death

In all of my incessant whining about life over the last five years, there’s something that I’ve rarely mentioned:

I find myself thinking about death. A good bit. My own and others (past and present).

And this is a change that only happened as I got further into my 40s. Despite my lifelong adult unhappiness, I was never the type to have a morbid frame of mind when I was younger. Back then, it just didn’t come to mind much. Like many depressed people, I just floated through my daily existence.

But now, it’s creeping in all the time. Especially since I’m now at the stage where the adults from my childhood are all elderly (or already gone). And I’m not talking about anything personal there either. I’ll see a game show host from the ’80s on a youtube video, and think to myself “he’s dead now”.

Not healthy, I know. But unavoidable lately.

What’s worse is that this is another part of the midlife crisis that could easily become permanent. Actually, it’ll probably get even worse. If I’m already starting to think about death regularly at 50, imagine how I might be about my mortality way down the road.

Another quote from Shawshank just came to mind: “Get busy living, or get busy dying”.

Maybe someday I’ll learn to become capable of that.

Living with lost hope: the early returns

Been about a month since I resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably never fix most of my major issues or experience happiness again.

And I wasn’t sure how I’d react to that. Would the depression become even more difficult to manage? What major changes would I feel daily? So far, the best way to describe it is this:

It’s like I’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness (and have already accepted my fate). But without the timetable of dying any sooner.

I know that doesn’t make much sense. But that’s how it is.

This has both some good and bad. The good is that I feel a little more at peace. Not much, mind you. But every little bit helps. At least I don’t feel any more unstable. And it relieves you of the pressure to try and fix yourself.

Actually, that last one could be bad instead. Oh well.

On the downside, you feel that much more empty and hopeless. Which dents the motivation to do the more necessary self-improvement aspects of life that much more. Pretty much the last thing I need, but an unavoidable result.

So, we’ll see how this continues to go. I doubt any big changes will happen anytime soon, but you never know.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to float through existence for now.

Cherish the life we live?

Yes, this time I quoted Kool & the Gang.

You know how people talk about having their life flash before their eyes and surviving some sort of brush with death? And all the feel good stories about how it made them appreciate things that much more afterward?

In the last few days, I’ve learned that it doesn’t necessarily work that way.

During my road trip across the country in the last week, I was driving on the interstate in Texas (about 40 miles away from much civilization) when a bolt of lightning hit just in front of my car. It looked like an orange explosion from a movie scene. And it instantly caused all of my car’s electronics to go haywire and made it very difficult to maintain enough power to keep driving.

Not only did I keep control of the car, but I also made it to the nearest city in my poor crippled vehicle. Every time I had to floor it to get new acceleration, it could barely do much but managed to respond without dying. So I was very fortunate to avoid a catastrophic wreck.

Between this near disaster and all of the poor decisions that I’ve made in my depressed life mess in the last couple decades, you’d think that this would make me take a deep breath and re-evaluate how lucky I am to still be here. Especially in one piece.

But that hasn’t happened.

I knew how empty I’ve felt for all these years, but my reaction to this just makes it hit home that much more. If your life flashing before your eyes doesn’t make you care enough to jolt (heh, pun) some energy into you, then I don’t know what will.

Combine that with how I continue to do worse and worse in general as this year goes on, and things feel that much more dire. I’m not even looking forward to getting back to my target city at the moment, because it seems like nothing I can do there will be enough to dig me out of my situation.

Anyway….I hope to be back on the road by Friday with a rental car. There’s no point in turning back now.

I guess if someone takes anything from this, it’s the following: don’t expect some random, scary event to somehow make your depression or other life issues ok. Just another spot where the real world does not end up like an ideal storybook path.

If you do want things do improve, you’re probably gonna have to do it the hard way and put in the lengthy groundwork to change your habits from square one.

Living with regret. But what about dying with it?

I recently wrote about how the “new” world we live in had taken my mind down an uncomfortable path that just wasn’t usually me. A little while ago, that continued to happen.

After a bad dream just now (one that was like my norm in some ways, but had a couple new twists to it), I woke up thinking a lot more about mortality than I usually would. But it’s not from a fear of dying from COVID; it mostly stems from seeing all the pictures and stories about it lately, and wondering if something very grim could be happening for the world’s near and distant future.

As I’ve mentioned too often in the past, I have been living with enough regret to fill a novel. And how the doubt that I’ll ever conquer the issues that caused that regret (combined with how I’m just not the type that can easily let the past go, especially while my current life is such a disappointment) means that I could easily be taking a ton of baggage to my grave.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to feel that way. On your deathbed, alone. Being unable to shake the thought that your life, which was always an emotional struggle during the best times anyway, peaked in your early 30s. And after that, failure overtook most things from that point on.

That you let SO much potential go to waste before long. If I listed what I’ve accomplished in my life at some point…..from sports to academics to career…..you wouldn’t even believe it was the same person who writes this blog today.

But that despite those strengths and abilities, you weren’t strong enough to battle through the bad habits, the weakness, the unhappiness, and so many other demons. That too often, you barely even made a dent in those. Despite having a very long time to find a way to.

And that in the end, the world got the best of you.