I feel compelled to stop paying my bills and buy a ticket to Vienna and tour Europe, eventually making my way across Eurasia and ending up on a beach in south east Asia, with nothing more than a backpack, cloths, a journal, and a few essential books
I also feel compelled to kill my self almost daily
Reason seems a more reliable guide than feelings, however
And why do you go on living?
Habits, mostly.
There are ideals I almost arbitrarily choose based on the constellations of reflections that have materialized over the course of my life. These provide some semblance of guiding light to bend my energies toward.
All life is a mote of dust passing through a beam of light.
And I don’t mean to get all morbid.
At the end of the day, the thing that prevents me from killing myself is that I’d rather die trying, that I’d rather live fearlessly.
Like, if I’m gonna die, I may as well kill my self trying to do something. Preferably a worthwhile thing. But not even.
Like, if I wanna kill myself, try doing it working out until I begin bleeding internally, or reading until my brain begins having seizures, or die at the hands of some rogue gang as you explore distant landscapes in foreign lands, or die running, or die from exhaustion, or die trying to achieve an unattainable goal.
Like, die trying.
Whenever I want to kill myself, I just tell myself to do something until it kills me. No fear.
Of course this sometimes works out better than others. There are certain seasons of my life where I am a coward, and I convince myself that I’m doing the things I fear, that I’m effectively killing myself by pursuing the most risky and challenging ideals.
But in reality, I’m being a soft little bitch. More talking and less doing. Being a passive coward. Staying comfortable. Dying slowly and never living, instead of living fully at the risk of dying quickly.
Cognitively, I desire to kill my self doing the hard things, the challenging things, the scary things.
That’s better than just hanging myself.
At least I tried. At least I threw my soul at something. At least I flexed my will and stared into the abyss.
I delude myself all the time though, which, upon realization, only makes me want to kill myself all the more, which in turn hardens my resolve to lunge at the limits of my life, and kill myself on the frontiers of fear.
Which, when I obey these instincts, usually propels me forward, or instigates growth and evolves the mind, liberating me from the prior circumstances of comfort, which are the source of discontent.
And you just repeat this process until life actually kills you. And this seems like a worthwhile way to die.
It’s a circular paradox.
Physical comfort breeds existential discomfort which pushes me toward physical discomfort which breeds existential comfort which in turn leads to physical comfort…. and so on and so forth.
William Dare 