mewling, timid little deer fawn in a world full of rhinos clad in carapaces, clashing honed horns in constant combat. I perceive humanity as fundamentally rough, valuing strength and assertiveness, glorifying 'badass' attitudes, equating fighting with entertainment or necessity. I'm aware that any attitude that makes such a broad generalisation about the entire species isn't going to be 'true' - or rather, there'll be innumerable exceptions - but this is an example of a 'core belief' that my mind has been programmed with over the course of my life, and which I find hard to shed despite realising its artificial subjectivity.

It takes the greatest hold over my life by manifesting as a fear of masculinity, and in turn an aversion towards connecting with other people who are male. That's ruling out a huge swathe of potential connections already, but again it's a core belief - built up slowly over my whole life - that feels essentially impossible to shake.

I see myself as fundamentally unmasculine, but I see the opposite sex as wanting that kind of masculinity in a partner, so my lack of it makes it impossible that anyone would want me (another core belief, another overgeneralisation). I don't mean that I think all women want some muscle-pumping macho man, and I know there are people who value and look instead for traits like 'intelligence' or 'kindness', but I feel that masculinity is fundamentally rooted in assertiveness, and if you lack that, you're going to activate a woman's motherly instincts rather than her libido, evoking compassionate pity but not lust. I can't really imagine a woman worrying if she's good enough for a guy she perceives as essentially some kind of flaccid milquetoast (at least I can amuse myself with the vocabulary I've accumulated). "I can't protect or provide" is the succinct way my mind has been encapsulating the idea recently. I see other guys as threats; as superior competition, mostly, but also as potential sources of cuts to my stupidly sensitive thin skin (dealing with hundreds of emotionally immature young males on Fig Hunter - while I myself was emotionally immature - led to the development of much of these biased, distorted beliefs).

This aversion to the apparent 'barbarism' of humanity runs deeper than I feel it does for most. I was reminded while writing that previous paragraph of /Rick and Morty/; of the relationship between the mother and father whose names I can't remember (it's been a while since I saw it). I have mixed feelings about Rick and Morty. It's... interesting enough to me that I watched the first two series in their entirety, but I spent much of that time avoiding looking at the screen because of the copious amounts of violence, and a lot of the time feeling uncomfortable about the overall vibe the show gave off. I'd describe it as very masculine... but I'm aware that I'm using my own warped biases to summarise it like that and other people might not ascribe the same connotations to that word as to that show. I don't know. That relationship, though, portrayed the 'choleric' woman's frustrations at her wimpy husband as essentially empowering, or at least that's the feeling that I got; I know it's a comedy and shouldn't be taken 'seriously', but comedy arises from dysfunction, and in this case the man's lack of masculinity was seen as the essential dysfunction. Maybe you saw it differently; this is just an example of how my mind sees the world. Rick and Morty is popular, which just exacerbates the feeling that my fundamental values aren't like other people's.

Also, I'm aware that a large number of people would call themselves "shy", or might be meek or insipid by nature, but it seems they aspire towards - or value - traits such as "confidence" and brutality in a way that I don't. There's just this roughness to the world that feels so harsh to me... How people truly enjoy things like Rick and Morty (to use one of many examples), how they turn to drugs and drink to tame their terrors, how they spice up their language with profanity, which to me feels like weapons in word form brandished frequently to show that they're not soft. So many people seem to boast about how they should not be "messed with", lest the aggressor "regret it", things like that. Everyone's armoured - metaphorically - for protection, because their experiences have taught them that they need to be. My mind cherry-picks these things and assumes they apply to the world as a whole; I notice the exceptions but don't remember them. It's like that with all core beliefs, from a belief in God to a belief that you're worthless.

I see myself as soft, 'genuine' in the sense that I bare my belly openly, without that armour, leading to frustration both that I'm the only one who seems to be doing it, and due to the shame of feeling like I'm essentially waggling my bare genitals around in a way that nobody actually appreciates anyway. To put it crudely.

