I’ve only written two poems in my entire life. Well, that’s not entirely true. I used to write lyrics for a band my friends and I were forming that never got off the ground. I’ve been in a bad place as of late and jotted this down last night to kind of try to help me through what I’m going through. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s any good, but I thought I’d share it here. Maybe it can help someone else. Maybe I’m just screaming into the void as usual. Like I said, I’ve just been in a bad way and felt the need to write something and couldn’t come up with anything but these words. I didn’t do much thinking on it. I just wrote down what came to mind. Just my own discombobulated mind spilled out on paper and now here on the Internet.
I wake up each morning
as if returning to a mistake I didn’t make.
The sun rises out of habit,
and I rise out of spite.
Some days my mind is a broken cathedral,
echoing with sermons I never asked to hear.
Other days it’s a carnival mirror–
every reflection warped
every laugh track broken.
There is a rhythm to the collapse,
a pulse that insists I keep going
even when I want to negotiate my exit
with whatever god still bothers
to read the fine print of my thoughts.
Bipolar dawns come and go:
one morning I am incandescent,
a lighthouse for a ship that will never arrive;
the next I am the ocean floor,
quiet enough to make silence uneasy.
But existence refuses to end on cue.
It drags on with the stubbornness of a bad joke
that no one remembers telling.
And I still stay for the punchline,
not out of hope,
but because even futility has a texture
I’ve learned to hold without breaking.
If there’s any mercy in this world,
it’s that numbness, too, is a kind of shelter.
And on the days when the abyss leans in
as if to whisper a shortcut,
I answer the only way I know how:
Not today.
I’m busy watching the ruins glow.
Tag: depression
The Last Christmas
It was decided, though no one could say who decided it first, that humanity would end itself on Christmas. Not out of devotion. Not out of malice. Out of a particular exhaustion, the kind that settles over a species the way frost settles over a corpse; quietly, inevitably, without spectacle.
Some called it a gift for Jesus. Others called it a release for themselves. Most didn’t call it anything at all. Naming things only gives them weight, and humanity had grown tired of carrying anything with weight.
The idea spread the way despair always spreads: silently, with the elegance of a shadow that has finally stopped pretending to be anything else. By Advent, the world understood the plan without having spoken it. By Christmas Eve, the world accepted it the way a terminal patient accepts a prognosis.
There was no mass panic, no riots. Absurdity rarely inspires hysteria, only a kind of philosophical shrug.
One by one, city by city, continent by continent, humanity closed its eyes and unmade itself. No great violence. No catastrophe. Just a soft relinquishing, like candles choosing not to burn. When the last human fell into that darkness — a darkness strangely calm, strangely welcoming — the world exhaled for the first time in millennia.
Silence spread across the planet.
A silence so total.
Then came the surprise…
Jesus, expecting once again the usual hymns and the brittle cheer of obligatory joy, found instead the entire human race standing before Him in the soft luminosity of the afterworld. Billions of eyes, all sharing the same expression: the expression of beings who didn’t quite regret existing, but regretted having tried too hard to justify it.
“Happy birthday,” someone murmured. It wasn’t festive. It wasn’t ironic. It was spoken the way one apologizes for overstaying a life. Jesus looked at them — at this species that had repeatedly fumbled both suffering and hope — and for a long moment He said nothing.
Finally He whispered, “You weren’t all meant to come at once.”
A few souls nodded. Some shrugged. One laughed softly, the laugh of someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling with the absurd only to die of it. “We thought it would be a surprise,” another said.
“A surprise,” Jesus repeated, not angry, not sad, but with weary tenderness of someone who watched a child break their own toy just to make sense of its pieces.
He continued to send them back, but to what? To the same repetition? The same spiral between meaning and meaninglessness? Even He wondered if return was a kindness or cruelty.
He told them the truth: a truth so simple it was almost cruel in its clarity:
“Existence was the only miracle I ever gave you. What you made of it was your burden.” The souls felt no shame. Shame was for the living.
