Forgetting to Die on the Last Day I Was Alive

One of the times I died, I was playing with some drugs I wasn’t very educated on, and as a result, I did too much, and I remember coming to in an apartment bathtub with ice and frozen veggies on me, and my chest was burning. It wasn’t the first time I almost died, nor will it be the last, but I remember thinking that I didn’t belong here on earth anymore.

People who believe in god will say god will do these things for them to help them live their lives; give them better parking spots, have them get pulled over and then let go without a ticket, or all kinds of divine coincidences. God shows up for people who are scared of the dentist, but will be checked out when someone is dying of cancer. What if, instead of god being checked out, the person wasn’t supposed to be here anymore? What if I was supposed to die?

Yes, I have a therapist, yes, I talk to him about suicide and death, no, I don’t want to kill myself, no, I don’t have death anxiety, but yes, I think about death a lot. Not only have I watched a lot of people die, but I have had more than a few brushes myself with it. From being adopted to drugs to being really stupid and pulling stunts to cancer, I have walked along the precipice of life and death.

When I had a Hinge account, I answered the prompt for the name of the book or movie about my life with “seconds and inches.” In some cases, I was seconds and inches away from death. There were times when I was really scared about missing death by such a close margin, but other times, I almost sought the feeling to feel alive. When there is no threat to life, life can get a little boring or mundane.

From skiing to getting into fights, putting myself in harm’s way was a way to feel alive when just going to work made me feel numb and life pointless. Nowadays, I have an even darker vice to stay away from: the pointlessness and numbness of doom-scrolling social media.

But there are moments where I am not on my phone or watching TV, where I am just in total solitude, usually in the act of meditation or just allowing myself to become bored, I think about how maybe I wasn’t supposed to be here, that all the feelings of alienation and strange sickening feeling I get when I try to connect to other people is all tied to that I was supposed not to be here on earth at all, that all of these times that I have missed Death’s kiss by seconds and inches has prolonged an existence that was never supposed to happen.

I would even wonder if people were making me up in their heads, like I was a figment of their imagination, and that, because I was being imagined, I had gained a consciousness and now had to appear in this person’s life. Still, other times I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be in anyone’s life at all because I wasn’t supposed to get this far in life.

Psychologically, it has harmed me in a lot of ways because I have never felt like I needed to prepare for a future. After all, I never saw it. I’d go to job interviews, and the person would ask me where I saw myself in five years, and I would have to lie because I never saw anything at all. It was just blank.

It wasn’t until I got cancer that I started seeing a future threatened. I knew that I saw a future because I suddenly was experiencing anxiety, and anxiety is just a fear of the future, the unknown. I was used to the depression of having shame and guilt about the past, and a general heaviness in the present, where I was not delighted by much, but now I felt that, and I felt terrified that anything I did would lead me to an early grave. I could see the future, and everything threatened it.

My wife once wanted me to get breakfast sandwiches, and I threw a temper tantrum because I was so scared of going in front of someone and asking for something, and while there is no life and death involved in ordering a breakfast sandwich, my body felt like it did. I was horrified by the outside world, and I had not grown up like that.

Therapy and Cymbalta (which is actually for nerve pain, but has a nice anti-anxiety side effect) have helped me lessen the anxiety, working through trauma and the medical trauma. Still, now I’m back to the depression and the obsession with how I wasn’t supposed to be here.

When I was young and first getting sober, I would sometimes hallucinate. Sometimes it was colors and shapes, and other times it was people who were dead standing near me, looking at me, and I would feel this deep shame and survivor’s guilt because I was still living and they weren’t, and who knows if they were supposed to have been living still, and I stole their spot on earth. I hadn’t had those hallucinations in a long time. Still, the other day I took a longer-than-usual hot shower to help alleviate the pain in my joints, and when I drew the shower curtain back to get a towel, for one brief second, a grey-toned older man that I remember from downtown Portland in the 80s and 90s stood there looking at me with contempt. I jumped and fell in the shower, but when I looked back up, he was gone.

That fear hasn’t left me since that day. I feel like I had almost died again, but it was just a ghost that visited me, reminding me that I wasn’t supposed to be in that shower in the first place. My head has been on a swivel, checking every nook and cranny, and staring hard into the shadows that seem to be watching me, and I have no idea why this darkness has caught on me, but it seems heavier than usual.

Today, I saw a very attractive heterosexual couple hug and kiss, and I was disgusted by their affection because I feel so alone in my head, and I was also jealous. Then I wondered if all my relationships had ended because I live like I’m not supposed to be here. I had a hard time investing because I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be here. I kept feeling my life was like getting HBO without paying for it, and any month now they are going to catch on and delete it. So I would watch it, but all I had to do was pay for it.

Then I wonder if I meet the “one”, if I would feel like I was supposed to be here, and when I have fallen in love, I do feel like I fit better. Still, as time goes on and I have to reveal the darkness that takes residence in my heart, I no longer feel that fit but feel even more alienated and alone. This is also why I never feel at home anywhere, because I wasn’t supposed to be here anymore.

Life as a depressed person is interesting because the world is all about ignoring the bad and only inflating the good, but I can’t see the good and only see the bad. While having a positive attitude is wise, it doesn’t really solve for why the world is the way it is. Like, I can fake a smile for a while, but in the end, I will see the real world for what it is, and I can’t even fake the smile anymore. No one likes a pessimist, but I also didn’t ask to be here at all, and here I am, living in your world.

With the feeling of not being supposed to be here, I feel like that is that part of my brain that still has a conception of a higher power, so I fight to forget the god concept altogether, at least the Western gods. If there is any god at all, it is the god of Spinoza and the eastern gods, where that god is everything; therefore, I am too. But concepts are easier than faith, and faith is what keeps me from thinking I’m supposed to be here.

I will never understand whether there is a point to any of this, and most of the time, I feel it’s random and chaotic. However, I try to come to terms with the fact that I am still here, and maybe there is something I can do to help another person or people have a better life with me in it, because there is nothing else that makes sense.