Heads or tails?

What if I could prove without contest that it really would be better for everyone if I just did it? Who could deny me then? Surely it would be okay if I could show you all that the short-term trauma would make things easier in the end. Easier for you, easier for me.

Maybe it is a moral issue. Maybe it is just plain wrong. I didn't ask to be born but I sincerely hold it as privilege, if not always a pleasure, that I was. I know all the things I have that should make me happy. Would it be viciously disrespectful to do it in the face of those things other people might die to experience once? But then I'm not one for top ten lists and besides I am well aware of all that good stuff I have. I'm depressed even with that. Not sure I want to stick around to face losing it.

I'm not expecting to go anywhere after leaving here. This is it and when it finally isn't any more then my one chance will have expired. There is nothing more for us after. Maybe this will disappoint some people and I can sympathise if it does. However, I have this curious sensation that it's this one conviction that is keeping me here. If I thought I was moving on to something better then maybe I'd be gone already. But is nothing better or worse than this?

Do you think it's fair to leave everyone who cares? Everyone who would be devastated by your absence. The domino effect could be more staggering than is possible to predict. You might not be taking only yourself off. Can you justify bringing them down to where you are? Seems to me this is not how you have lived thus far, Ciaran. But of course you know how much that need to help fix other people is another symptom of what's got you here. Perhaps this ultimate act of selfishness is merely selfishness long overdue.

This soliloquising like Hamlet is my daily bread at the moment. Often the only interlocutor in my discussions is myself so it's important I try to look at things as objectively as possible. Not an easy task but I must continue. If the cataclysmic finale is ever too occur prematurely I'd like everyone to know that I can see all the things I'd be leaving behind. All the people I love infinitely more than I will ever love myself. The beautiful sensations on earth that only humans are lucky enough ever to comprehend. The hopes for a time when things may seem better for me. All of this and more I couldn't bare to live without. But living with them can be a difficult task too. I don't want anyone to think I didn't realise how lucky I am. I won the lottery when I was born. The problem is that even with that being said I'm still not happy. I might never be. I think I am just a sad person.

Isolation

I am not the only one here. Lets just be clear on that. Your brother might be depressed. Your mother or son or best friend might be in unimaginable turmoil. Most people refuse to talk about it or stick to sweeping generalities on the topic. It's a little awkward to talk about, is it not? I understand it with crushing clarity and often I find it hard to talk about. 

I tell more people than most that I am depressed. People I've just met, even when I can't tell people I've known forever. Acquaintances and friends, family and colleagues get the mundane privilege of hearing about the essence of my wilful self-destruction almost on a daily basis. I know some people think I talk about it too much. I know that there are some people who simply do not want to know any more. I can understand it if they think at times I do it for shocks and attention. I wouldn't even attempt to deny the charge. Sometimes I crave attention, even the bad kinds. But the reasons for talking about it so openly are precisely because of the contrast with many people in the same boat. People die because they can't talk about it. Because they think nobody will listen or care. People suffer pain in silence for years because this isn't something we talk about. 

There is a generally accepted opinion that the stigma around this thing has largely disappeared. No doubt it has but nowhere near enough. I hear all the things people talk about all day every day. All the food and the clothes, the quantity of alcohol consumed and the xfactor. These aren't bad things. All I'm saying is that in the middle of all this if you ever get the feeling that someone around you isn't feeling good, even when it doesn't look like they want to talk, please make an effort to speak to them. I know myself how difficult it is to talk to me on my worst days. That I don't respond or engage is typical. But it's not that I don't want to talk to people it's often that I physically can't. I apologise for that but I'm not really sure I should.

The stigma still persists. Not in me or in many people I know but still it's a hushed conversation with many. There is no reason it should be anymore. This is why I'm happy to talk about. It might help somebody else talk too. Someone forty years my senior recently asked for my advice on depression. It's only because I am open to it that I can help. It isn't something that should be pushed into the background only spoken about in whispered conversations. Ask me about it any time. 

