Yup. Therapy today.

First, I told my therapist about this dream I had last night. Trigger warning : suicide.

In the dream, I was part of a 60’s style monster fighting squad, like the one that sometimes harassed Godzilla. It was the usual anime setup, five people in the team, all with specialties.

Mine was eating. Just kidding.

I remember that we wore form-fitting white Lycra suits, and I remember that we fought a lot of monsters, but just when we thought we had defeated them all, this version of Gidora (or, as it is apparently spelled, Ghidorah… never saw it in text before now) made of dull white metal (like what you would get if you just spray painted metal siding) appeared. He crashed through our HQ, which it turns out was suspended in an endless sky. Literally nothing but sky in all directions. Blue sky, puffy white clouds.

Like a screensaver meant to be relaxing.

Now we get to the meat of the dream. When White Ghidorah (the name of my new Japanese Nazi death metal band) crashed through out HQ, I was almost knocked completely out of the building, and was just barely clinging to a piece of the HQ’s floor by the tips of my fingers as the wind howled around me.

And I found myself thinking, “Why don’t I just…. let go? Let go and end everything? It would be so easy. ”

So yeah. That happened. I contemplated suicide in a dream. And I can’t say I decided against it (or for it), because the whole thing scared me so much that I woke up.

And I did not wake up… happy. I was, in fact, very scared. Luckily, the realization that I was back in safe solid reality and that it had all been a dream helped to calm me down fairly fast, but I was still left feeling cold and vulnerable.

Luckily, I was about to go to therapy, where I could tell my therapist all about it.

It seemed like the sort of thing he should know about, you know?

He made the obvious inference that this was about my recovery, especially the “we thought we had defeated all the monsters” part. And yeah, duh. My dreams tend not to bother to be obscure and mysterious.

You can read them as easily as you read a stop sign.

But then he asked “Why do you think you were strong enough to have that dream now?”

And that really got me thinking. I had not had nearly enough time to process the dream that far. I was in my therapist’s office around two and a half hours after the dream. It was barely cool!

But it clicked. That sounded right. I felt like I had grown strong enough for my subconscious to get me thinking about something I never think about, namely my own suicidal thoughts.

Understandably, I don’t like thinking about them. They frighten me. It is a deep and terrible thing to realize that you are a threat to yourself like that. That there are situations where you might very well choose death just to escape all the voices in your head and all the hardship of life.

That is, of course, the wrongest of wrong solutions. The way out is to stop avoiding and start enduring. But there is still a part of me that… considers it.

Now don’t worry, my noble correspondents, I am not in danger of self-harm any time soon. A long time ago in my recovery, my survival instinct woke up, and now I am just as scared to die as anyone else.

But that’s not quite the same as knowing what you have to live for. That’s what my therapist asked… he literally asked me “What do you have to live for?”

And I know why. Answering that question could have been very affirming and healing. I could have discovered a whole new purpose for my life, or at least affirmed an old one. From his point of view, it was worth the risk.

But from my point of view, as someone with serious issues with feeling worthless and useless, having my therapist ask me why I live really hurt. I can’t help but hear that as “And what purpose could a person like YOU have?”, even though I know he did not mean it that way at all.

That aside, I really have no answer for that question. The best answer I can sincerely give is “I don’t want to die”.

And that leaves only one alternative.

Other than that… I can’t imagine having a purpose. A single, overriding goal in life. Or even a whole bunch of them. How would I choose them? What could they possibly mean to me? I have far too much going on inside me, too many talents and facets and ideas, to pick a purpose.

And that says a lot about why I don’t have any life momentum. I’m stuck at the infinite signpost, wishing I could go all directions at once and unable to pick one.

Having a single dominant purpose just seems so limiting to me. I realize that’s a problem when it comes to actually going anywhere in life, but it’s part of who I am. I am too claustrophobic for that kind of confinement.

So I never think about the question. What if I can’t come up with an answer other than “None. I have absolutely no reason to go on living. At all. ” What then?

All the answers I can think of are bad.

So no. I don’t have a purpose other than not dying. I can extend that a little and say that I still find life interesting and want to know what comes next. But that’s about it.

Actual hope is alien to me. I hope (hah) to learn it in time, but there is still too much of depression’s deathly chill within me to be able to accept real hope.

It just gets crushed between the ice floes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.