But I'm rambling. There's also the fact that there are many typical things in the world that I've never done or can't do. Basic life skills or resources I've never acquired. I can't drive, I can't cook, I don't have my own place. I'm cut off from my relatives. I've never been to a wedding or a funeral. I've only had one romantic relationship. I've never lived with anyone other than my parents in the long term. I've never had a job, and my lack of employment history would likely make it difficult to get a 'good' one. I don't even know what I want to do.

There's also the strong desire to not hurt anyone; pacifism, consideration, that kind of thing. But it - like so many of the rules in my programming - is set to an extreme value, and as a result I just don't contact people because I don't want to 'bother' them. I end up hurting people anyway because of my various failings, and then torment myself for having failed to live up to this value I hold so dear.

Deep-rooted perfectionism - and the frustration that arises when things aren't exactly as I feel they should be - pervades all of these beliefs, and makes it incredibly difficult to be truly satisfied with anything. Everything always feels like it should be different. Event on the rare occasions I've got something I thought I wanted, all I can see is the fraction that isn't quite as it 'should' be.

Overall, these mental ingredients have come together to form a mind that either resists connections, or which those who are 'lucky' enough to make it through my many filters eventually learn to hate, largely due to my fears, aversions, and anxieties.

I'm aware my condition could be summarised by mental illness labels like Social Anxiety Disorder or Avoidant Personality Disorder (which are essentially the same thing), and of course capital-D Depression has filled the hole in my heart where love should go, but 'treatments' for those conditions - like drugs or therapy - wouldn't really 'cure' me because the issue is with beliefs. I wonder if there's a drug that can turn atheists into theists? Or a therapy? I know it's supposedly possible to rewire these beliefs, and therapy does exist that aims to do that, but stupidly one of my core beliefs is the belief that I have too many faulty beliefs to be worth changing - it feels like trying to tweak a picture of a dragon until it looks like a portrait of a face - so it's not really worth the effort. It'd take too long, be impossible, basically. Plus I lack in-person social support to keep me going through the process. Oh how invaluable that is.

Both my ex and my I-suppose-now-ex-friend left me for essentially the same reasons, and I can understand why. I don't really want to live with this mind anymore either. They could at least escape it and improve once rid of its poison, but the only escape I could have is through death. Which is why I'm considering it.

Also I have a brain tumour. So there's that, on top of everything else.

So overall, I feel like I need connections to live, but my mind is so repellent and so perfectionistic that I'll never find the sorts of connections that I want. Plus I'm getting old, so the available options are dwindling in all areas of life. I could write pages and pages about the ins and outs of my defective programming, but, well, that's the gist. I want to die because I am broken. Because I can't connect in a way that's both healthy and fulfilling to me. Forced connections despite the rare spark would feel like a gay man marrying a woman because he should, or at least that's how it feels. Would he be happy?

I'm scared of death... but I'm more scared of a life spent alone. I'm scared of going back to university, and having to somehow either make new connections when I don't feel I 'deserve' any, or that I'd hurt them with toxic mental makeup anyway, or having to endure the days alone in my titchy little room in the halls of residence, too unpopular to live with friends. On top of that, I'd be terrified of encountering my ex-friend, or seeing her replacing me with others while I cocooned myself in repulsive sorrow.

I've been reading a lot about what might await after death, as if someone planning a trip. Perhaps it's not actually something to fear. I could write looooads about all this since it feels like much of my life has been spent trying to know the unknown or unknowable in some form or another, but I want to cover at least a few things that have been going through my increasingly disconnected mind lately.

After death

Are you familiar with Near Death Experiences (NDEs)? Is your first thought upon reading that that they're a fascinating glimpse into eternity? That they're hallucinations caused by oxygen-starved or DMT-flooded brains? A bit of both? Something else?

I feel as if I've spent my life trying to understand what's beyond life... Like I never had much interest in this world to begin with - many vices hold no appeal to me, and I've never wanted things, really - but anything supernatural or paranormal - especially things that seemed to shed some light beyond the veil - certainly piqued my interest.