The quest to de-stigmatize depression is undoubtedly a current personal crusade. You see I had an episode a week ago. Perhaps feeling no worse than I have at times before it became a crisis because I allowed the symptoms to manifest themselves in the physical dimension more than I ever have before in public. I'm glad people saw it. They need to because like I said, I'm not the only one here. Now I'm not allowed to work because people had to confront what has always been there and what will remain there when I do go back. Isolation seems a bizarre treatment for an illness often directly caused by it. Out of sight out of mind I guess. Up to a point I understand the policy of getting me out of there and keeping it reasonably quiet. Then I thought again. It doesn't really encourage anyone who saw me that day to open up about their problems. Better to keep sitting on them until they're fatal because this type of thing clearly isn't acceptable. I'd be scared to talk about it too if I thought that would be a typical reaction.

It's easy to think I was always so open about the illness but I most certainly was not. Years I spent hiding it, denying it, putting it down to a bad day or tiredness. This, unfortunately had a profoundly negative effect. Over time the depression became the general perception of my personality and so how could anyone see it for real. I left it too long to get help. I won't ever see a definite end. It is part of me now. I was convinced the doctors thought I would be lying to them when I first went. Perhaps I had contrived the whole thing and they would be able to see through it. Most people I have spoken to are quite receptive however. I only wish more people would be willing to speak up.

One million people a year die from suicide. That's more than through war and murder combined. I'm not shocked by that at all. It's under reported because it's still a taboo subject. There is no way all of these could have been prevented. Unfortunately some people are beyond help. But I know a lot of these could have been prevented if people felt more confident about talking or seeking help. Even in a few cases if one person had made the effort to offer some help. People with broken arms don't pretend they are fine although people with cancer do. Imagine how well that works out. I suppose we could just continue to brush it under to save that awkward conversation. It'd be worth a million or so lives.

Behind the Fossette

It was by mere chance that I was born this way. There was no divine plan, no omnipotent overseer of my fate. It seems to me to be a ludicrous pretension that any heavenly king would have the remotest interest in any one of us. But that's just me. The odds of my existence at all are severely negligible. The combination of factors leading to my appearance on earth, from the cosmos exploding into life to the chance moment of conception, are so unlikely to have lined up with such definite perfection that I might be forgiven for believing my life was not only an accident. Perhaps even some part of me wants to believe I am here for a reason (everybody likes to be needed). But it's clear to me that there never was any plan for me being here, even if there are any number of reasons for me to stick around. It was nothing but an accident, and in my present state of mind I see it as a rather unhappy one.

Strangely, my implacable godlessness has in my happier moments had the effect of stirring something like true wonder and awe inside me. The world is a beautiful place, what does it matter to put a label on a maker when we can't ever possibly know? I don't need false piety to exert twisted morals on me so that I know the right thing to do. I'm still a good person. I know what is right without having to be told. I try to look out for friends even when it takes more from me than I can really afford to give. The most enduring effect of my Roman Catholic upbringing was undeniably a poisonous lie. The feeling of guilt so intertwined with all christian theology has left a lasting impression on my personality. I am predisposed to self-doubt and self-loathing among many other personal failings but throwing an unnecessary weight of guilt onto my shoulders for things I don't even believe are wrong is a sin I find unforgivable.

For about a month or more I have been holding back a leaky tap that disguises a waterfall of existential dread behind the fossette. Incrementally, my words are drying up as my days spent in bed become more frequent. God can't help me. No-one can. Not that I am contemplating suicide at this moment. Maybe if I had the conviction that I really had nothing I wanted to stick around for or wasn't grasping at something I can't grip. Maybe then I might have gone ahead and done the job already. On that point however, the knowledge that when I am dead and gone means just that, and not an eternal sleepover at a celestial retirement village fills me up with excited certainty that life needs to be lived all the more intensely now.

