Suicide Set Part IV: Hopelessness

After the violent parade of negative emotions had passed, after they had drained me of any motivation, thought, or energy, only hopelessness was left.  I was empty and lost.  There was no way out and no way onward.  There was no way.  It was in this darkness I attempted to take my own life.

I realize many things about my actions at that time now.  Things that I can only understand in hindsight.  At the time I was under the sway of powerful negative emotional patterns and I consider myself very lucky to have come through the experience alive.  My own feelings brought me to the edge of death.

The person I am today is nothing like the person who attempted to take his life. I can see now that I needed to come to this edge and look out at the ultimate destruction I was heading toward.  I needed to hold my life in my hands and understand that the choice of its continuance or destruction was mine and mine alone.  I needed this moment to know that I had some form of control, that my life was indeed my own.  This instant, this moment of choice, has informed all the decisions I have made in my life since that day.

I would like to note on the side of safety and communication that today, despite the difficulty of my current set of life circumstances, that I do not in any way feel suicidal.  It is simply that the time has come to share these pieces.

{Sharpie}

Suicide Set Part II: Worry

I realized as I began this post that this week is the thirteenth anniversary of my suicide attempt.  A strange and macabre anniversary to be sure, but perhaps one of the most significant moments in my life history.  The person I am today is vastly different from the person who tried to take his life.  I still consider things deeply and intensely, but I do not worry as I once did.

Worry is about the weight of my thoughts at that time. Everything felt too heavy to move.  I felt buried or lost in a labyrinth of caves. Every feeling was a complicated net of issues that seemed impossible to unravel. I couldn't find a way out. Every new facet I discovered seemed only to lead me into greater complication and darkness. All my hope was overwhelmed by the burden of my feelings.

I would like to note on the side of safety and communication that today, despite the difficulty of my current set of life circumstances, that I do not in any way feel suicidal.  It is simply that the time has come to share these pieces.

{Sharpie}

The Kingdom of the Blind

Darkness within and Darkness without. 

From the Darkness they come. 

They are of the darkness

and the holy land of Darkness. 

Interior Life From the Archives: Panther Rattler

And now for something completely different...well not really.  The next few drawings were from the same period as my other Interior Life posts from Trail of Bread Crumbs: Sunrise, The Old Blue Man, and The Well.  However, the ones I'm posting here have a definite darker edge.  Welcome to my dark corners.  (Thank you Garth Marenghi!)

When I created this piece and the ones that will follow, I was trying to find some kind of balance between my commercial goals for my art and my emotional needs for my art.   There has always been a therapeutic aspect to my work as well as it being a descriptive litmus for the current state of my life.  Selling that out completely to commercial control seemed ill advised...that and I'm sure I'll never be able to affordable a proper therapist.  So why throw away a perfectly good tool for self analysis and growth?!?  Instead I tried to blend the two by making my emotional works a little more commercially presentable.  I'm not sure it worked all that well in the end as I am currently unemployed, but what do you do?  LOL.  Ah Life!

My idea here was of turning some of my darker feelings into functional illustrations.  This is me on a bad day...a very bad day.  I think this may have been the lurking demon of the steroid, Prednisone.  I took that hateful drug for 4 months and it took me years to recover from its effects.  I would not recommend it to anyone.  It made me psychotic and when I tried to explain it to my doctor he just looked at me and nodded and smiled.  So I did some research and learned what I needed to do to ween myself off it, then went to a nutritional therapist at the suggestion of my friend Su.

Prednisone is the reason I have very little faith in the medical community.  The answer is always - "yeah but you're alive".  QUALITY of life is also extremely important. I wish for anyone who says something like that to be required to take Prednisone until they've eaten their way to 35 pounds heavier in four months, are punching walls at least once a week, are crying themselves to sleep every night, and are laughing and crying at the same time whenever they have ANY kind of emotion...but YEAH...I was alive.
I was just out my F@%&#&^ mind.

(prying his white knuckled hands from the podium, he steps down from the soap box)  Oops...Sorry about that.  Prednisone was a bad experience for me and my doctor was apathetic about its effects on me.  Anyway - how bout that crazy cave creature I drew!

I was worried at first about posting this text because of the intensity of my feelings concerning Prednisone, but I realized that this text matches the drawing quite nicely.  So it stays. 

{Pen & Ink.}

Depths

Bones are always buried.  During our lives, they are buried in our flesh, and when we die we place them under the soil. 

{created in Photoshop.}