At the same time, I'd always been sceptically-minded. I can't really do the faithful believing thing that theists do, nor could I blindly believe in things like Kirlian photography or chakras since they don't stand up to scrutiny, or seem artificial (this despite my earlier talk of the artificiality of my core beliefs being no barrier to my deep acceptance of them).

I've always noticed though that people more often than not fall on one side. Some would entertain the possibility of astral projection... and in turn would collect magic crystals, read auras, see mediums, get Tarot readings, and cast Wiccan spells in crop circles to contact the government who are secretly faerie djinn sorcerers from Planet Zod. Others would embrace evidence-based science, and would scoff at all of the above without giving them a second thought; any effects they might cause must be caused by delusion or known physical laws, obviously.

I've always tried to blend the two... So when I heard about astral projection, for example, rather than screaming "pfah! Hogwash! Black lies straight from the devil's teat! The devil who is just a myth woven by morons!" and spitting in the poor person's face, I decided to give it a try. If people say it works for them, that they can have these experiences, how could you possibly call yourself open-minded if you discount them without investigation??

NDEs are widely reported - even more often now that it's possible to rescue people from closer to the brink of death than before - and while no two are the same, they do have some intriguing components in common. There's the well-known stuff like the tunnel of light and greeting dead loved ones, but what I find more fascinating are the truly transcendent aspects that people report. Many say that the experience is more vivid than reality; that by comparison, this feels like a dream. They say they can see colours they've never seen before, see in all directions, understand information deeply without language or time getting in the way. Time doesn't exist as we know it; they are in an eternal instant, events can be visited at will, like... a buffet, rather than an n-course meal. The 'God' many report encountering seems to be some incomprehensible presence rather than a man in a cloud. The events deeply affect the person, give them a new lease on life. Many feel deeply disappointed when they have to cram their expanded existence back into their limited meat shell; some grow depressed, homesick, say it's like going from an IMAX theatre to a postage-stamp-sized silent monochrome display, things like that. NDEs are remembered long after the experience, even while other memories from the same time period fade.

Perhaps this says a lot about my attitude too, but I don't think most people would be creatively-minded enough to come up with concepts like this by themselves. If their experience mirrored exactly the beliefs they'd been brought up to have - they entered through pearly gates and sat on a big bearded man's lap with grandma - then I'd be more incredulous. That seems to happen too - a person's beliefs very much shape at least the initial parts of the experience - but when we're dealing with something that transcends the bounds of mundane existence, I don't see why that renders the experiences invalid. Perhaps there are multiple paths into the afterlife? Why would there have to be just one for everyone? Like different airports, with their essentially similar but different rules. Perhaps reality is essentially shaped by thoughts, and during the final experience, this is more apparent?

I watched ∞ this discussion ∞ about NDEs, and found it interesting comparing the views of the experiencer, the scholar, the doctor, and the token sceptic. The sceptic displayed the attitude I find so annoying because I can understand it completely. Rolling his eyes at the "obvious nonsense" people were spouting, coming out with things like "there's little to no disagreement in neuroscience about the nature of out-of-body experiences". It bothers me because often these 'mystery solved' attitudes are based on 'evidence' that sort of fits, enough to remove the threat to the established paradigm at least. For example, jet fighter pilots experienced tunnel-of-light effects due to oxygen deprivation... therefore they're exactly the same as NDEs, of course. Mystery solved. We can ignore them gladly now. Never mind the massive differences in the feel of the experience, or the lack of other qualities that make NDEs so fascinating. Or there's the observation that drug trips - like on DMT or other similar hallucinogens - cause transcendent, spiritual experiences; therefore, all such experiences are caused by those drugs acting on the mind, right? Why couldn't it be that those things 'unlink' the mind from the brain, or something similar? Reduce the filter? Reveal the underlying chaos rather than creating it?

