As a teenager, I had difficulty picturing where I would be or what I would be doing past the age of twenty-four. It seemed, at the time, that I could live only up to that age and then just disappear. I think maybe I lived through my early twenties in a state of constant dread. Of what, precisely? I was never so sure.
The dread used to enshroud my sense of time, keeping me from planning for the future, and preventing me from enjoying the present by forcing reruns of greyscale memories. It used to consume me so completely that on particularly bad days, I could not even speak of the day after. I remember feeling as though I did not have a future, that living past twenty-four would be impossible.
My experience of time itself was so distorted that the moments of dread would pass by so agonizingly slowly such that my notion of yesterday had felt, at some point, like weeks ago. Whenever I found myself idle, the dread would weigh on me and prevent me from moving on with my thoughts. I remember considering about a thousand different ways to die, some of them self-induced, and I also remember feeling so helpless that nothing would happen.
Thinking about death and dying is still a quirk I seem to have, but back then I just could not shake it. Every other sensory stimulus was a potential cause of death, if I only harnessed them, but I rarely did. Maybe I was suicidal, but I remember only ever having attempted thrice, and survived. Most of the time it was a passive battle against continuing to live; I would seek out situations in which I would find myself vulnerable.
The idea was simple: the dread and morbid thoughts only happened when I was thinking, so I would actively avoid thinking, sometimes doing precisely what I would not have done had I thought about it properly. If I could just not think, then maybe I could not dread.
But twenty-four was a strange age. I was weaned off of the antidepressants I had been taking for at least two years prior, and I had to learn to live with the sense of dread without the chemical crutch. Maybe it was never about the antidepressants; maybe it was about how I thought about dying. Twenty-four was an age I was anticipating for many reasons, but while I was, I could not see a way out of it.
Twenty-four was a black hole, and I am not sure how I got through it. I remember making plans for when I would finally die; I remember telling people how much I love them; I remember enjoying myself despite the sense of impending doom hanging just above the crown of my head. I remember almost melting down over the the stupidest of things: getting upset over quality of service; leaking frustration over lost objects; or even just experiencing the beauty of the world.
Twenty-four was a state of precarious thinking. Think too little, and I would endanger myself; think too much, and I would paralyze myself with dread. It was also a state of precarious feeling. Feel too bad, and I would want things to end; feel too good, and I would want to end on a high note.
Maybe it was the navigating precariously between seemingly opposing states that I survived that year. Or maybe it was because those seemingly opposing states prevented me from dying.
I remember that in those moments I was on the verge of melting down, I could not help the morbid thoughts. Thoughts of the various ways I could actively kill myself were thwarted by the loss of motivation to do anything but dwell on the negative thoughts. But it stopped there: I could remember the content of the thoughts, and nominally what I felt with those thoughts, but there was nothing to push me into despair. It was dread, and it was powerful, but it was not powerful enough to push me to act on suicidal thoughts.
On the other hand there were also moments that I would find myself elated. Maybe I always found meaning in the arts; maybe I would be reading too much into my own idea of beauty. But in those moments, I would be devastated by beauty, and the thoughts of dying would come: the various ways in which I could just die in that moment, feeling the most at-peace with the world for a long time. If there were a line between experiencing bliss and dying of euphoria, I could have walked it in those moments.
Without any other factors to kill me in those moments, the dread would pull me back slowly from the line, and I would be devastated by how I had not, in that moment of splendor, died. The lines of despair and euphoria have a narrow space between them that, for the most part of twenty-four, I was navigating. Maybe I survived because as soon as I approached either line, I would trip a shut-down mechanism: losing motivation to take my own life, dread slapping me in the face whenever I felt too good.
Maybe it was a good thing that each day of twenty-four was strange; maybe on a normal day I would have enough motivation and planning to kill myself. I remember planning for my death, identifying important people in my life and drafting letters for them to find should I have died in my sleep. I remember working, not because I was motivated by life, but because I was excited at the prospect of dying. Something about knowing there is a deadline really put things into perspective for me. I just did not anticipate that the deadline was flexible.
The dread is still around though. It still takes some getting used to, but there is a sweet spot between fearing death and being excited for it that I think I can use to my advantage. Maybe not fear, nor excitement for death: maybe I have been so fixated on death that I forget about living. Maybe there is a way to live with the fact of death—neither to fear nor be excited by it, but to respect it.
Right now, though, I want neither to die nor live as though I were dying. I get these moments more often these days: moments in which I can just be.