Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=3423]Being Dead For a Day[/drupal]
To say that my Sunday was unproductive would be an understatement. I stayed in bed all day aside from an hour where I showered, ate, and brushed my teeth and this started at about eight at night. The only reason I got up was because the inside of my mouth tasted so nasty that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Despite this, my dinner consisted of some leftover special cornbread I had made for a BBQ on Saturday that had green onions, hot sauce, cheese, and garlic in it. Shortly after finishing my meal and going through my “getting ready for bed” routine, I turned off the light and went back to bed. I wasn’t tired in the least but I forced myself to sleep anyways.
My sleep schedule has been pretty erratic so far this summer. I’ve been getting up at random times from as early as 1am to as late as 6pm. For my work, I’m pretty much on-call all summer (a nice way of saying that they’ll only have you work as a last resort like if someone suddenly gets Ebola) and as far as entertainment goes, I’m down to one game left over from Christmas and a few DVDs I borrowed from the library. I’m reading a few spiritual books as well but, all in all, things are pretty uneventful and my schedule (if you can even call it that) is unimaginably loose. Get a summer job you say? I spent nearly 2 ½ months last summer looking for a job because Cape Girardeau virtually becomes a ghost town when the college crowd is gone. I have a job now and I don’t like the idea of quitting the new one as soon as school starts up because it looks terrible on resumes. If finding a regular job was such an enormous pain then I don’t even want to think about how trying to find a seasonal one would be. I’m working on a project at school but I only have to go up there a few hours at a time with several times in between each visit. As I said before, my summer has been uneventful.
The reason I just explained all of this is because it is not only one of the big reasons why I stayed in bed nearly all day yesterday but why I could do it without any consequence. Another reason was because I wanted to get back on a sleep schedule that at least resembled a regular human’s. The third was because I wanted to see what it would be like to be dead for a day. I had thought of it a lot in the past but had never acted out on it before. “What would it be like to be dead for a day?”
When I was suicidal in the fall of 2008 I fantasized about it almost every day as I walked to school. In my mind, I thought of it as a way of test driving death. If I didn’t like being dead, I could just wake up the next morning and just carry about my business. No tears, no sadness, no grieving from friends or family. Heck, even my roommates probably wouldn’t notice unless I soiled myself explosively in my death-like state and the smell leaked under the door. The world would just carry on without me for a day. No harm, no foul. As what usually happens with fantasies that come true, the end results were far from what I expected them to be.
For starters, I didn’t feel refreshed this morning. I always figured that if I were dead for a day that I would wake up with a clear mind, ready to tackle whatever challenge was before me but I didn’t feel that way in the least. My body felt fine. I figured that being a vegetable for a day would have had me feeling sore and cracking and popping with every move I made but I felt normal. It was just like waking up on any other day but mentally, I felt terrible. I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t have a headache nor was my head stuffed up. I didn’t feel groggy or achy or anything like that. The only thing that felt different was that I genuinely felt an emotion that I hadn’t felt so fully in nearly four years: regret.
For the first time in my life, I actually felt regret for sleeping too much. If you’ve known me long enough, this is a tremendous statement in itself as I will regularly sleep until 3-4 in the afternoon on days where I have nothing to do. It drives my parents up a wall as they both are up at 6am every weekday and are done with work by the time I bother to even put pants on. Those days were largely wasted but this was different. This wasn’t just me getting up late, carrying out my usual business, and then going to bed around the same time they left for work, this was a day that was entirely wasted.
It was just one day, you say? Time is something you can’t get back no matter how hard you try. June 13th 2010 is forever lost to me. You tend to think of time in minutes and hours but what about moments and happenings? Memories and happiness? You may argue that it was unlikely that something big would have happened that day but that leads to me arguing what someone can do in a day. What can you learn in a day? How many people can you interact with in a day? How many ways can you help someone in a day? How can you better yourself as a person in a single day? Compound this by what all could result from doing those things and you’ll probably have difficulty just trying to stand up while imagining it. Time is precious and I feel like I’m realizing the face value of it for the first time.