All I really feel I know now is how much I dislike this improbable collection of genes and protein cells. I'm not sure what it is I wanted to be but it is not this. It occurred to me today that one of the most evil long-term effects of depression on me has been the absolute and final destruction of any shred of true inner confidence I might have had. The outward show is only an act. As it happens, put on more for myself rather than anyone else. If I decline further inwards then I return to a useless waste. I will cease to improve but regress. I won't be a good friend, although I am beginning to feel like I give more than I get anyway. My brain will turn to mush and I will return to the days of crying at soap plot-lines hiding in my bedroom. It's already started.

It was suggested to me that I don't want help. Implying my depression is contrived, I assume to exude pathos. It seems an unfair criticism to someone who has spent his entire life considering how to be at least contented. I have lost count of the number of doctors waiting rooms, anti-depressants and therapy sessions I have had. The number of self-help books I've been through to find the treasure map to confidence. You may laugh but I've even gone to the bible for answers (there weren't any). If I were in complete denial I might claim there was no truth to the charge, but we both know better.

It is a shame that we only experience the world from inside our own bodies cage. Perhaps if I could interchange the senses of others with my own I might find myself not thinking as I do. Maybe in a far off evolution. As it is I am stuck with myself. On the flip-side we should be grateful that no-one else is.

Anyway, I guess I have spilled over enough for one evening. It is approaching quarter past two in the morning and I want a cigarette.

I should finish by crediting Christopher Hitchens with helping to put a lot of these ideas in my head. Unfortunately his effect on me was posthumous but nonetheless impressive for it

2013

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. I have to thank Mr Charles Dickens for the succinct clarity of the opening sentence because it sums up 2013 in the life of Ciaran Cooney better than I ever could. However, allow me to elucidate this often strange and often sad epoch of mine in some of my own words even if they fall short of said master of language above.

I began writing my thoughts down on here in late spring as a reaction to finding it an excruciating torment to say any of those things aloud. At that point I had back-slid so far into my depression that I'd had to step up my medication to it's maximum and go to a weekly therapy session. I could barely speak to my friends any more, was convinced I would never  be able to look at another woman again let alone talk to one and figured the odds of making it to twenty-seven were reducing exponentially on me. You can probably guess that this was during the worst of times.

The year had started relatively well too. Apart from the traditional post-Christmas blues I was thriving on the sense of a new start that January brings. I was motivated in a way I have almost never been before. I had my first semester exams and I studied hard for those. Meanwhile, I breezed though seven books in the time I wasn't studying. For a month I was probably more dedicated to exercise than I had ever been and by the time of my decline I was as fit as I had been in years. I was socialising without drinking. I was enjoying my life. Maybe that is part of the reason that the fall that was to follow felt particularly hard this time. Or maybe it is just that I've grown exhausted of trying to dig myself out of that hole.

Oddly enough I can pinpoint exactly where I was when this malignant hopelessness began to settle in. I was in a Chinese restaurant on a Saturday night in February. The 9th of February to be more precise. Enjoying a meal and a drink with colleagues and friends it suddenly struck me that I wasn't like anyone else there. I felt an obscure distance from the rest and my mind fell vacant so that I was almost unable to speak. I knew what was coming. The following day the pain in my body was such that I wanted to die. I would have died, if I had dared to.

A few days later I fell victim to a flu virus that was doing the rounds and together this and the depression sewed the seeds for seemingly terminal pain. The first two weeks of being sick where, to the best of my memory, the worst I have ever experienced. The physical torture combined with the mental decline at that moment was something I could scarcely survive twice.

It went on like this for a few months. Finally I was convinced to get help. This would mean more pills and a first crack at therapy. Sitting in the waiting room of a mental health clinic for the first appointment had, in my case at least, the pleasant effect of making me feel comparatively okay. I was sure I didn't need this the way the people beside me did. Looking back now though, I know I needed it. I needed to stop myself getting lost.

