10 years from now.

There's this mental health exercise people suggest where you're supposed to write where you want to be in ten years. It's supposed to give you insight into your wants and needs.

Most people put things like bigger house, more money, nice car, etc. And you know what, those are all nice things. Who doesn't want to worry about money? Money fixes a lot of things. Hell, I even thought if I won the lottery, I could buy love and a feeling of self worth. But there are limits to money. Money doesn't protect you from lifelong depression. Money doesn't protect you from grief and sadness.

My ten year list makes me feel bad about myself. I could put a positive spin on it and say, "I don't need much!" as a justification why my dreams are so plain. But really it just feels like that I'm such miserable trash now that anything is better.

The biggest thing I want in ten years is to not still be living this perpetually severely depressed life.

God, anything but that. Put me down please, if that's what's in store for me. I don't want to still be this fucking person in ten years. That's really all.

It's humbling.

I keep telling myself that once my kids, family, and friends are settled that I can finally be free to go without guilt. I get less and less sad about it. It gets easier and easier to justify why everyone is better off. It gets easier to quietly swallow the heavy burden of realization that this is all there is to me.

I keep asking for life preservers, but at last minute, it feels like someone pulls it just out of my reach.

I have too much stubborn pride to keep asking for help. I'd rather drown. That's the worst thing about me. I'll suffer endlessly so as not to admit that this all really fucking hurts.

In a one to one conversation with my closest people, the most intense thing they'll get from me is that "I'm having a hard day."

When I'm telling the void, it's much easier to be honest.

I wish I could get them to understand the mental gymnastics of fighting how attractive suicide is. How normalized it is in my brain, but still assure them that hospitalization isn't the answer.

I'm doing fine.

That's a problem. I want to be either done with all this or ok.

I'm just real fucking sick of myself.

My mentally ill brain at least.

There are at least things I actually like about myself now, sans haunted brain.

But brain and I can't both coexist in this body. Not like this.

It really is like living with a poison inside you.

10 years from now I don't want to be here.

That's the easy answer.

The difficult answer is that I probably will be, and I need to make peace with that. I need to find out how to teach an old dog new tricks.