I see myself as sort of an anomaly in that I've known I'm trans for years, have been (selectively) out for years as well, and still haven't started actually transitioning at 20 years old, mainly because I am endlessly promising myself that I'm going to be dead in two months. I've never attempted to kill myself, never even gotten particularly close, for some reason, I don't know. but I still let the looming specter prevent me from making any promises to myself. rather, I don't let it- I want it to. I actively use the specter to prevent the promises. because I don't want to be alive- I'm not happy that I haven't attempted to kill myself, there has been no moment in the past 9 years- to the approximate point I can track having my first suicidal thought- where I've sincerely thought "I'm glad I didn't kill myself." I wish I did. I wish I did on my 20th birthday, in early july when I sat in the tub, last october, last march when I called the hotline, last february with the tie on the doorknob,* the spring prior when I was 17 and 9 months, when I was 16 and graduating from high school, when I was 13 writing in my journal, when I was (circa) 11 and the thought first appeared in my head, the first inkling of ending my own life as something that was possible for me to do. I wish I had spared myself the trouble. there has never been a sense of relief that I'm still alive. I don't understand life and it's difficult for me. I don't know how or why I am still alive. it makes no sense. I can think all these things and somehow still not kill myself. I don't understand it. I don't even believe my life has worth. I think I'm just scared. I somehow simultaneously hate myself immensely and value my own existence so much I won't allow myself to die. or maybe it's punishment. forcing myself to experience the torture as a form of self-harm. or maybe it's that I recognize myself as a bad person, a terrible force that needs to stop existing, but I won't make the terrible thing go away because I am so terrible. I hate myself because I'm awful. I need to die because I'm awful. I can't allow myself the reprieve of death because I'm too awful. I'm awful for keeping it from myself, I'm awful for wanting it. most of all- my most despicable, unforgivable, cardinal sin- I am awful for even daring to exist in the first place.
doing something to "invest in my future-" even my future happiness- is foreign and nearly impossible for other reasons, too, maybe most notably that "the future" (or, more specifically, "my future,") is a basically obscure concept which I've never been able to fully grasp (in the same vein as the concept of "other people," I sort of pretend to know what it means- and do, in some crude way- but "other people existing" is not something my rudimentary solipsistic prototype of a human mind can really understand). in a very broad sense, I don't know what I want to do- with myself, with my life. not that there are things I want to do, but feel that they are out of reach- there is truly no future I can imagine myself actually being any level of happy with, unless I was simply not myself at all. rather than moving towards a future, I stagnate and withdraw into myself, turning "now" into something that lasts years and years, because nothing ever changes. so at the same time that there is no future, there is no past, because I've forgotten it all, or else it seems like something that happened to some stranger who later told me about it, and I'm recalling the recollection, and so "now" becomes infinitesimally small, because the person from (a decade, 4 years, 6 minutes) before was not me at all. and so while "now" is perceptually both long and short, it doesn't exist, because I don't exist in the present and am not ever perceiving reality as it happens. I move through the world-haze very vaguely and try my best to never notice that I exist, if I exist. why invest in the future of something that doesn't exist? I don't exist now and I won't then. lately (more prominently since tuesday, july 26), things have been dimly unrecognizable. normal things, like animals and food and people- unrecognizable for what they are, I mean. things seem sort of like a collection of unrelated parts and attributes. in my mind, I've stopped referring to my parents as my parents. I don't believe that is what they are. I see myself as an invader, and that is not what I want to be. I want to be an observer. I don't want to have to interact with the troublesome machinery. I want the machinery to let me go. I don't want to be part of it.
*admittedly, depending on your perception, it's possible you think I lied (or am mistaken) about having "never even gotten [...] close." I said that because I don't believe I ever actually intended to do it- although intent is a difficult thing to surmise, even within your own self, especially when that self has a particularly cynical view of its self, and views almost all actions taken by this self to be a signifier of either cowardice or outright villainy.