The pervading paradigm in modern materialist science is that the brain produces the mind. Anything else is wacko talk, fringe stuff. Because that's how science works. In paradigms. The idea that the Earth orbits the sun was hardly met with open arms, at first. That, though, leads to this bizarre attitude that because something isn't accepted by the mainstream, it must be true; creationists have used similar 'reasoning' to support their own fringe beliefs. Or it's like the God of the gaps argument; because something hasn't been explained yet, the supernatural can easily be slotted there.

But there's the idea that the brain is more like a radio than a piano when it comes to music. It channels - or filters - consciousness from some external source, rather than creating it. This still means that when the brain breaks, the mind does too - it's like having keys missing on your keyboard, and being unable to type certain words even if your fingers still exist - but that there's the possibility that consciousness might in some form survive bodily death. It's an idea that's taken seriously by at least some neuroscientists (David Eagleman comes to mind), and some have invoked quantum mechanics because that's a convenient example of how against commonsense the universe's workings can be at their core.

For a while now, I've seen us being made up of three parts: the body, the mind, and the soul. The body - including the brain - is the hardware, the mind is the software, and the soul is the user. If the hardware or software break, it will impede the user's ability to communicate with the virtual world to which the computer is a portal. But the user themselves remains unaffected. They can get a new computer, but they'll probably lose some or all of the files they had on the other one. Unless perhaps they'd saved some to a cloud. Hmm.

I don't know if that's true, and it's definitely something we can't test scientifically at the moment, but the existence of things like NDEs gives some credence to the idea, so I'm willing to entertain it.

I'm also intrigued by stories of children who report experiences from past lives. They appear often in cultures where reincarnation is an accepted belief, but they occur in cultures where a belief in reincarnation is either unknown or actively seen as sinful too. They're quite intriguing, especially when the child's statements can be traced to the life of some actual person who died, with bits of information they mentioned about them from before the identity of the person was discovered fitting with the eventual discovery.

However, I'm well aware that the sceptic can wave away such stories as mere stories; they're anecdotal, the parents probably encouraged them, there's probably cherry-picking going on in regards to statements that were made in order to force them to fit, the child might have been influenced by something like television or who-knows-what. And it's easy to just stop there if these stories don't fit with your beliefs.

I myself feel conflicted. On the one hand, there's that voice inside that says, well, all of that sort of stuff; that these things can easily be 'explained away' and that all that awaits on the other side of death is oblivion. I think of how you can look up archives of enthusiastic stories about many experiences - UFO sightings, alien abductions, dates with Bigfoot, leprechaun orgies - and the people who report them probably believe as wholeheartedly as NDErs or reborn children that their experience was genuine. I'm also aware of how susceptible the mind is to suggestion or distortion; I'm studying psychology, after all, and I've written before about Derren Brown, who I hold in high regard because of what his performances reveal about how little control we have over our own experiences. The books of neuroscientists like Oliver Sacks are also quite eye-opening in regards to how vastly perceptions of reality or the sense of identity can be warped when brain structures become damaged.

There's also something about the attitude of some of the proponents of NDEs and the like that gets to me. A few years ago, I read a popular NDE book by one Eben Alexander - maybe you've heard of it, or him - and was quite moved by his account, especially since he was a neurosurgeon and was apparently measurably brain dead during the experience. It gave me profound feelings, but I didn't think much more of it at the time.

During my bed-bound investigations of what might lie beyond, though, I watched a couple of videos of him giving talks about his experience. He comes across as boldly charismatic, and his words are meant to evoke emotion. He portrays a clear 'enemy' - materialist dogma - and cultivates a 'we're the few who know the truth' mentality. He reminds me of creationists, like Ken Ham, who pepper their well-prepared, emotive, repetitive speeches with bits of what seem like science in order to give themselves credibility. Further, I read that Eben Alexander had a history of malpractice and was heavily in debt before his experience as a result of being sued for such, and that his 'brain dead' state was more like a delirious stupor. He's also a neurosurgeon, which is to a neuroscientist what a mechanic is to a physicist. Sort of.

