Fighting to Stay Alive

By “Carter”

As told to Cliff Williams


“It’s a massive challenge to keep going every day.”


Edited by Cliff Williams from a recorded and transcribed conversation with Carter on March 5, 2024. We talked when he was in his late twenties. “Carter” is a pseudonym.


Almost Hung Myself

Carter’s relationship with a woman in his early twenties ended after four years. “I had done everything I could to save the relationship, but it colossally exploded. I lost count of the number of times I caught her cheating. In hindsight, I realize I too was lying, though by omission, by not telling her about my habitual porn use. 

“I was madly in love with her. Every time I looked into her eyes, I melted. It didn’t matter that she had lied. I forgave her every time. She would tell me that she was going to so-and-so’s house, but she actually went to see another guy. Or she was going out to a party, where she got drunk and ended up with some dude.

“It hit me super hard when the relationship was dying. I had been feeling that she was done with me. The gut-punch finisher came while she was showing me something on her phone. A text message popped up from another guy to whom she had given the pet name she had for me. That cut me deeply.

“In that moment I felt acutely that she did not care about me. I became flooded with hopelessness about myself and about my prospects for finding love. I agonized over the fear of being alone with my thoughts. 

“That night I stepped out on the balcony of my apartment. I took my belt off, tied it around the top bar of the balcony fence, then looped it around my neck. I looked out at the lake behind the apartment building. I cried.

“I don’t remember how I talked myself out of  going through with it. 

“Later, I found a GoFundMe site that she had created to get money so as to get away from her ‘abusive boyfriend,’ namely, me. I got agitated about that, and things blew up between me and her and my roommate. I didn’t handle it well. She didn’t handle it well. My roommate didn’t handle it well. It was bad.

“I was single for about a year until I met the person who became the mother of my child.”


Unsettling Thoughts

Carter has had suicidal ideation for most of his life. “I was five years old the first time I asked my mom if I could have some rope to hang myself. I don’t know how I knew about that as an option then. But I was ready to go pretty young.

“I suspect that there was more than exposure to pornography when I was a toddler. Up until recently, I have believed that my dad had watched pornography in front of me then. When I asked him about that, he said he would do that only after putting me to bed. He seemed earnest when saying that, but I don’t trust him. So it is a big question mark now. I don’t really know.

“Most days, though, it is a moot point what happened to me as a child, because I can’t even tell anymore whether I’m truly alive or in a purgatory merely thinking I’m alive. Nothing feels real. I could be in some Shutter Island hologram space matrix thing—a three-dimensional photo of which I am a part. I don’t know. 

“Sometimes I feel that I have actually hung myself, because things often don’t feel right. But when I follow that train of thought, I wind up with questions I can’t answer: ‘What if this? What if that?’

“I feel disconnected from my family. I have always felt that I was the black sheep, but recently I’ve felt more and more isolated from them so that I don’t even have anything to be a black sheep against. At the same time, there are parts of my family that I miss, and I wish I had a closer connection with them.

“I feel relentlessly trapped by my life. My soul says, ‘Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out.’ I want to do that, but I don’t want to traumatize people I love.

“I could wake up tomorrow here in my apartment, go to work, come home, and that would be good. Or I could wake up not in my body, and that would be fine too. I’m at the point at which I could take it or leave it.

“A week and a half ago, things were getting to be too much. I had been losing friends, losing touch with reality, stressing about new fatherhood, trying to restructure my identity. I put my belt around the shower curtain rod and stood on the side of the tub. I said a little prayer, ‘God, sometimes I feel that you want me to leave early. I don’t know what that’s about, but things are getting to be overwhelming. If you don’t want me to do this, send me a sign.’

“I had put on a playlist, and Bob Marley’s ‘Could You Be Loved’ came on. As I was putting the belt around my neck, I heard the line, ‘Don’t let them fool ya.’ I didn’t know how to take that, because I didn’t feel that I was perpetually being fooled. I leaned into the belt.

“I didn’t want to jump off the edge of the tub and break my neck, but I continued to lean into the belt. As my vision started to tunnel around me, I heard the line, ‘We’ve got a life to live,’

"‘Okay, Bob,’ I said to myself, ‘You win. I’ll take the belt off and try to figure something out.’

‘So, yes, I can talk myself out of ending it all. But in the same breath, I might be lying to myself when I say that. I may well have already killed myself and just am in denial. I can’t say with any confidence that that’s not the case. Everything has been so surreal and so uncanny and not consistent with how I understood anything to work.

“I want to make sense of things, but I don’t know what to do with the fact that I can’t.”


A Confusing Mess

The biggest thing that keeps Carter alive is his young daughter. “She’s a year and a half old. It encourages me to see her enthusiasm for life and the innate joy she has. I feel more purposeful in providing for her. I desperately want to protect her, and I want to build a better world for her. I’m trying to figure out how to dig my feet in a little more now that I have a very good reason to.

