Is Suicide a Recourse in a Narcissistic World?

I think a lot about killing myself.

It’s difficult to divine a point to existence. Anyone’s. But mine, in particular. What’s the point of me? No one loves me. No one is truly interested in me. And I can’t fathom why I’m so inconsequential.

I am not ugly. I am not stupid. I am not incapable. I am not out of shape.

I am compassionate, empathetic, thoughtful, intelligent, capable, fit.

I’m even handsome by other people’s measure (if they are telling me the truth). I hide my face because I’m exploring ugly things, and I don’t want the fallout to pollute my real life, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or don’t. I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. I know I’m not beautiful.

So, bearing all those positives in mind, what is the problem?

Well, trauma, for one. Being molested at such a young age and for such a protracted amount of time has debilitated me as a thinking and feeling being. I experience terror at the cellular level when it comes to intimacy. I expect to be hurt when I am vulnerable because that was my formative experience. I have been hurt again and again nearly every time I’ve made myself vulnerable in search of intimacy, which I never find because people are, themselves, so fucked up — traumatized in their own ways, and thus agents of harm, whether willingly of unwittingly.

Most people are stupid. That’s discouraging. And, if they’re not stupid, they’re often ignorant: of their own motivations, the effects of their experiences, the consequences of their actions. Few are capable of soberly analyzing their own lives. They don’t think; they just act. Mindless. Which is tantamount to stupid.

I’m tired. Tired of living in a world full of people like this, where it seems that I will never connect with anyone in a meaningful way. I grapple with ambivalence about humanity because I see so much potential in us, but nearly all of it is unrealized, for all of the aforesaid ignorance and stupidity. And let’s not forget avarice.

My pessimism has won out: I don’t want children, because — based on my own miserable experience and all of the misery I witness in the world — I wouldn’t wish existence upon anyone. Further, because my childhood abuser was a woman and because I am heterosexual and all of my partners have been women, the lion’s share of the psychic and emotional hurt that I’ve experienced has been at the hands of women. I don’t want to be a misogynist — and I’m not, in practice — but I do bear deep wounds inflicted by my interactions with women that have debilitated me to such an extent as to dissuade me from desiring to interact with them.

Although that’s not entirely true. I do have a deep, existential yearning for love, affection, and intimacy. I want those things. And, because of my biology, I want them from a woman … but, based upon my experiences so far, there is no woman who will provide it. I’ve had dozens of partners, by this point. I think that I’ve gathered enough data that I’m not being unreasonable. I’m not navel gazing. I’m analyzing the evidence.

I’ve dated since the end of my last relationship, which had been an open one because my trauma will no longer permit me to commit myself fully to anyone else’s care. I expect those affections to be rescinded at the woman’s convenience. I recognize the impediment that my faithlessness poses, but when you burn your hand in the fire, are you supposed to keep sticking your hand into it or learn that fire burns? My dates have led to opportunities to have sex, but I haven’t consummated most of those opportunities — and this will surely be met with incredulity and derision — because I haven’t wanted to. I have rebuffed seven women between the end of my relationship to now. That is: I have eschewed overt propositions for sex. I am not hard up for opportunities. I am just not interested in being newly hurt, nor am I interested in hurting anyone else. I already hurt so much, and it’s no one else’s obligation to fix me. Especially not some stranger who thinks they’re getting something enticing — a cavalier fuck — but, in reality, it’s much sourer and graver than that. A lemon.

Now, I like lemons … but most people don’t prefer the sour. They want the ideal. Something sweet (and not in any wholesome emotional sense, but in a heedless, confectionary sense). I am not ideal; I am wounded by experience.

Yet, I am quite capable of being sweet.

If you ask of my partners, I think they’d tell you that I was one of the most loving people they’d ever known … that is, if they could separate those positive experiences from my rages, my cruelties — the unfortunate side-effects of not knowing how to parse trauma in a healthy way, and being stuck in a relationship with a partner who either doesn’t know how or doesn’t care to help. Don’t get it twisted and think that they didn’t dole out the same or similar negativity. They weren’t hapless victims, but game participants in the toxic exchange. So many of those women reveled in being fucked well by an angry, aggressive man. Choked. Slapped. So few of them wanted intimacy. They wanted porn, and I gave it to them. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy it, too, but one can’t survive on a diet of only candy.