Instead they stood there, suspended in a light that illuminated nothing but themselves. Beings who had fled the weight of existence only to find that consciousness follows like a shadow. And so humanity spent eternity as it had spent life: questioning, doubting, arguing with itself, trying to make sense of a gesture no one had requested and no one had fully understood.
Jesus remained with them, not as judge or savior, but as a witness to their absurd act. The only species in creation to annihilate itself out of equal parts fatigue and affection.
A birthday surprise.
A cosmic misunderstanding.
A final proof that even in its ending, humanity insisted on being both tragic and ridiculous. The only combination it ever truly mastered.
Infinite Jest and the Test of Boredom
Infinite Jest is one of those books I re-visit a lot on this site. It’s in my top five favorite books of all time. When people ask what it’s about I tell them the surface level answer: It’s about a film so entertaining that people watch it without doing anything else until they die. Oh, and tennis. It’s more than that though. I talked to a friend of mine about it who introduced me to the book in the first place. I told him, “I think, at its core, Infinite Jest is a book about our inability to deal with boredom.” Not even our inability, our refusal. It’s about the sheer panic that rises in us when we’re left alone with our thoughts, without a screen or distraction to drown out the noise inside.
The author — David Foster Wallace — saw boredom as the truest test of freedom. Not freedom in the political sense, but the freedom to exist without the constant need to be entertained. The freedom to pay attention — to life, to others, to ourselves — without numbing out. The irony, of course, is that we’ve built a society where that kind of freedom feels unbearable.
The book also tackles addiction, and the addicts in Infinite Jest aren’t just addicted to substances, they’re addicted to escape. To anything that shields them from the crushing weight of unfiltered consciousness. But Wallace’s genius was showing that this isn’t limited to drug users. We all have our fix. Some people chase achievement. Some chase pleasure. Some chase attention. The forms change, but the hunger doesn’t.
At the center of the book is “the Entertainment,” a film so irresistibly pleasurable that viewers lose the will to do anything but watch it until they die. It sounds absurd, but it’s not that far off. Every endless scroll, every algorithmic loop, every dopamine hit of digital validation is a step toward that same self-erasure. Wallace wrote the book in the 1990s, but he saw where we were heading: a culture where overstimulation replaces meaning, and distraction becomes the dominant mode of existence.
What makes the book so overwhelming — so sprawling, so labyrinthine — is that it mirrors the chaos of modern consciousness. The fragmented attention, the tangled connections, the endless search for something that feels real. The structure itself resists our hunger for easy satisfaction. You can’t skim it; you have to wrestle with it. And maybe that’s the point. Reading it is an act of resistance against the same forces it warns about.
Wallace once said that “the real, profound boredom” we experience in everyday life is where freedom begins. But to get there, we have to stop running from it. We have to stop medicating every quiet moment with noise. Boredom is uncomfortable because it strips us bare. It forces us to confront who we are when we’re not performing, producing, or consuming.
That’s the real terror of the book. Not addiction, not death, not even despair, but the silence underneath it all. The realization that maybe we’ve built our entire lives around avoiding ourselves.
In that sense, the novel is both a warning and a mirror. It asks whether we can still be present in a world designed to keep us from ever being present. It asks whether we can stand the boredom long enough to rediscover what’s real.
Boredom, it turns out, isn’t the enemy. It’s the doorway back to awareness. It’s where meaning has been hiding all along: in the space we’re just too afraid to enter.
Anti-Natalism Isn’t My Most Extreme Position
Most people recoil at the idea of anti-natalism. “But my legacy!” “I need the family name to live on!” “You’re not full until you’ve had a child!” Spare me your bullshit. There’s no altruistic reason to have children. Every reason anyone gives is selfish and self-absorbed. Most people feel like being an anti-natalist is a spit in the face of them and their progeny. Let them think that. I will not back down from this view. I don’t stop at anti-natalism though. My position goes further. I’m pro-omnicide. Yes, I mean that literally: I’m pro the end of all life. Not just humans. Not just animals. All of it.