Strange as it may sound, I consider this submission to another for my mental well-being as a minor victory. It was something I had always laughed off before but in 2013 I finally did it because I had to. It was good for me. I needed to hear from someone with a clue that if I kept on the same track that the probability of suicide attempts was constantly increasing and that the day was getting quite close.

Scratching my way through to passing my first full year of college was a big win, even if I hated virtually every moment of that second semester. By rights I probably should have failed. I felt myself pitching and rolling and maybe on the verge of capsizing. This mature student thing wasn't nearly as much fun as I thought it was going to be. It appears fairly obvious to me now that I made a mistake when I decided on electronic engineering as the vehicle for my return to formal education. But I'm here now so I best just get on with it and keep those credits ticking over. Anyway, deciding on the wrong thing is often better than not deciding at all.

Summer, summer, summer-time! Last day in a mental health clinic (with a little luck, ever) coincided, somewhat serendipitously, with an afternoon flight to Edinburgh for my mates stag. Not going to romanticise it as  turning point but it was a kind of happy release because now I was free to enjoy myself for a few months and for the most part that is just what I did. I guess there is no point in boring anyone with the details, especially as I've already written most of the stupid shit I got up to. From getting twerked in Rome (perhaps due to me wearing suit and sunglasses at night) to trying to leverage £80 from a mate so I could shag a stripper it was mainly just good craic. The year most definitely peaked in Rome. The wedding of my two friends was perfect. The weather was perfect. The food occasionally a little disappointing but the craic ninety-one. The hangover was interminable.

I've had to settle back down to reality the last couple of months. I am finding myself reasonably dedicated to the course I'm doing even if I lack any aptitude for engineering at all. There is nowhere I have ever felt more stupid than in those classrooms. I will take some comfort knowing that Aristotle thought knowing ones own ignorance was a sign of intelligence. Feeling exhausted seems to be my default state at the moment. I find myself doing more hours at work than I did last year. It's all good though. I don't like being a poor student and there are so many things I like to spend money on. A return to Amsterdam is top of that list. Maybe January 2013.

Apparently it seems I am living the life I missed out on when I was 18 or 19. I've been told by different people recently that I am a sleazy, cheesy, flirt. A metro-sexual (fair enough), bisexual (I'm not), macklemore look-alike. I can see where most of that comes from. I was super-depressed when I was younger. I could hardly talk to anyone, definitely not the girls I fancied back then, so don't blame me for trying to have the fun I missed out on now. So what if I want to be a bit of a slut now, that doesn't make me bad. And anyway I'm nowhere near as big a slut as I'd like to be. Still, it's all just a bit of banter at the minute.

It's not that I'm cured. I still have the days when I can't talk, can't do anything. Days when I remember what it was like to want to die. I mean even today I'm here lying in bed because I really don't want to go out, although I might make another excuse. I went seven days without taking any fluoxetine, when I should be taking three a day. Proof if needed that self-destructive behaviour still lingers ominously. It just that now I know for certain that I'm not nearly done with life. There is too much to be had to stay in bed, like I have done for years and am doing today. So, I won't be doing it tomorrow or again any time soon.

I know some people who's version of life scares the shit out of me. It's not that there unhappy. More that they don't seem to care about anything that are the really good experiences. They seem satisfied to work, eat, sleep, stay in the same town forever and never see the world. Not interested in sex and never going to have children. In some way scared to live. That is my biggest nightmare. I'd rather die than grow older and old like that. It's not even the action that is important but the attitude, I need to know that there might be something more exciting out there for me.

With all that in mind I am actually looking forward to next year for the first time in my life. I used to look at it as the depressing passing of time that is impossible to hold back. Almost like, ' we're ll going to die anyway, why bother?' But now I think I can see that the real pleasure in starting a new year is all the possibility for improvement and hopefully some fucking excellent moments. Everyone should see it that way. If I can bounce, anyone can.

I suppose the moral of the 2013 story is that I'm not finished with life yet even when I know some days I hate it. Nobody should be. It's all out there waiting for you. You just need to decide what you want and then go get it. It is hard but it can be fun too.