I don’t want merely a sweet life. I’m OK with the sour. More than OK; I recognize the necessary role that it plays. And I love the savory. I want the gamut.

However, all I have is endless bitterness. My earth has been salted, and nothing can grow there. From what I’ve seen, I’m not the only one suffering this condition.

And that makes me want to die.

I have no hope. No promise. No desire to surmount new challenges. I am defeated. Truly. I have been vanquished. I gave up on life when the last woman whom I loved got into that cab, signaling the end of our relationship. So what if we slept together after that. So what that we had maintained a connection. She ceased to be mine that day, and she was all that I had wanted. Eventually, she cut me out entirely, and that is my deepest wound. I legitimately hate her, now, but only because I still love her and am now of no consequence to her. I’ve never been able to process the grief. I recognize that it’s not her problem.

I slept with at least three times as many women after her as I had before. I traveled for three months in Europe and Africa, alone, after her. I met people and I enjoyed their company, some of it intimately. I published a novel. I carried on that three-year uncommitted affair that entailed me also sleeping with nearly every willing woman who crossed my path. I’ve “lived.” I’ve accomplished things. But I’m dead inside, and so there’s no sense of achievement or satisfaction. Hedonistic abandon did not prove to be nourishing. It didn’t salve the underlying wound. Objective success rings hollow when my sense of self-worth is so impugned.

And so, I want to die.

I fear that I’ll never feel joy again. I don’t think I’ll ever be loved again. I’m not sure that I ever was. I don’t have hope that a better and brighter future awaits me, in any way. This pandemic has made me realize that I am OK alone. Have I the material resources, I could persist like this — isolated and feckless — until I die by the hand of time or circumstance, rather than by my own. But, with the economic reality being what it is, my prospects for material resources are just as poor as mine for immaterial ones.

I was jettisoned from my previous career because I was a feckless malcontent. I hated the work, and I hated the people I worked with. They were malignant narcissist materialist misogynists. The environment was a miasma, and the work itself was pure bullshit. Totally pointless. Stupid. Pap.

On top of that, my relationship was falling apart because I’d had the hubris to think that I could be with a beautiful sexpot twelve years my junior without being wrecked by insecurity. Both situations were toxic. I’m fortunate to be without that career and without her. Her presence in my life consumed me like a cancer. But I loved her. I adored her. And I wanted her to be something that she wasn’t, wouldn’t, and couldn’t be … because I’m a fool. I admit that this evinces that what I felt for her wasn’t love, in any true sense. It was infatuation. I threw myself into it. Like an idiot, I struggled against the riptide and I drowned.

I’ve been underwater ever since.

I haven’t had a “real” job since. I tried to become a teacher and I was undermined by vindictive megalomaniacs. I’ve since been teaching in another venue — and, honestly, loving it — but I am expendable, and that brings no peace of mind, no sense of security. It only exacerbates my insecurity, financial and emotional. And, during the next term, I will be more insecure than ever because I’ve been assigned just one class. I’ve asked around for more, but I’m like Oliver fucking Twist.

“More??”

These insecurities undermine me in the feminine arena, of course. Why did I get so laid, back in the day? Because I had money. I didn’t give a shit about spending it to participate in the farce of lavishing a female with food, drink, other experiences so to make her vagina secrete for me. However, just because the money was no object, it didn’t mean I enjoyed the vampire dynamic. I just played the game because those were the parameters. I wanted the spoils.

Now, though, my resources are more precious. I don’t want to waste them on some stupid trollop. Back then, all I wanted to do was fuck away my sadness. Trollops were ideal. Spending my way into their beds sufficed to get my dick wet, but it did nothing for my starving emotional self. And I’ve reached a point where he is so emaciated that I can’t ignore him, anymore. He and I are now in such a desperate famine, and I can’t feed him. I don’t want to spend money just to make someone like me (and let’s be honest, they didn’t; they just liked what they got out of the association). It’s not that I don’t have still have the means. I do. I socked away a whole bunch of scratch. I just don’t want to waste that kitty on pussy. I want something real.