Being “dead for a day” didn’t help me nor did it help anyone else. I’ve always known the idea of committing suicide was inherently selfish but only now do I understand the scope of it. Even if it was only for a day, I freed myself from having any responsibilities right down to simply being “alive.” Thinking about it almost makes me angry simply because mulling over “simply being alive is too much to handle” is the equivalent of grinding walnut shells between your teeth. Never mind all the people I willingly let go of for the day, I let go of myself in an act that I could only label as betrayal. I betrayed myself. It’s funny if only because, as I have shown, the statement has a surprising amount of depth to it despite seeming like an oxymoronic sentence.
When I think I could have taken myself completely out of the picture, it shows how sad the statement really is. To think of all the days, months, and years that I could have missed and all the moments they could have brought is unfathomable. Even asking something like “what if my roommate was a gay, talking polar bear and worked at Dairy Queen” is easier to picture than what all I could have missed if I really had gone through with suicide several years ago. It’s like buying a book and then ripping out ¾’s of it after you finish reading the first quarter of it. What happens next? Who knows? Is it good or bad? Couldn’t tell ya. Who else comes into the picture? Dunno. Things could have become worse but they could just as easily become better too which is why I’m especially glad I didn’t go through with it when the temptation was all too real.
Maybe some of you have thought about this as well. “What would it be like if I were dead just for a day?” Maybe things have been particularly stressful or defining your life as a whole as “crap” would be nothing short of poetic justice. Maybe you feel overwhelmed and just want to escape for awhile. For some of you, I can fully understand as your problems make the ones I’ve had up until this point look like me complaining about pouring too much sugar into my coffee. Despite this, I want to encourage you to try to better understand how significant time is. Time will go on whether you’re there or not but that’s beside the point. Other people could do what you can do but why don’t you do it yourself? It’s not a matter of making an impact simply because you exist but the potential that we all have with the simple gifts of life and time. What is your potential? Only time will tell.
Fatmanonice, June 14, 2010
“There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”- Nelson Mandela
“Time is swift, it races by; Opportunities are born and die... Still you wait and will not try - A bird with wings who dares not rise and fly.”- A.A. Milne
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”- Helen Keller
To say that my Sunday was unproductive would be an understatement. I stayed in bed all day aside from an hour where I showered, ate, and brushed my teeth and this started at about eight at night. The only reason I got up was because the inside of my mouth tasted so nasty that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Despite this, my dinner consisted of some leftover special cornbread I had made for a BBQ on Saturday that had green onions, hot sauce, cheese, and garlic in it. Shortly after finishing my meal and going through my “getting ready for bed” routine, I turned off the light and went back to bed. I wasn’t tired in the least but I forced myself to sleep anyways.
My sleep schedule has been pretty erratic so far this summer. I’ve been getting up at random times from as early as 1am to as late as 6pm. For my work, I’m pretty much on-call all summer (a nice way of saying that they’ll only have you work as a last resort like if someone suddenly gets Ebola) and as far as entertainment goes, I’m down to one game left over from Christmas and a few DVDs I borrowed from the library. I’m reading a few spiritual books as well but, all in all, things are pretty uneventful and my schedule (if you can even call it that) is unimaginably loose. Get a summer job you say? I spent nearly 2 ½ months last summer looking for a job because Cape Girardeau virtually becomes a ghost town when the college crowd is gone. I have a job now and I don’t like the idea of quitting the new one as soon as school starts up because it looks terrible on resumes. If finding a regular job was such an enormous pain then I don’t even want to think about how trying to find a seasonal one would be. I’m working on a project at school but I only have to go up there a few hours at a time with several times in between each visit. As I said before, my summer has been uneventful.
The reason I just explained all of this is because it is not only one of the big reasons why I stayed in bed nearly all day yesterday but why I could do it without any consequence. Another reason was because I wanted to get back on a sleep schedule that at least resembled a regular human’s. The third was because I wanted to see what it would be like to be dead for a day. I had thought of it a lot in the past but had never acted out on it before. “What would it be like to be dead for a day?”