2014...GO!!!

Untitled

I read this passage in a book tonight and then I did something I never ever do. I read it again. And I mean I never re-read sections. I'm usually in a furious rush to finish each book that sometimes I miss the point somewhere along the way. That one is an extremely modern trait of mine. But this one got me instantly and I found myself anticipating the words before they were illuminated in my retina. I read it, read it again, tried to digest it before reading again.

So, what was it about this particular few lines that caught my attention? Well, to be honest I'm not entirely sure. The passage is about a child, a young girl, who is very sick and it seems fairly certain she will die soon. An exceptionally beautiful girl, angelic, and imbued with a wisdom frighteningly mature for a child. The author is trying to say that perhaps we should be happy to let such perfection go to God, that they were only ever here to briefly enlighten our lives and maybe if they are taken at their best that they will remain that way forever. Undiminished, while the rest of us decay.

I know why I liked this so much. I always wished I had been that child. A bright flame, extinguished before it lost its glow. When I was younger I'm sure I thought I was. Man, I thought for sure that I was the second coming. I even wanted to die young. Leave some exceptional impression and exit stage left. To be remembered, almost in reverence and never replaced. Alas, it wasn't to be. I wasn't that wise, didn't amount to anything impressive and lie here enclosed in sorrow for the degeneration.

Then again, perhaps some fatherly instincts have been awakened within me and I just didn't recognise them. In this case I really don't think so. I love kids, it's just I have too much selfishness in looking after my own life to give so much to another. The old cliche applies; I'm not ready to have a child, I'm still a child myself.

The truth is though, that the passage I read a little earlier simply served to remind me of someone I never got to see enough of. I wish her brief sojourn on earth could have been a little longer but it's not to be. Her name even pops up in the text just to give me a little nudge to remind me.

Don't expect too much of your children. Be happy you've got them...

"Has there ever been a child like Eva? Yes, there have been; but their names are always on gravestones, and their sweet smiles, their heavenly eyes, their singular words and ways, are among the buried treasures of yearning hearts. In how many families do you hear the legend that all the goodness and graces of the living are nothing to the peculiar charms of on who is not! It is as if heaven has an especial band of angels, whose office it was to sojourn for a season here, and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they might bear it upward with them in their homeward flight. When you see that deep spiritual light in the eye - when the little soul reveals itself in words sweeter and wiser than the ordinary words of children - hope not to retain that child; for the seal of heaven is on it, and the light of immortality looks out from its eyes"

Harriet Beecher Stowe

I'd read it again

sixty-nine being nothing but a number

Bend over and twerk me, force me down and hurt me. Straddle me, get on your knees for me. Stimulate or tease me. Stammer out the words s,s,s,s,sixty-nine? if you resist it will be the only time. Degrade yourself to please me. In the moment you belong to me.

That is what I want.

I trust you were happy to allow to me to park all of my trademark sensitivity for a moment. It's still here of course but right now it is being steamrollered into submission by my selfish sexual appetite, animal noises and filthy fantasies.

All men have secrets and here is mine, so let it be known. I want to rut with her. I want to lay with that girl. I think I even want to make love to some of them. I'm telling you I don't want sex with one person, I want sex with literally millions of people. Why should I limit myself? I'm not sure I've got the stamina to reach the full seven figures but when there are men so old that they need scaffolding to maintain their erections still having sex, I'm happy that at least time is on my side.

For any women readers out there who might pretend to think I'm crazy when I talk about the scale of the male sex drive I will try to illuminate my point a little. Every single day I'm faced with new people coming into contact with me or cutting across my eye-line. I am always going to have an initial instinctive reaction like, 'what are they doing here?' or 'what can they do for me?'. Now here is the controversial bit. With every single one of those people my first instinct is to ask a question: 'Can I fuck it?'. Assuming an affirmative answer, a second, and potentially more important question is posed: 'Would I fuck it?'. You might be surprised how often the second question returns a yes.