So that seemed to lower his credibility a bit in my eyes, and to cast doubt on the validity of NDEs as a whole.

There's a trap here, though. It's one of those logical fallacies, I don't remember what it's called, where you conclude things like "Hitler was a vegetarian, so all vegetarians are bad". If you're a True Believer and you've had experiences with repugnant Internet Atheists (such as myself just a few years ago), you might be led to believe that their acerbic attitudes invalidate their claims. Did you know that Richard Dawkins has been divorced several times and seems to be sexist and prejudiced etc? That means there must be a God!! Because he's a fallible human and therefore what he preaches is wrong, of course. Makes sense, right?

Anyway. I mentioned astral projection earlier, which I found intriguing because it was something supposedly transcendent which could actually be attempted, rather than relying on something extreme as in the case of NDEs. I couldn't believe it was possible though just by reading other people's accounts, but instead of just discounting it altogether because of that, I gave it a try.

I failed, many times. I had these sorts of feelings, like it was going to happen, but I always got scared and pulled back. Or I was confused by the instructions telling me to 'roll out of my body'. What, like rocking side to side? Front to back? Curling in a ball? My mind got in the way. Or sometimes the other person's beliefs did; I'd use YouTube videos of guided meditations, and sometimes they'd start mentioning spinning your chakras or seeing a silver cord and it just made the "oh, this is nonsense" thoughts flood into my mind, ruining any chance I might have had of going along with it.

Eventually, though, I actually did experience something. It wasn't the kind of vivid, life-changing experience that NDErs experience, but it was definitely something new and unusual. I've had dreams before of varying levels of lucidity, but they always feel like dreams, even when I'm able to fly around at will and enjoy the exhilaration of being conscious during it. This wasn't a dream. It's hard to explain what it was because it was so brief... I so wish I could experience it again! But it happened when I'd sort of given up trying, and I'd fallen asleep during or after the guided meditation (which usually meant I'd 'failed'). When I woke up, though, I opened eyes that weren't my own; it was so odd. I got excited and thought "it worked!!", and I remember standing up from my body and sort of walking to the door of my room, trying to open it... but then I 'lost the connection' and woke up normally. I spent the rest of that day laughing to myself about how "none of it really matters anyway" because life's just a game, or something, and... that sounds quite mad when I put it like that, though that's how it felt.

In the discussion I linked to, the sceptical neuroscientist spoke of out of body experiences being reproducible via brain stimulation... but it bothered me that nobody asked about the nature of these, whether the person was actually 'seeing' from a different perspective or whether they simply felt dissociated and like their consciousness was rooted outside themselves even if they still saw from the same eyes. Some people who've had OBEs during NDEs do report veridical observations, like noticing a document on a high cupboard or being able to describe what the surgeons were doing or wearing or saying or whatever, which seems to lend support to the idea that they really were outside their body, perceptually, rather than just dissociated. Experiments to test this - using cards in high places and such - seem to have been quite dodgy and haven't revealed much, and I wonder how much of that is because these things are just so hard to test, or to fund. Or perhaps I'm clinging to the hope that OBEs can be veridical when they're actually not, doubting the conclusions of such experiments because they clash with this hope; the doubt is always there.

Also, a thread on Reddit (which I am not a fan of in general, for reasons I rambled about in the other half of this post) where people talked about their time being briefly dead revealed that most people simply experienced nothing. But studies of NDEs seem to find that only a fraction of people have any experience at all, and I wonder why that might be. It's true though that not everyone remembers their dreams, but that doesn't mean that they don't have them. Perhaps there's a reason some people 'choose' to forget the experience, perhaps some come closer than others to the way out, or perhaps some have the experience because it's 'important' for them to do so. Or perhaps I'm grasping at straws, saying "perhaps Bigfoot is in THAT clump of trees even if he wasn't in the other million!!"

