Agony of Desire - Thursday, November 28, 2024.

You call it hope — that fire of fire!/It is but agony of desire… — Tamerlane by Edgar Allen Poe.

Listening: Society by Eddie Vedder

I whiplash between utter despair and cautious hope. For the past few days, I've had no energy to do anything besides lie in my bed after sludging through schoolwork. Everyday there is a invisible flow of suicidal ideation streaming through my unconscious. Although I feel better now — more capable of reading and doing things beside bedrotting — that doesn't change.

Depression is awful, but now it feels like Truth. I feel as though I can see reality and the future more clearly when I'm despairing. Hope is just a delusion, conjured up by my brain to keep me alive a little longer. Hope is just torture, dangling golden laurel wreaths in front of my vision, saying I could win them, but I know I can't — the impossible saying it's possible.

Everything feels impossible: all the things I want to do, all the things I could do. I don't even know if I'm going to be here next year at this time. I'm not yet fully committed to dying before the summer of 2025, because I don't know what it's going to be like: I don't know if it will be another awful boiling kettle of failures, failures, failures, or if it will actually be good, if life will actually be worth living for. It's the not-knowing that is so awful — because it could be good! — but I know it won't. I could be wrong though, but I know I'm not. But — and on and on.

Hope argues with reality, refuses to let me give in completely, refuses to let me commit to death. I dislike this dance of emotions, of change. I'd rather be completely despaired, so depressed that it's a ironclad certainty that I will die soon, instead of not knowing what will happen: if I will be okay, happy even, or if I'll die, or if I won't die but just continue living as a miserable, eternally suicidal failure. I'd rather die than be the latter — but that's thing: I don't know if I will.