Woke up at noon. Stared at the ceiling, slept again, woke up again and stared at the ceiling for a while once more. Took a thick cloth belt from the closet, tied one end around the bookshelf, put the loop around my neck.

First thing I noticed was the pressure. My face felt like it was pulsing and expanding, like I could feel myself turning red. Then a loud ringing in my ears drowning out everything else. Then choking and sputtering as I breathed in and couldn’t. Arms and legs spasmed, took a conscious effort to not reach for the belt. Twice I tried to die, but both times I couldn't help but struggle to ease the belt off my neck. Strangling myself made my being alive feel so much more immediate, which was nauseating compared to the dissociative sad stasis preceding my decision to die. Which is ironic because I had previously believed I'd want to be conscious when I die, but it would be so much easier to just slip away silently in my sleep or something. I now have petechial hemorrhage all over my face, and some on my neck. My throat perpetually feels like it has a lump in it. I have a persistent bad headache, nausea, I feel like I can't think more than one looping thought per minute, I can barely focus on any coherent train of thought nor input from the physical world. It has taken me hours to write this. Honestly, not a good time.

This is not the first time I've tried to kill myself and frankly, I am seriously worried it won't be the last. Somehow I feel both like I want to end my life and also like I don't, and in those fleeting moments of unsuicidal lucidity (madness?) I try to find ways to save or at least prevent myself from what I might do. I've heard that stuff about people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge saying right after they jumped they realized all their problems were solvable and they shouldn't have jumped, but for me that wasn't really the case. After the second try didn't succeed I kinda just sat there for a while feeling nothing. It was oddly soothing, feeling totally blank when usually my mind and emotions spiral incessantly in a depressive pattern. I wasn't relieved to be alive, I felt no new resolve to live my life to the fullest or even at all, and most of all, the things that made me want to die are just as present and real as they were before I strung the belt around my neck. In fact, the biggest thing that made me decide to die feels itself immortal and unkillable:

Evil. The world is evil, pervasively and ubiquitously so. I have been on the receiving end of it in more ways and more times than I care to remember, and I know I've contributed to it through my own thoughts and actions. Yes there is beauty and love and joy in the world, and such things are real and important, but in my experience they are fickle and pale in comparison to the omnipotent, omnipresent capacity of human evil. They don't make life worthwhile to me, and it follows that I don't feel as though life is inherently worthwhile either. To find happiness is fortunate and fleeting, because evil is the backdrop, the default. You are guaranteed to find evil, and you never need to look far.

Since I was a child, I would cry for hours on end, heartbroken at the suffering and horror caused by the evil humans do to each other. Why do people suffer, and make others suffer? How can such a world, and a life in such a world be worthwhile? I am 25 now and in that regard, I haven't changed much at all. If anything, it's more unbearable now. I have searched my entire life for something to make it make sense. I've read novels and poetry, I've read and listened to various religious and spiritual teachings, I spent years studying philosophy, I've listened to and made music, I've seen and made art, I've talked to people who seem able to cope, desperately trying to find something to redeem this shithole of a world. And I'm still as empty handed as I was years ago, but it feels worse now because I'm surrounded by failed explanations and justifications and it feels like I've run out of new ones to consider. Being surrounded by the husks of failed answers to that eternal, painful question feels somehow more desolate than being in a void of none.

Frankly, I don't want to live in a world plagued by the sadistic, broken darkness of the human soul. It feels maudlin and perhaps naive to say that the bottomless evil of humanity is what made me decide to take my life, but it's the honest reason. And it's not going anywhere anytime soon. The final words of Nicolas Chamfort in his suicide note have always resonated with me: "And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead."

Right now, I don't want to try and kill myself again. But I don't know what to do to make sure that doesn't happen. I don't know that I won't attempt it again tomorrow. It's highly unlikely that I'm going to have a transformative experience that reveals god and purpose that solves it all in the next few hours a la Cat Stevens or something. I feel that perhaps this is the kind of situation where one should check themselves into the hospital, but the thought of being isolated and constantly monitored for several days is straight up terrifying and sickening, on top of the worry of medical costs and not wanting to strain medical services further as they struggle in the current pandemic. I need an answer. I need something, anything that makes it less horrible. What makes life worth living, in spite of all the evil? How? How does anyone face this and manage to live, to find meaning in life, to wake up and feel like it's worth it? Why shouldn't I try to kill myself again, when evil springs eternal, when I contribute to it myself? Why should I try to go on living in an evil, broken, disappointing world?