I'm aware that drugs and hallucinations can cause all kinds of phenomena that seem to transcend reality. We class them as mental illness, usually, and it does seem that fiddling around with the brain can evoke some of these illusions. But try fiddling around with the innards of your computer and see what that does to your screen. Does it affect you, though? It'd affect how you interact with the virtual world for sure, but it can't touch your flesh and blood because it's from a different realm entirely.

I like the idea of video game characters becoming aware and discovering the rules of their world, the code that makes it run... and then concluding that what makes them move left is the function Move(-speed, 0), and calling that the root of the action. You move left when that function runs, so that function causes the movement. End of story. They can't even conceive of the player because what that player is made of is so different to the ones and zeros that make up their reality. They could build all the tools they liked in that digital world, but they could never build one using the data they had on hand that would be able to extend into the 'real' world.

What would they think if they somehow did?? "This feels more real than reality!" I wonder.

Or perhaps reality is a simulation? That's an idea that's floating around, which you might be familiar with.

If we were eternal, omniscient beings, I wonder whether we'd find value in immersing ourselves into what are essentially MMOs. They'd lack meaning if we entered them in 'God Mode', so we'd block our memories from the start, begin a 'New Game' afresh. We'd plan a story for ourselves so we knew what to expect, or so we could choose which lessons to learn... or perhaps the experience itself would have an innate narrative that would become apparent over time. Or maybe there'd be none, and the interest would come in seeing what evolved from the dance of equations. Since we knew it was 'just a game', not everyone would choose to play as someone with everything all the time. Being a tribal child who dies of brain rot before their tenth birthday might be a worthwhile experience in itself because then you could know what that was like. Like choosing to play as every character a game has to offer, because you can, because you might learn something, see something you haven't seen before.

Rick and Morty had a thing like that on one episode actually. Which is interesting.

Perhaps it's like the world outside this one is white, and we use worlds like this to experience colour. To filter the entirety of experience to bring forth things that you could never experience as that unified whiteness. That might be a particularly good metaphor, actually, since as well as the 'eternal instant' nature of time people report (it's not like a million years, followed by another million, then another; it's just 'everything at once', and we can't conceive of that), there's also the feeling of oneness with the universe, of being a part of all things.

I wonder whether I chose this life for myself because I wanted to know what it was like to be lonely. Perhaps I chose "the suicide path"; a life which was always doomed to lead to this point. Or perhaps that's just an evolved need for meaning being applied where there isn't any. I can't say.

The End

I feel like there's nothing really tying me to this world. Perhaps I've experienced everything that I came here to experience. Perhaps that's just delusion and oblivion awaits. I don't think it's possible to know from this vantage point.

I wanted to write about my creative ideas... It wouldn't be too terrible to just immerse myself in those for a bit longer. But the responsibilities of the world get in the way, as does the ache of a lonely heart, and I don't feel that I can face what lies ahead.

I don't know whether I'll go through with it tonight or whether I'll wait a bit longer. It doesn't even feel like the depths of despair, really... If anything it feels like a peaceful sense of resolution, of finding that perfect answer that solves so many problems so neatly.

I know that suicide spreads pain to others... I really don't want to hurt my mother. But at least I'm lacking in close connections who'd be hurt beyond the "that's sad" feelings that come with the idea of loss; I feel that when someone distant dies, people 'miss' them in the sense that they're reminded of the fact that mortality is a thing, and it's sobering, but they don't really miss them. People who have NDEs and return often speak of doing so reluctantly for the sake of a loved one, usually a child. I don't have people who rely on me in that way, so I wouldn't be casting anyone into challenges they needed me to help them overcome.

So what will I do? Is this how this story ends? As a story, it's been primarily solitary, introspective. I can't think of any loved ones who'd be waiting for me on the other side even if that was a thing, nor is anyone begging me to stay. My ex-friend made it fairly clear that she wouldn't be particularly upset about me dying. So that's certainly something.

I don't know whether I'll post again; as I said, I haven't decided yet. But it really could go either way at this point. Thank you though to those of you who've read my words and left your own over the years. I hope something I did improved your experience of this world at least a little bit.