The urge to give up

So remember the problem with medication?  Well I kept on thinking I'd gotten better and then realizing that I'd instead gotten to the point where I was functional in certain settings but not, critically, in the one that often matters most: on my own left to my own devices.

That's when work gets done, after all.  Schoolwork especially, but other things as well.  That's when stories get written.  Notice how stories have been lacking of late?  I count three fragments in the last month.

I should have seen this coming, logically.  Even though getting off my medication has almost immediate down sides, getting back on it tends to take about a month to work out.  So I should be at 100% in early December.  If I'd stopped to look at things reasonably I'd have realized this and not had a sequence of getting false hope in a setting that was able to stabilize me getting the hope crushed when I was on my own again, and then repeating several times.

It took me way too long to realize what was going on.

But the title is about giving up, because that's been a strong feeling.  The urge to just quit at life.  I need to pause here just because the words can be taken the wrong way.  Wanting to quit at life is impossible.  As much as I might sometimes want to just give up on everything, you can't really do that.  Life is not a job you can decide not to show up at.  It's not a program you can drop out of.  As much as you might want to give up on everything and let all responsibilities drop, you just can't.

Suicide is something else entirely.  It's an action, not a withdrawal.  It's also something that I have never seriously considered and very much doubt I ever will.

So it's important to distinguish between those two things.

Wanting to quit at life is not the same as ideation of self harm.  Far from it.  It's a desire for inaction.

And it comes up a lot.  I'm walking to school and I wonder what the point is, wouldn't it be easier if I just stopped moving and curled up in a ball on the ground?  Fortunately that's impractical.  One needs heat and shelter for ball curling to work well.

For the first time ever I'm giving up on a class after the standard tryout period.  I can't get my money back, I committed to it, but I can get a medical withdrawal.  And I'm going to.  The teacher actually suggested it, but I wasn't on board with it until I woke up one morning and couldn't force myself to get out of bed.  I was fully awake, but the whole moving and getting up and getting ready shit wasn't happening.  What was the point?  I'd fallen far enough behind when I was off my medication and in the aftermath that I probably couldn't pull through, why go if I can't pass?

I actually know why.  I usually don't have it in me to quit.  But right now quitting is so fucking tempting on everything.

And that's a problem.  Bills need to be paid.  Appointments need to be kept track of.  I have a cavity.  That was supposed to be fixed this morning.  I haven't been able to muster the energy to check messages on the answering machine so I missed the reminder call.  When they called up this morning because I was late and they were wondering where I was there was no way I could make it.

I already didn't know how I'd pay to have the tooth drilled.  Now I'm going to have a missed appointment fee.

At least two bills got passed due while I was not having the energy/motivation to read my mail.  Oh, joy.

You can't quit life, but when you stop participating it starts throwing penalties your way.

I don't know what the late fees will be yet.  I don't know what the missed appointment fee is.  I don't think I ever mentioned, but needing to pay for things like furnace repair and other such shit (which, reliable heat is awesome, and I can now wash dishes once I muster the necessary motivation, so there are up sides) has left me $600 behind on something else because ... either the god of money hates me or I'm utterly incompetent.

Which brings us back to the urge to quit, and the impossibility of doing so.  You can't just say, "Fuck it, I'm out," and give up.  You still need things like hydration and nutrients, you still need to pay bills if you want things like water, heat, and a place to stay.  Life doesn't let you take a break, there are no vacations, there is no time off, it just keeps on coming at you no matter what.

But that doesn't change the urge to stay in bed all week, to just not show up to school, to not read the mail or check the messages, to not get off the couch, to close my eyes and hope the world disappears.

So that's where I'm at at the moment.

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I still have ideas, of course.  But nothing ever comes of them.  I have an idea for a story but when I try to write it all falls apart.  I have an idea for a project and quickly realize that if I can't muster the money to get even, not ahead, just even, with my finances then I can't come up with whatever capital, however small, might be needed for the project.  Or maybe the project doesn't need money at the start, but I'm not exactly going to learn to create 3-d character models at this point in this state either (the abstractish geometric modeling used to make puzzles doesn't really apply to making something that looks like a person), or I know I'll never get around to getting the materials, or I know I'm not in the right frame of mind to learn new programming, much less understand what's described in this article and adapt it to my own nefarious purposes, or I'd like to do X but that would mean effort I have no chance of wrangling.

And so forth.

I feel utterly useless at this point.  I can't actually succeed in doing anything.