When I was suicidal in the fall of 2008 I fantasized about it almost every day as I walked to school. In my mind, I thought of it as a way of test driving death. If I didn’t like being dead, I could just wake up the next morning and just carry about my business. No tears, no sadness, no grieving from friends or family. Heck, even my roommates probably wouldn’t notice unless I soiled myself explosively in my death-like state and the smell leaked under the door. The world would just carry on without me for a day. No harm, no foul. As what usually happens with fantasies that come true, the end results were far from what I expected them to be.
For starters, I didn’t feel refreshed this morning. I always figured that if I were dead for a day that I would wake up with a clear mind, ready to tackle whatever challenge was before me but I didn’t feel that way in the least. My body felt fine. I figured that being a vegetable for a day would have had me feeling sore and cracking and popping with every move I made but I felt normal. It was just like waking up on any other day but mentally, I felt terrible. I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t have a headache nor was my head stuffed up. I didn’t feel groggy or achy or anything like that. The only thing that felt different was that I genuinely felt an emotion that I hadn’t felt so fully in nearly four years: regret.
For the first time in my life, I actually felt regret for sleeping too much. If you’ve known me long enough, this is a tremendous statement in itself as I will regularly sleep until 3-4 in the afternoon on days where I have nothing to do. It drives my parents up a wall as they both are up at 6am every weekday and are done with work by the time I bother to even put pants on. Those days were largely wasted but this was different. This wasn’t just me getting up late, carrying out my usual business, and then going to bed around the same time they left for work, this was a day that was entirely wasted.
It was just one day, you say? Time is something you can’t get back no matter how hard you try. June 13th 2010 is forever lost to me. You tend to think of time in minutes and hours but what about moments and happenings? Memories and happiness? You may argue that it was unlikely that something big would have happened that day but that leads to me arguing what someone can do in a day. What can you learn in a day? How many people can you interact with in a day? How many ways can you help someone in a day? How can you better yourself as a person in a single day? Compound this by what all could result from doing those things and you’ll probably have difficulty just trying to stand up while imagining it. Time is precious and I feel like I’m realizing the face value of it for the first time.
Being “dead for a day” didn’t help me nor did it help anyone else. I’ve always known the idea of committing suicide was inherently selfish but only now do I understand the scope of it. Even if it was only for a day, I freed myself from having any responsibilities right down to simply being “alive.” Thinking about it almost makes me angry simply because mulling over “simply being alive is too much to handle” is the equivalent of grinding walnut shells between your teeth. Never mind all the people I willingly let go of for the day, I let go of myself in an act that I could only label as betrayal. I betrayed myself. It’s funny if only because, as I have shown, the statement has a surprising amount of depth to it despite seeming like an oxymoronic sentence.
When I think I could have taken myself completely out of the picture, it shows how sad the statement really is. To think of all the days, months, and years that I could have missed and all the moments they could have brought is unfathomable. Even asking something like “what if my roommate was a gay, talking polar bear and worked at Dairy Queen” is easier to picture than what all I could have missed if I really had gone through with suicide several years ago. It’s like buying a book and then ripping out ¾’s of it after you finish reading the first quarter of it. What happens next? Who knows? Is it good or bad? Couldn’t tell ya. Who else comes into the picture? Dunno. Things could have become worse but they could just as easily become better too which is why I’m especially glad I didn’t go through with it when the temptation was all too real.
Maybe some of you have thought about this as well. “What would it be like if I were dead just for a day?” Maybe things have been particularly stressful or defining your life as a whole as “crap” would be nothing short of poetic justice. Maybe you feel overwhelmed and just want to escape for awhile. For some of you, I can fully understand as your problems make the ones I’ve had up until this point look like me complaining about pouring too much sugar into my coffee. Despite this, I want to encourage you to try to better understand how significant time is. Time will go on whether you’re there or not but that’s beside the point. Other people could do what you can do but why don’t you do it yourself? It’s not a matter of making an impact simply because you exist but the potential that we all have with the simple gifts of life and time. What is your potential? Only time will tell.
Fatmanonice, June 14, 2010
“There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”- Nelson Mandela
“Time is swift, it races by; Opportunities are born and die... Still you wait and will not try - A bird with wings who dares not rise and fly.”- A.A. Milne
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”- Helen Keller