“I don’t have much else to live for, except maybe my mom. Most of my friends have drifted away. I’ve ruined my relationships with the women I’ve loved. The whole world is a super bleak place to be. Sometimes I just want to get into a spaceship and leave. But I don’t know where else to go.

“I can appreciate the fact that people other than my daughter and my mom would be sad if I were to kill myself. But it doesn’t feel that any of them want me here badly enough to make my day-to-day life hurt less.

“On a personal level, I have a pretty cushy life. But that’s not enough to keep me alive. It disturbs me that the world is so tremendously effed up. I don’t like being in it. Still, I don’t want to abandon everything. 

“My mom says I focus too much on the negative. I say she’s too busy being blissfully naïve. I wish I could have her simple outlook on things, and I envy her ability to see the good in people. She really, sincerely believes that most, if not all, people try to do their best most of the time. I strongly disagree. If my condition is a result of that disagreement, then yikes!

“Even though I am staying alive for my daughter, there are days when I feel she would be better off if someone were to replace me.

“My whole life has been defined by my wish to escape from it. I genuinely thought I was going to kill myself by the time I turned twenty. I certainly didn’t expect to make it to my late twenties. To me it’s mind blowing that I’m still alive.

“I don’t want to kill myself solely because of ‘Woe is me. My life is so hard.’ I do, indeed, feel these, but mostly I do not want to participate in the world as it currently is. I don’t know how to undo that feeling.

“I want to help people. I want to take care of myself and my daughter. But I find the world I’ve inherited revolting. So I don’t know what to do.

“I have been trying to feel encouraged recently by the fact that things are lining up in my life. But it feels as though the way that is happening leads me into another trap, another situation that is at least as much of a pit, someplace I don’t want to be. And I don’t know how to extricate myself from that trap. Killing myself might actually make things worse. I don’t want to hurt people, and I don’t want to spread the pain I feel to others. So it is all a confusing mess.”


Religious Trauma

“I’ve had to confront some religious trauma as well,” Carter said. “I have had the feeling that God’s original plan for my life was for me to off myself in high school. I was born damned, born wrong, born to fail. That perception has never left me, and it has hurt me badly. 

“I spent a good seven years as an atheist. While on psychedelics once, I had an intense experience in which I believed I was in hell, actually in it, damned forever.

“I have had to remind myself that God could very well have left me there. I didn’t do anything or say anything to get plucked out of hell. It was a pure act of mercy. 

“Building my relationship with the divine has been difficult because I’ve been doing it from a place of extreme deficit, from the sense that I was set up to fail. Connecting with the divine also holds a lot of bizarre mystery. I can’t deal with mystery. I have to get to the bottom of things.

“I’m not discounting the possibility that I am dredging up subconscious fears from childhood religious trauma or that my thoughts on this are simply chemicals in my brain firing. Things can be explained any number of ways, though that does not mean they are mutually exclusive.

“I now identify a lot with Jacob, who was ‘touched’ by God on the hip, which made him limp.”*

“Despite all these fatalistic emotions, I sense that having a relationship with the divine is fulfilling in its own right.”

   

Ambivalence

Carter finds himself both in darkness and light. “There’s a lot of darkness in the world. If we humans manage to continue not blowing ourselves up, there’s plenty of cool stuff to experience.

“I know there is love greater than all the bad things, a love that can ultimately win no matter what. But just getting through those bad things is really, really, really, really hard.

“I am thinking of doing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). I have been on so many different medications and on so many different therapists’ couches that I don’t want to do those anymore. The risk of doing something to my brain as a result of TMS or ECT feels negligible compared to what I am going through. It’s a massive challenge to keep going every day. 

“I miss my siblings. Actually, I don’t know how to connect to them. And I never did anyway. We had some kind of parallel reality going on most of the time. I take responsibility for that without overburdening myself with it or beating myself over the head about it.

“The world is as beautiful or ugly as we make it to be. I recognize that my version of things has been pretty skewed. I think working on that would definitely help me plant my feet more firmly so that I can make it to forty.

“I understand all too well when someone wants to take their life. But I don’t understand why some people are permitted to succeed and some aren’t. That troubles me. I want to understand why things have to be the way they are. I have discovered, though, that some things aren’t meant to be known this side of the veil. We need to let sleeping dogs lie. 

“We humans like clean answers—this is right, this is wrong, bing, bong. But it’s very seldom that life is that simple and clear on anything.

“I still sometimes feel as though I’m not in the real world, whatever that means.”

 

* Jacob wrestled all night with an unnamed man who dislocated Jacob’s hip and whom he later regarded as an angel sent by God. Genesis 32:22-32


© 2024 by Cliff Williams

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