I want an authentic connection with another human being — one who happens to have a vagina. I’m tired of mere sex. I want love. But there isn’t any. Society is so deeply narcissistic that no one knows how to love. They don’t even love themselves. They think they do. But, by and large, they’re deluded. No one could soberly analyze their behaviors and conclude them to be hallmarks of self-care and -respect.

It’s so frustrating. I’m tired of dealing with women who hate men (and I’m not saying they’re not justified) and who express this hatred by acting in exactly the manner they decry. And I don’t want to be a man who hates women. I’m sick of living in a broken society of broken people. I’m sick of being broken, myself. The most frustrating aspect of my quandary is that I want to heal … but I can’t … because I don’t have access to the resources I need. It’s so apropos of the healthcare situation in this lie of a country. So apropos of the lie of this country, period.

I need affection, but we don’t do affection. We do dissociation, compartmentalization, and blithe fucking. We masturbate ourselves with other people’s bodies, and then throw them away when we get bored.

I hate it here. And it makes me want to die.

What other recourse is there when life is a joyless, loveless enterprise? Where my humanity is irrelevant, and I exist only as either a useful or useless object?

I can be alone forever. I probably will be. But I don’t want to be.

Maybe if enough people gave a shit about what I can do, I’d feel better. Maybe if I could be published in a way that raised my profile and fattened my bank account, I would feel more secure. Like I had value. Because it would mean I were being validated. That’s another thing I sorely miss. Validation. I never got it as a kid, and so it’s another thing for which I starve. That deficit can never be overcome, and practically no one is trying to help me overcome it. I have one friend who regularly builds me up and champions my work. I’m grateful for him. I need it. But I need so much more, besides, and I’m not getting it from anywhere. I’m not apt to.

The women whom I connect with on dating apps don’t indicate that I’m some gift in their lives. They indicate that they’re old and/or used up and broken and/or don’t really give a shit about anything but their own gratification. They express that they might as well talk to me because, well, maybe I’ll fill that vacuous, ravenous hole of theirs, at least for a little while — even just once. God, I really do fucking hate them: these women who reflect all the worst aspects of men. I am a misandrist. I recognize the root of all of these problems, and I direct my harshest recrimination at the source. But when that infects the people whom I’m compelled to seek, and it leaves me choking on dust and ashes, it hard not to be embittered by that experience. It’s hard not to be angry.

I know what I said, earlier: “I don’t want to be a misogynist.” I don’t. But then I so deeply resent the male-female dynamic that exists in this toxic culture, where I and they reside. By their own admissions, they hate it, too. From their own mouths, they hate men, yet they emulate their worst behaviors. I just spent the night with a Jamaican woman who refuses to date Black men because she finds them so abusive, yet she admitted that she takes out all of her resentments on the white men she does sleep with: using them like things, immune to their feelings. I am one of them. I don’t expect to see her again.

I don’t think that this inter-gender enmity is natural. I think it’s societal. Our society is sick, so every interaction is thus impugned. We spend so much time hurting each other, because we don’t even know how to help ourselves. How, then, could we ever been of any use to anyone else? How do you restore someone else when you’re so busy abusing yourself? I hate this with the fire of a thousand suns. I have been doing my damndest to stop participating. It’s why I’ve rebuffed almost every partner I’ve encountered, lately. I don’t want to hurt them, and I know that they can’t — or won’t — meet my emotional needs … so I refuse to use them for sex and then discard them, because they are a person, not a thing.

I am not a thing, either. I am a person, too. I would like to be allowed to be a person.

To be honest, I don’t want to die. I just want to hurt a little less. If I can offer the same to someone else, I would love to. But where is that opportunity? Absent.

This isn’t life. But I want to live.

And therein lies the rub.