THE ART OF REFUSING TO DIE

On paper, I’ve spent twenty years. In the reality of my bones and synapses, I am an exhausted old man who has already lived a hundred lifetimes of pain. For me, depression is not a phase; I was diagnosed when I was only twelve, and it settled in to become a severe chronic pathology by the time I was eighteen. I have lived with death inside me for almost ten years.

I am the result of an equation that should have ended in suicide or cardiac arrest a long time ago. If you were to open my chest today, you wouldn’t find the anatomy of a young man in his prime. You would find a smoldering battlefield, a desecrated sanctuary.

From the outside, you see a guy who is 6'3". What you don’t see is that I am a prisoner in a body made of glass, marked by micro-fissures, tears, and fractures. My growth was too early, too brutal, leaving me no respite to build a solid foundation. I am the tenant of a ruin. My lumbar vertebrae are in shambles, my back inexorably locks up every two weeks, and my hips are out of alignment.

Moving through space with such a carcass is a perpetual state of anxiety. How do you inhabit the world when you fear the fragility of your entire being? I walked, played, and lived for a year and a half with a ruptured ACL in my left knee, undergoing blind injections every two months because the doctors were fumbling in the dark, unable to understand the nature of my injury.

And rather than preserving this failing body, I punished it for falling short. I marked it so that the pain of the spirit could finally find a physical translation. My skin is a ledger of my distress: burns from lighters and cigarettes, gashes from razor blades and knives. Until that one time when the void was so deafening that I went as far as severing my own bicep muscle. Thirteen stitches. Nine on the outside, four on the inside. Today, my arm throbs. Stretching it hurts—a searing reminder that beneath the scar, it’s nothing but a mass of ground meat. Self-harm was the only way to regain control over the severe somatic pains that were eating me alive.

But physical scars are nothing compared to the neurological inferno that serves as my brain. I am a walking psychiatry textbook. ADHD, generalized anxiety, chronic fatigue and pain, binge eating alternating with anorexia, psychomotor retardation and agitation. And above all else, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder coupled with emotional dysregulation of unheard-of violence.

I have no emotional ground zero. In me, an emotion is an earthquake. So, to keep from imploding, my mind chose flight: I live in a state of constant dissociative disorder. Depersonalization and derealization are my roommates; I often watch my own life from the ceiling, a stranger to myself, disconnected from this flesh that suffers too much.

How do you face that when you're just a kid? You steal credit cards to buy virtual power in video games. You swipe a child's Nintendo DS at a wedding to escape. You lock yourself inside simulations because in those role-playing games, you finally master the narrative of a replacement life. High-density information appeals to me; it channels my focus.

But eventually, the pixels fade, and reality returns, ever more ferocious. So, I had to hijack the chemistry.

I became a poly-addict. I’ve smoked a pack of cigarettes every two days since I was thirteen; I’ve hit my vape daily for years. Cannabis has flowed through my veins every day since I was thirteen as well. I used hard drugs, alcohol—anything that could offer that ounce of dopamine my brain obstinately refuses to give me.

People told me it was destroying me. What they don't understand is that my mind is too vivid; it produces lethal thoughts on fast-forward. Cannabis makes me stupid, and that is exactly what I want. It is a voluntary anesthesia to shut down the machine.

Faced with my chaos, the medical profession responded with heavy artillery. I’ve crossed paths with a hundred healthcare professionals: psychiatrists, psychologists, sophrologists. My body has ingested about fifty different medications. They imposed terrifying chemical straightjackets on me. I swallowed massive doses of Thorazine, 200 to 300 mg a day, and every possible neuroleptic passed through my brain. These legal poisons destroyed my perception of things. I went looking for sleep, for oblivion, for silence, to the point of swallowing entire blister packs of benzodiazepines, sleeping for three days straight only to wake up, bitter, in a hospital room.

Then came the apocalypse. The absolute overdose. The point of no return. One net gram of Tramadol ER. Twenty 0.50 mg Xanax pills. Four grams of ecstasy.

My nervous system screamed. Serotonin syndrome. Two epileptic seizures, my body convulsing violently before sinking into total anesthesia. I brushed against the finish line. I woke up, but a part of me stayed behind in the limbo.

That day, I lost 60% of my baseline capacity. Physically, I’m cooked. I opened a Pandora’s box that should have remained sealed. Out of that box came perpetual tinnitus; silence no longer exists for me, replaced by a high-pitched ringing that drives me mad. And most of all, HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder) Type 2. Chronic. With symptoms pushed to the limit. My vision is shattered. When normal people close their eyes to sleep, they find rest in absolute darkness. I trip. I spend my time hallucinating, exhausted by a brain that refuses to turn off the light.

I am psychotic. I have gone through severe acute psychotic episodes, talking to shadows I wanted to touch, convinced that every passerby on the street—while I was withdrawing money for drugs—wanted me dead.

And in the middle of this chemical putrefaction and medical violence, there is the violence of men. I have been betrayed. I have been defiled. I have been abused, sexually assaulted, physically and verbally attacked. These traumas are embedded in my flesh like fishhooks.

This is why I keep my distance from happiness. This is why when I love, I have this almost religious timidity. I feel illegitimate. A stranger with dirty hands, covered in blood, drugs, and madness, entering the pure temple of love. I spent my life with no one to take the hits for me. The older brother I never had left my skin raw before the wrong people, before school, before life.

But instead of becoming a monster, I chose to be the shield. I became that gentle big brother for everyone. I worked with children to create magic with UV lamps, trying to offer them the light that had been stolen from me.

Today, my dark thoughts are my traveling companions. Chronic fatigue nails me to the floor. Somatic pains remind me that my body forgets nothing. I am aware that I am dysregulated to the extreme, broken against my will by trauma and neuroleptics.

But one thing remains. A single weapon that no one has managed to tear from me—not the doctors, not the tormentors, not even myself: my fucking lucidity.

That is what saves me. It is what places a filtering frame before my eyes so that I can remain me. It is thanks to this that I got back up, alone, from my overdoses, from my seizures, from the blows, without anyone's help.

I am an anomaly. I am a survivor writing from the wreckage of his own existence.

You’ll have to try harder to take me down.