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There are two phrases that keep coming into my mind: I'm just so tired and I want to go home. I don't even know what they mean any more, really. "Tired" is what happens between waking up and going to sleep. "Home" is something that happens to other people. I can't go on like this. But I don't know how to stop. I don't think I can even go on for another week like this. So I just go on for another day. And another. And another. And so on, until they days become... nothing. I haven't experienced a month for over 5 months. Just a string of days, and the occasional week. I feel so hollow inside from crying and from not sleeping. I don't want to sleep now. Maybe I'll never sleep again. I don't want to draw lines between the days, you see. Then I won't have to live another day, I can just go on living this one, and telling myself that I'll give up tomorrow. I can't see any future. I can't even see tomorrow morning. It'll happen whether I like it or not, but I can't envisage it, I can't plan for it. It'll just shake me rudely awake when the time comes, and there'll be nothing I can do about it, and I'll get up and get dressed and go out as if I'm still dreaming. Maybe I am. Current Mood: dreading
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Well, don't. Your other friends are right: things change, they do get better, and if you are seriously talking about death, that's not common sense, that's a non-sense. You have too many people who love you and who would be damaged by your death; your physical health is good; you can play music, dance, move about, speak, read, write, have all your limbs. This temporary state of emotional paradigm-shifting get at you does indeed require endurance, but so does everything worth having, and life is worth having: especially yours.
The good in not giving up lies in your mother's security that you are alive, in your father's care for you, in your sister's comradeship, in the care and love of your friends; in the work you do for Oxfam, in the way you work at the pub, in the gifts you bring to your orchestra and your choir.
Believe me, lots of people manage to have a good life just by accepting that they can't depend on their plans or envisionings, and living, making the most of what they do have, from day to day. Most "plans" are illusory anyway: a product of self-deluding and sleep-walking by people seeking precisely what they cannot or indeed will not choose to have.
You have what you have. You don't have what you don't have. You tell yourself that if you only had what you don't have you'd be happy and as you can't have that you can't live, enjoy life, enjoy what is spread out before you like a banquet? Don't be a fundamentalist, a this-happiness-or-none, brainwashed by the Happiness Terrorists (ooo, ooo, scarequotes, if you don't get X then you'll never be happy, gotta get X no matter what it costs), by the belief that the Elysian Fields are some kind of permanent address. They aren't, but you will be able to keep visiting them from time to time over the years. You will.
Be happy with the small things that come to you. For now. The big stuff will take care of itself if you do the small stuff.
Get some sleep.
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Sorry, it did come across as an order but it was meant as a suggestion. It was, I realise, a quote from a song by Johnny Clegg called In my African Dream, and the full verse is "Old man sitting in the shade of a bong tree, talking of the things he used to do: 'Suffering is life, life is suffering, be happy with the small things that come to you, that come to you...' " Happiness comes, it doesn't respond to being sought. Many things can be sought for in themselves, but not happiness as some kind of clinical entity.
Giving up doesn't mean a "worthwhile" person will get what you have. Which you know, really. Nobody can in any way "have" or "take over" your experience or the love other people have for you: your life is in no way a transferable asset. When it's gone it's gone and you would leave people inconsolable. That isn't meant to "make" you "feel guilty", it's an uncontestable fact and has to be said just in case you had forgotten it or thought it was a fiction your head had dreamed up independently.
All I am trying to do is point out that "giving up" or ending your life artificially can be and should be argued against in plain terms.
That's not to say you shouldn't think it over, talk about it, write about it, but you don't really expect thinking people who care for you to sit by and say "oh, hey, that's too bad, but whatever, if that's your choice...". Getting rid of your life as a response to your feelings, which your other self/selves know will change, is not something anyone can contemplate lightly.
I never said anything about you *having* to be grateful or happy for what you have: only listing what you have. It's a reality check.
You are not a hopeless failure, you're an intelligent young woman who wants to do some interesting, sensible, good things with her life (including raising a family and all that jazz) and unhappily your past education and life experience hasn't helped you too much to acquire the skills you need to find out what constitutes "good" and "interesting" for you, yourself. That doesn't make *you* a failure, it just means you are part of the 95% of the population who aren't born with a striking and socially-acceptable vocation or calling, and you have to work harder than the lucky/cursed 5%. Things will get better, anyway, because as your other friends have said it is in the nature of things to change of themselves, anyway.
Did you get a chance to get those B vitamins at all?
xx
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