Life is suffering. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology. Every living being spends its existence avoiding pain, hunger, sickness, loneliness, decay, and finally death. Even joy is temporary, always shadowed by loss. The very structure of life is cruelty: to live is to feed off of other life.
The one and only true solution to suffering isn’t better medicine or fairer societies (although I wish for those to ease the suffering as well as ending capitalism before we go.) It’s ending life itself. Omnicide is the clean cut, the only guarantee that no more beings — animal or human — will be forced into pain.
There can be comedy in this as well though. It’s not all doom and gloom. Billions of years of evolution, countless wars and inventions, all the books and religions and empires, and it all ends with nothing. Lights out. Curtain call. The universe shrugs and deletes its own save file.
People keep searching for meaning, for some grand story about progress, destiny, or utopia. But the joke is that there is no meaning. The only punchline left is extinction; not tragedy, not triumph, just silence.
Why say this publicly though? Because most people won’t even look in this direction. They’re terrified of questioning the assumption that “life is good.” But if we really care about ethics, if we really care about suffering, then omnicide is the most compassionate conclusion. And if we really embrace the absurd, then there’s no need to dress it up as anything other than what it is: the end of the joke.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, but I also don’t think the can refute me, try as they might. They can’t deny that suffering defines life. And they can’t deny that omnicide would end it once and for all.
That’s why I’m pro-omnicide. Not because of a hatred for life, but because I see life for what it is.
Waiting for the End
I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t sign up for this whole “life” thing. I just opened my eyes one day and the clock started ticking. Expectations piled on. Rules I never agreed to. A world I didn’t create.
By now, I’m 38. No spouse. No kids. I still live with my mom. That fact alone makes me feel like I’m not a “real adult,” even though I pay attention to the world, think deeply, and try to be a good person. But none of that matters, right? Not in a world where adulthood is measured by mortgages and marriage licenses.
I look around and feel alien. Tired. Like I missed a train everyone else caught, or maybe I was never invited to the station. People around me post pictures of weddings, kids, vacations, “success.” I sit with the weight of just surviving, and sometimes even that feels impossible.
The truth? I’m tired. Bone-deep tired. I’ve had days where I didn’t want to wake up. Days where I felt like checking out would be easier than dragging myself through one more empty cycle of eat-sleep-repeat. I’ve thought, “what’s the point?” more times than I can count.
I didn’t ask for life. But life was handed to me like a debt I didn’t incur, and now I’m supposed to be grateful just for enduring it.
Still… Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I told someone how I felt. And I wasn’t met with judgment. I wasn’t told to “cheer up” or “get over it.” I was just heard. And sometimes, that’s enough to get through another day. So maybe this blog isn’t a rallying cry or a solution. Maybe it’s just a flare shot into the dark for anyone else who feels this way. You’re not alone. You’re not a failure. And you don’t have to carry this on your own. I don’t know what comes next. I’m still here, and for now, that’s enough.
Living with Bipolar 2 Disorder
Living with bipolar 2 disorder is a journey I never chose, but one that has shaped me in ways I’m learning to appreciate.
At its core, bipolar 2 is about navigating two very different worlds: hypomania, where energy and ideas flow faster than I can keep up with, and depression, where even getting out of bed can feel impossible. Neither lasts forever, and learning that was the first step toward building a life I actually want to live.
In the past, I thought stability was impossible. When hypomania hits, I’ll race ahead without sleep, full of excitement, and bold plans. When the depression takes over, I’ll crash so hard it feels like nothing will ever get better. It took some time (and a lot of help involving a wonderful psychiatrist and medication) to realize that these cycles don’t define me. They were just part of the landscape I needed to learn to navigate.
Today, things are different. They’re not perfect–never perfect–but better. With the right support, the right tools, and a lot of self-awareness, I’ve found ways to catch the early signs of a shift. I’ve learned how to slow myself down when I start to climb too fast, and how to reach out when I feel myself sinking.