It's in our nature, all of us, to want sex. To want good sex, with the people we're attracted to. Even at inappropriate times and places. Unfortunately, at some point this fact seems to have gotten perverted to the point where it is dangerous to admit the truth. We all get horny sometimes!

It's degenerated to the stage now were a man can claim an addiction to sex for compelling him to cheat on his wife. It's not Tiger's fault, he has a medical condition. It was the same for Michael Douglas. He didn't want to have sex with all of those beautiful and willing ladies. It was simply a case of a relentless addiction taken hold. My opinion on all of this is a little different to the conventional. If these guys are sex addicts because they wanted to have sex with a seemingly endless line of women the I'm sorry to say that almost all men are sex addicts. I'm a sex addict. My friends are sex addicts. Your boyfriend is a sex addict. The difference between men like Tiger Woods and an average Joe is availability and risk assessment. Be realistic guys, if you had drunken women throwing themselves at you like you were a premiership footballer do you think you wouldn't try to have your cake. Most normal guys also have to consider whether it's worth the risk to lose out on the regular sex in exchange for the possibility of some extra sex.

Girls! Girls! listen to me. Your virtue doesn't lie between your legs. It lies in the better part of you. The bits that make up the person you really are. So, take this as a call to arms because I'm not going to judge you. Girls! If you feel like you want to have sex then why don't you just go ahead and do. Do it as often as you like. Ya wee skitter!

The truth is, it's the constant search for all the sex I can find that's really been holding me back all this time. Here I am blaming it all on drinking and depression when perhaps the problem is that I drink to give me the confidence to go chasing ass and then get super depressed with everything when it doesn't happen.

If I were truly in love with someone. Then maybe things would be different.

23/10/2013

Bring me Miley's wrecking ball. I would like something to smash through my scull right now and it seems like the implement of choice at the moment.

So, shall I go ahead and pour out the melodrama? Once again I feel like letting the whole production crash down around me. Drink myself into oblivion, fuck the college shit into the bin, push my stupid head through a cattle grill and sink into self indulgent madness.

Man, I have issues. Big, ugly, inflammatory, elephant sized issues. If I step back for a second I can see them there in all there suffocating glory, squeezing the oxygen from my lust for life. I suppose they make me what I am. A needy, neurotic loser. A shit scared bottler that takes one risk a decade and lies awake at night questioning why he hasn't made it yet. A stuck in the friend zone motherfucker with an habitual fondness for choosing the wrong one.

If I'm correct, self pity is a very attractive trait. But of course I am wrong (Perhaps that's why the Jews have never been considered a particularly attractive race). Luckily I don't want to play that card today. I could and in the past I most certainly would have. Maybe I would have crawled into bed for a month and refused to talk to anyone, grow a beard and loose a stone. I've snapped out of it before I settled into it.

If I could focus for any longer than the length of a 10 minute porn video I think I could probably have worked myself into someone quite smart or successful by now. Instead I move from one interest to the next before the had work begins because I don't want to run the risks that success may bring. Feeling unloved and overlooked, I've been looking for ways to confirm that theory. Unsurprisingly, it ain't in no way hard to find them! At least when everything crashes I can say I got what I really, really was looking for...A chance to build a tree house of self loathing and climb inside.

Anyway, the here and now. I'm a fuck up. I'm so fucking angry and depressed with no effective outlet that my brain is hurting inside my head. I'm rejected, again. I'm feeling old, getting older. Running out of time already! All that shit isn't good, but it really isn't so horribly bad either. I mean, I have managed to get this far without disintegrating completely. It's like this, I just can't be bothered with the wasted time anymore. Yes, today I feel shit but I don't want to feel sorry for myself feeling shit.

Fuck sake! What are we doing with these emotions? It would be nice not to get the bad ones but then I guess we wouldn't ever get the good ones.

P.s. Actually not bothered by what I've done this time to put me here. It wasn't a mistake.