Goodbye, 2008, And Good Riddance

I know that the division of time into calendar years is arbitrary, and that Day One of one year is really no different than Day 365 of the previous one. Still, even if the day the year changes is arbitrary, it does represent another trip around the sun. With that in mind, I bid farewell to 2008, a bad year by any measure.

It wasn't all bad, of course. Even the worst life has a few moments of joy. Even the most miserable person has days of contentment or even brief happiness. I am no different. However, by any objective measurement, 2008 for me had far more bad moments than good ones.

In terms of my mood, though, it was one of the worst. The darkness in my heart flooded the rest of me and threatened to consume me completely. I haven't come so close to choosing suicide as I did last year. For the first time since 2000, I spent weeks at a time trapped in a self-created prison of darkness, thinking constantly of suicide and praying for an accident or a heart attack or some other socially acceptable death.

Financially, it was a catastrophe. I began last year with less than $200 to my name. I begin this year with about the same. Financial stress makes everything else difficult, but what is worse than that is the knowledge that it will never get any better. This is my life - scraping by, paycheque to paycheque - and this is all my life will ever be.

You probably wonder how I can possibly know that things won't get better. The answer is painfully simple. If things are ever to improve, then it is up to me to make it happen, and I can't, or I won't. I'm working with my psychiatrist on the reasons I subconsciously want to fail, on the reasons I unconsciously need to sabotage myself, but we have made little progress. In the mean time, I'm too afraid to change and too afraid to take any risks. I may be creating fear in myself in order to avoid taking any risks in life, but that doesn't make the fear any less real or any less paralyzing. I keep myself in a prison of fear and despair. I am the heart of my own self-contained darkness. I will do what I've always done, because deep down, I seem to want and need to be a failure.

Still, 2008 was worse than most years, and I'm glad it's gone. Fuck you, 2008. Rest in peace, motherfucker. I wish I had died, but I didn't, so I guess I have to stumble my way through another crappy year where I am the heart of the darkness I live in. Fuck.