Therapy, medication, and daily routines have been game changers. So having self-compassion, patience, and the courage to admit when I need help. Recovery isn’t about never struggling again, it’s about building a life that can survive the struggles.
There are gifts in this too. Bipolar 2 has made me more creative, more empathetic, more resilient. It’s taught me to appreciate stability when I have it, to savor the small moments of peace, to celebrate progress no matter how small. It’s taught me that healing isn’t a straight line, and that setbacks don’t erase the work I’ve done and continue to do.
Living with bipolar 2 isn’t easy, but it’s not hopeless although sometimes it feels that way and there are days I want to give up. Every day I’m learning more about who I am, and every day I’m choosing, again and again, to keep going.
If you’re struggling: it’s not your fault.
You’re not broken.
And there is a way through.
Maybe not a perfect cure, but a path: messy, winding, but real. And it’s worth walking.
What’s My Drug of Choice? Well, What Have You Got?
I remember reading a blog some time ago on another site by some old fuck that lives in her own little world and refuses to accept that the world changes, and she refuses to accept that sometimes people can’t help their situations. One particular blog of hers was about drug addiction, which was something she clearly knew nothing about. “People who use drugs have no one to blame but themselves. They had the choice to use drugs or not to use drugs and they chose to do it so they shouldn’t be helped.”
I was talking to my brother-in-law about this. We used the example of a party one time. No one goes to a party and just blurts out, “So who’s got heroin in this motherfucker?” A lot of the time heroin stems from an addiction to opiates, which are prescribed by doctors to manage pain. We as humans will find any way possible to eliminate the pain in our lives, whether it’s physical or emotional.
I started drinking and using pills when I was 19 or so. I’ve used coke, still smoke weed, drink occasionally (but have recently discovered that I can’t drink alone anymore. I won’t drink alone anymore.) Also, as I mentioned in my previous blog, I tripped on acid for the first time this past weekend. We’re all looking for ways to avoid, ignore, or eliminate pain. I don’t know too many people who become addicts because they’re happy. No one drinks alone because they’re entertaining happy thoughts. Those of us who use are trying to mask, hide, and again, eliminate pain. We’ll go to any lengths to do it.
I know what depression is like. I’ve struggled with it since my teens. It’s not something that’s easy to live with and it’s not something I’d wish on another person. Then again, maybe I would just so someone else could walk a day in my shoes to know what the pain is like. I commented on a friend of mine’s blog about depression, saying:
Sadness and depression are two very different things. I have felt sat before and I struggle with depression. Sadness is the loss of a job, the feeling you have after a fight with your partner, failing that test you studied so hard for.
Depression is wanting out. There is nothing to life and you go along every day and wonder why you still bother in the first place. It’s feeling that nothing is ever going to get better and dreading the days ahead. It’s sleeping the day away because you can’t bring yourself to face it. It’s just not wanting to play anymore as David Foster Wallace said in Infinite Jest. Nothing brings you joy but the nothingness of being unconscious somehow whether it’s from sleeping or being passed out from the night before.
It’s why we choose things that are bad for us to handle the pain. We drink, we do drugs, we try to numb the pain anyway we can because it’s physical and mental. You don’t feel anything when you’re on drugs. That’s the feeling we want … the feeling of not feeling at all.
It’s why so many who suffer from depression commit suicide. They want an out. They’re done with playing and have realized this life has nothing to give them.
I struggle every day with the feeling of not wanting to feel. I lie in bed and sleep for hours on end because I just don’t want to know what the day holds for me and I don’t care. I just want to be out of it. I want to be put into a coma so I won’t have to be dead, but I won’t have to deal with what’s going on in my mind anymore, either.
Knowing this, how could you say you don’t understand why people turn to drugs? It’s easier, faster, and sometimes cheaper than therapy.
