[This post is pretty dark — and self-indulgent, but that should come as no surprise. You probably don't want to read it unless you are in the most robust frame of mind possible. It mentions the concept of suicide in passing.]
I mostly live in one of two realities these days.
One reality is pretty objectively verifiable. I live in a beautiful part of the world, and I have many lovely and brilliant friends and colleagues who accept, appreciate, and even quite like me. (They don't understand me, but that would be asking a lot of anybody.)
I am not financially secure at all, but I'm comfortable. It wouldn't take much of an upset to throw my life into complete disarray, but I'm doing okay for now. I don't get paid for any of it, but I've plenty of work to be getting on with that I find meaningful and satisfying, and even occasionally fun. This is the world where I've spent most of the last couple of years, and it's been pretty wonderful.
The other reality is always at least dimly visible to me, even at my best. There, everything is grey, bleak, and hopeless. Every day is an ordeal of despair, loneliness, and grinding pain. I am incompetent, unlovable, and contemptible. On the bright side, I can just about manage to keep myself clean and fed, but I've no idea why.
Sometimes, I find myself dipping a toe into that world, but for most of the last decade I've been able to pull myself out before it gets too firm a hold on me. The "nice" reality has just become too clear, distinct, and compelling.
However for the last couple of months I've been in the "bad" reality most of the time. Every now and then I seem to be climbing out, and the nice reality comes into view again, but I keep slipping back.
Heaven knows I've had some nasty episodes in the distant past, but never so long and deep as this one. I've certainly known since childhood what it's like to genuinely want to die, but I've never understood suicide. But now I honestly don't know that there's no possibility that given a fast, neat, and clean way to do it, and somebody reassuring to hold my hand and tell me I'm one simple, concrete, voluntary action away from lasting relief… But all that's changed is that sliver of uncertainty (thankfully).
I woke in tears this morning. I had a dream where I was simultaneously acting in and living in some sort of soap opera. I would slip between being the character and the actor (for instance, to suggest a modification to the set design), with nobody being disconcerted in the slightest. My parents (which is to say, my character's parents, as played by my parents — try to keep up!) were in the show as well.
There was a scene where my father (i.e. my character's father) revealed that he was dying, and in reaction I generated a performance that was pure Oscar-bait. Not because I'm a good actor, but because in the dream scenario my being the character and being the actor were both equally valid truths. I grabbed him, and hugged him tightly, and wept and howled with my face buried in his greying hair. (Thank heavens towards the end of his life my father let his standards slip and stopped using Brylcreem.)
This was all rather undermined when, a few days later in dream time, I was having a conversation with the actor playing the character of my mother, who was also — in some sense — my actual mother, when the actor who played my father dropped by to say hello. Obviously he was no longer playing the character of my father, as the character of my father had died, but as to the status of my actual father…?
It was all terribly disconcerting in the way that dreams tend to be, so I woke up in a puddle of tears, and went out for a walk to feed my ducks some frozen peas before breakfast.
I don't know if parents are still like this (never been one myself), but in my day, the job of being a parent apparently necessitated being in denial a lot of the time, and therefore being able to operate in multiple realities at once. As a child you pick up on this and just accept it. Most of the time, my parents just lived in whatever happened to be the least socially awkward of the available realities. But sometimes one of them, wearing a very sombre, earnest expression, would draw me aside for a serious word, and I'd have to think "Okay, what world are we in now?" In retrospect, this juggling was excellent training for having to spend years in the closet.
As it happened, my father never told me he was dying. I knew it, and he knew it, but never in a reality that we ever both occupied at the same time. My parents flew up from Sydney to visit me for a few days, and on one of those days (my birthday, as it happened) they were uncharacteristically decisive, and declared that I would drive them in their hire car (my father was no longer confident with distance driving) a couple of hours down the coast to the little town where we would holiday when I was young.
It hadn't changed all that much since the 1980s, so walking around town and along the breakwall to the beach seemed quite dreamlike. It was one of the few places I ever felt safe as a child. We always went out of season (it was cheaper, and everybody knows the first or last couple of weeks of school either side of the summer holidays are a joke), so there were few other children around, and none seemed to notice the entertainment that making my life hell would provide. Also, my father always took pains to spend some time with me when we were there. On revisiting the place, I found I'd slipped out of my parent's preferred reality for a quick epiphany.
"Oh!" I thought, "He's saying goodbye."
And then I slipped back to polite reality, and my mother took a photo of the two of us with the beach in the background. And then we had lunch, and drove home, and the next day they flew back to Sydney. There was no hugging or weeping. I never saw him again. It would be a few years before I existed as properly me in any version of reality I felt able to share with my family, so he never even got to meet me.
Thursday is my weekend, and even though I have deadlines long past, I am jolly well taking it. Should our paths cross any time soon, dear reader, and you enquire as to my well-being, I will tell you that I am fine, and that everything is going splendidly. It will be the honest truth — in one version of reality. Just don't ask which version of reality I'm currently occupying; it's not polite.