Life has a sick sense of humor

Life has a sick sense of humour. I laugh at my ineptitude, an inability to process pain, a lack of understanding or care of what was good for me. So many times, I should have died, and so many times I laughed it off and did the same things again. I am glad I’m here today, happy even but at the same time incredibly lucky. Other than my attempt at my life from a deliberate standpoint, there are countless that were not deliberate and whilst may not have gotten close to killing me, really should have. I do not fear death, it's one thing in life that does not scare me. One thing that does is disappoint those that love and try to protect me. For me to die due to reckless behaviour, would be the ultimate act of betrayal, mistrust, and selfishness. I never thought I was hurting anyone with my actions and in the grand scheme of things I wasn’t but regularly I was one step away from hurting them all in the worst way possible. What makes it worse is that I only considered that once I had stopped.

I danced many a time with the devil, in many a scenario. I wish it were simple to explain but it's not. Growing up I could not quite grasp why I wasn’t “popular”, and it hurt me.

Now I look back I’m so grateful that I wasn’t a part of those people’s lives, I would not switch theirs for mine any day, not even my worst one. These people who I had so many times wished I could befriend turned out, now looking back, to be the best and worst thing to happen to me. Aside from the countless hours of therapy I have done to cope with the trauma caused in those years I am grateful that they have shown me the type of person I wish never to become. Selfish, arrogant, self-centred, rude, crass, mean-spirited, cruel, nasty. I don’t pretend to know the trauma they had faced in their youth to turn out in such a way, but I do truly hope that they have learnt the error of their ways. Their actions and their inaction to be good people have taught me so much about the world. In the end, it has partly made me who I am today, to say I am grateful for those people feels weird. It's like thanking someone for stabbing you.

Rock bottom is a concept familiar to many and a reality for a few. On this earth, a few are of course many, but you get my point. The idea of hitting rock bottom is something we all understand in theory but rarely come up against. There are bad days, there are shitty days, there are days when all hope is lost. Rock bottom however feels nothing like any of those days, rock bottom is when darkness appears, nothing lights up in your head, no thought, no matter how happy or wonderful, no images of cute animals can clear the retched fog of rock bottom.

I’ve been there four times, once at school, once a couple of years later at college, once in a hotel in a ski resort and most recently in 2019. Don’t get me wrong I had some god-awful days in-between but none quite like these. The difference and differentiation between a “bad day” and rock bottom is that you can turn around a bad day but for rock bottom, you need to do something a little different. See rock bottom doesn’t quite mean you can’t go any further down it just means you need to get climbing back up. When you have a bad day often the solution can be found as it goes along but the solution to rock bottom is often not as straightforward. It's more like a treasure hunt, with clues. Once you start looking more and more reveals itself until bingo you find what you’re looking for. The only catch is that there is no end to the hunt, unlike with a bad day which is singular, rock bottom can encompass an amount of time with no limit and it's only when you decide to look for clues that you start climbing. The aforementioned treasure is just a big clue in disguise and leads you to bigger and better things. Rock bottom is something that is to be used as motivation for a better life, the knowledge of what you’re leaving behind is the first clue to the road you’d rather follow.

We shall disregard the first three for the time being as I did at the time and focus on the most recent. In October of 2019 when away on holiday, I was unable to access certain things I had become extremely accustomed to daily. This led me to have withdrawal symptoms and a full nervous breakdown, I knew a career change was required and that my life was ultimately about to change for good. I had hit rock bottom (again), only this time I listened to my body, my brain, and my heart. Within a month I was back in therapy, taking steps to recovery and making my way back to normality within society. When I say I wouldn’t go back in time I say this because if I did, I would be a fundamentally different person today than I am now and I don’t want that. Who I am today is because of what I’ve gone through in the past and I’m truly grateful for those experiences as it’s given me a perspective on life at 21 that many spend a lifetime to achieve. This is not to brag to make myself seem better than others, the methods I took to get to where I am are most undesirable and only through a large amount of work is it that I can have this perspective. No one, not one soul alive would say what I’ve been through is fun, or nice, or a welcome part of life. The last time (other than at the time of writing) I was truly happy was when I was 9. That’s 12 years, 12 years gone, 12 years (a handful of good memories towards the end) that I would happily erase from my memory had they not forged who I am today.

To go full circle now, why do I think life has a sick sense of humour? Well, now when I look back, I laugh. Yes, sometimes I cry, sometimes I scream, sometimes I get so angry I take exercise (god forbid it becomes a habit) but in the end, I always seem to laugh. Everything I’ve gone through, put myself through, put others through. And I laugh. There is only really one way for me to describe this to someone and it's to say that life has a sick sick way of doing things but in the end, it's for the best. I hate to admit that the adults were all right when I was younger, and I wish I could have listened to them then, but it does “get better” stuff does “happen for a reason”. All of those quotes whilst they seemed unhelpful at the time are truer than I could have ever believed.