You can’t understand a user’s mind
But try, with your books and degrees
If you let yourself go and opened your mind
I’ll bet you’d be doing like me and it isn’t so bad
Anti-Natalism and Mental Illness Mash-Up
I’m back again. This is my second post of the night. A lot of my posts deal with my discussing my mental illness as well as my anti-natalist views. I figured why not post a blog that touches on both of these topics? People get the wrong impression as far as anti-natalists are concerned. They think we’re a bunch of misanthropic assholes who just think the world should burn. I’m not going to lie, I am pretty misanthropic, but I consider myself a philanthropic misanthrope. I try to do good by others and extend a hand if someone needs help, but if the human race were to die out tomorrow then I think it’d be for the best and we had it coming for a long time anyway.
Mental illness seems to run in my family. Dad was bipolar. My sister’s bipolar. My mom suffers from depression and anxiety. I think about people who have mental illness in their family who have children and wonder why they decided to have said children. I wonder the same thing about people who have issues such as diabetes, cancer, and things of that nature that run in their families. Why do you want to pass these things onto other people? It’s cruel if you ask me.
People don’t consider what they may be putting their offspring through nor what they may be putting themselves through. I’ll never have children so I’ll never experience the pain of losing a child, but for those out there who suffer with mental illness and have passed it onto their children, what if your children don’t deal with it as well as you do? What if they can’t or don’t get the help they need and do something drastic? It could lead to something tragic, something tragic that could have been avoided had you just not decided to procreate in the first place.
Procreation isn’t fair to the unborn. You’re giving them a life that they didn’t ask for and quite possibly a life they’re going to not end up wanting as they get older. What then? I suppose you could get them help with a professional and get them on some meds, but those don’t always work. Speaking from experience, I’ve been through my share of meds and therapies to try to “get better” and I still struggle daily with thoughts of suicide. They haven’t been as prominent in recent months, but they’re still at the back of my mind. What’s usually on my mind these days is wishing I’d never been born in the first place.
I, like billions of others, had no say in this matter. I just struggle to understand why my parents wanted to have me knowing what ran in the family. Is it any surprise to anyone that I’d be stuck here suffering through the same issues, suffering with the same thoughts and feelings? The shitty part is that I think as I get older, it gets worse. I’m just getting closer and closer to the grave and for some reason it’s starting to worry me a bit and I don’t know why. I wasn’t always afraid of death like I am now.
Why do you want to put others through things like this? It’s not fair to them. We all know life isn’t fair so spare others from experiencing that. Spare others from experiencing thoughts of their own demise. Spare others from the stigma that’s associated with mental illness. Just spare others from pain by leaving them in whatever realm they’re in before this thing called life begins.
The Beauty of Non-Existence: Anti-Natalism Chronicles XII
Do any of us really know what happens after death? We all have our varying beliefs, but no one really knows until they’ve experienced it, and it’s not like any of them can come back and let us know if they’re having a good time or if the whole death thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m sure it has its ups and downs like anything else. You no longer have to worry about bills or your health, but you’re also missing out on shit that others are doing that maybe you would have enjoyed if you were still alive.
This is another argument for putting an end to procreation. None of us know what life was like before being brought into this world and none of us had a bad day because of it. I don’t remember anything about being a year old, being in the womb, and I most certainly don’t remember anything before that. Nothing bad happens when you don’t exist. It’s when you bring people into existence. That’s when problems start.
I’ve been struggling as of late. I’ve mentioned it a time or two. I’ve slipped into another depressive episode and can’t shake it. Another day has gone by and another one is going to come and go tomorrow. I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring or what the next few months or few years are going to bring. I just know now more than ever that time is ticking away and there’s nothing I can do about it. I suppose I could kill myself, but that would leave others behind and I don’t want to do that, but the thought crosses my mind time and time again. I was doing so well with keeping the suicidal thoughts at bay, too.
I would never have had these problems had I never been born. I think we’ve seen a movie or a television show where an angel or ghost of some sort comes to a person and shows them what life would have been like had they never been born. These mediums always paint existence in a positive light because we all want to feel better at the end of the day. That’s why we turn to sitcoms and banal shit such as that. We want to feel better. When I lie in bed at night, I don’t feel better. I feel like things would be better without me here.
If it were up to me, I’m talking about being in the spirit realm or whatever came before I was conceived, I would have told my parents to think twice about deciding to have a child. If I got to have a look at everything that would happen to me and see how it all turns out for me in the end; the good, the bad, the ups and downs, I believe I’d choose not being born at all. It’s the constant worry of what’s going to happen from one day to the next. No one has to worry about that when they don’t exist.
No one has to worry at this moment. I’m not going to do anything drastic. I don’t even know how many of you out there still read the dribble I spill onto this fucking site. I’m not longing for death. I’m longing for never being born in the first place.
Forget It. It’s Sooze-Town.
I’ve noticed my social anxiety and depression have gotten worse as of late. I can’t listen to anyone because I’m too focused on all the shit going on in my head. I have kept it all bottled up for weeks now, and I realized that maybe I should just write everything down that’s going on so maybe I can have it all in one place as kind of a go-to if I need it when I see my psychiatrist in a few weeks.
I don’t know why it started. I was doing so well with my medication, but I started talking about things that don’t really matter with my psychiatrist in order to avoid what’s really bothering me. I do that more often than I’d like to admit. I’m prone to keeping things bottled up like I always have. I know that talking things through helps, but sometimes I can’t make myself do it. I feel like my problems are insignificant, like they don’t matter.
I find it hard to sleep at night because of all the thoughts that go racing through my head. I’m 32-years-old and I have nothing to show for it. I’m terrified of absolutely everything these days and I’ve become a shut-in basically. I can’t drive due to epilepsy, but I want to get out of the house so when the opportunity arrives to go for a drive with someone I always go, but I stay in the car. I can’t bring myself to get out and go inside anywhere. All the people make me nervous. I get nervous being surrounded by so many people and then realizing all those people making me nervous makes me even more nervous. I break out into a sweat. I start fidgeting. I pace back and forth.
I’m not getting any younger and the thought of death is always in the back of my mind. I know we’re all going to die and I used to be accepting of that fact, but as I get older and realize my time is running out I’m becoming less and less OK with it. I’ve always had a great relationship with my mom, and she has always been the one constant in my life; I fear something happening to her and never seeing her again. I don’t know how to shake these feelings. I dread the days she goes to work. I dread the times she has to fly to another state for work. I have this constant fear that something is going to happen to her and I’m not going to know how to handle it.
Then there’s the fear of something happening to me. I know when I’m dead it will all be over for me and I won’t know any different, but it’s just the thought of being dead and thinking about those I left behind and the impact it will have on them. My dad committed suicide fifteen years ago. My grandfather died three years ago. My mom’s boyfriend died almost two years ago. What’s my mom going to do if something happens to me?
It’s stupid, but I think about what happens after I’m dead. I think of things I’m going to miss out on when that happens, trivial things. I won’t be able to see my family or friends anymore. I won’t be able to read another book. I won’t be able to watch the shows that I enjoy. No more walks with my dog. No more sitting outside and enjoying the weather, watching the cars go by. Life goes on long after we’re gone. I want to leave something behind so that I can be remembered. I just don’t know what. I want to be remembered. I have this fear of being forgotten.
It’s like that one scene in “BoJack Horseman” where he says, “Is that life? You’re there, you do your thing, and then people forget.” That’s what I fear the most. I want my life to mean something. I don’t want to be forgotten. What do I have to do to make some sort of impact? I don’t want to just be another name on a tombstone. I see all those tombstones in the cemetery – names of people I never knew. I wonder if other people remember them. How many people go and visit those graves? After a while when the initial shock wears off that your loved one has passed, you visit the grave less and less. I guess I just have a fear of being forgotten. I want my life to have meaning and purpose, but I don’t know how to make that happen.
Sisyphus Shrugged 