blog post 27.03.2025

Wake up with a headache. Eat. Write, or attempt to. Watch something on the television. Work. Sleep. Wake up with a headache. Repeat.

The rhythms of my life are exhausting, mentally-draining, and offer me no true solace. In the moments I get true relief from working, from attempting to change and figure out my life, I become a cocoon of the most joy I could ever possibly feel. I spend time with the people I love desperately trying to outrun every conversation about what I am supposed to be doing with my existence. These questions, grand in scale, won’t leave me alone when I am not distracted by something more enjoyable. More relaxing, more freeing. When I went on holiday for a week in Sydney, I felt more alive than perhaps I had in the last five years since the torpedo that marked the beginning of a new decade. You are supposed to really find yourself in your twenties, but I started mine regressing as a person and quickly becoming so riddled with chronic pain that I approach the exact middle point of my twenties and…it makes me nauseous all over again. Nauseous to think about how long I have had my excuses, but known I can’t merely ignore them. I can’t overlook the pain, the anxiety and depression, the worry within that I have no real desire to contribute to society like mostly everyone else.

If I could have it my way: I would find some manageable way to live my life doing only the things I most care about. The hobbies I collect like reasons to stay alive, the films I need to watch before I die, the people I call my family even when there’s no blood between us. Unless you count the blood rushing round the body to the penis. Erection jokes, but I’ve lost the will to hesitate when I make them.

            I can stomach going to appointments. Hell, there’s something genuinely comforting in going to therapy, but perhaps that is attached to trusting in my therapist and valuing his advice when it comes to my terrible, rotten existence. I say that with only a tinge of self-deprecation—I laugh at myself when I call this life rotten, because there is so much to be grateful for, even if I have to spend too many hours each week earning money doing a job that luckily isn’t in a skyscraper. [The joke here is that I might find the nearest shatterable window and dive out.]

             I can stomach many things, except the stomach pain. Nauseously, I torture myself not knowing what to do about it. About many uncertainties in my life. This job, dead-ended and only a source of income, is a lifejacket when I cannot find anything else. Nobody wants to hire a hardly-experienced Bachelor of Fine Arts kid who has worked in retail for nearing a decade. Soul-crushing, to check your emails and I find another rejection even before they have met you in person. The inverse of the reaction I receive when someone sees a picture of my dick—everyone wants to book me for the job, yet they don’t realise I have absolutely zero desire to ever top someone.

            I have started thinking about doing a photography course to at least change up whatever is going on. I am doing my homework, looking into course, looking into requirements and how much control and freedom I would have over the coursework. Open University has a course you can entirely do at your own pace. No exams, either. Videos, though, where it suggests you roleplay with “family members or friends”—an insane concept for any degree in the year of our lord 2025. I know I couldn’t add the course load to my current schedule—I would never have the energy, nor the passion, and my writing would fade into the background as the easiest thing to avoid. I am too depressed and overwhelmed to want to avoid my writing. I say writing is my one true passion, my reason for being on this earth, and I am considering ignoring it for twelve months? No, part of my world will need to shift to return to studying again—I have to work less.

Every opportunity, every suggestion, means an upending to a life that only barely floats above the surface. With the course, I could imagine myself working three days a week at the retail job I am exhausted from. Well, on three days a week, not three days in their entirety. Those shifts, any shift, drains me of energy, of love, of a willingness to live. It may seem like hyperbole, but for someone living with chronic pain, being on their feet for, say, five hours with only a fifteen-minute break is completely deflating. My feet hurt, my brain is a muddle of pain and suffering, my stomach has the potential to be aching, my anxiety has the potential to be set off by customers who don’t understand they’re not the centre of the universe. Doing a course in photography would mean I temporarily halt the job search, but that complicates things further: doing a course does not guarantee me anything at the end of it. I could be jobless for longer than I’m comfortable with, bumming still in this house, living with my parents.

            I can’t afford economically, emotionally, to move out right now. Not with this job which makes me feel second-rate, not with the constant pain which makes everything slower, more laborious. Not with my anxiety and depression in their current state. I can’t be thinking about quitting my job and moving out all at once—I joke about being a realist, about knowing how uncertain this world is, and the idea of throwing away my comforts in favour of being approved of by society, of trying to be a better adult, makes me nauseous. So much in this life makes me nauseous. Even the idea of killing myself does.

I think about dying more than you know.

When you consider yourself an imitation of a person, you know there are easy escapes, easy routes out of the house. I have never understood suicide so clearly as I have lately, imagining leaving this body, leaving this pain behind. I am writing this right now finding it difficult to not start crying, because I can picture every single response to this: you are stronger than this, you have so much to live for, you are a talented writer, you are a friend to me when I need a friend, nobody wants to watch that beautiful body get buried. I’m too lazy to lean over and grab a tissue, so I just wiped my eyes with the back of my hands, like knuckling the sleep out. I don’t want to kill myself, but I pretend that I do, and the costume party is one and the same to raiding my closet. I don’t want to kill myself, but I want to.

            To be rid of the burden.

            To be free of feeling helpless, hopeless, pathetic, a waste of space and precious natural resources. Think of all the water and clean air and trees I would save.

            To be free of wondering how long the people who support me have in them before it becomes unbearable to watch time tick with no resolutions. I sit here in almost the same position as years before, making little strides, but those strides don’t mean much on paper.

            What have I accomplished so far in 2025?

            I have my passport. I saw Hadestown twice in one week. It is the end of March and I am nauseous because the most exceptional thing I have done so far this year is see one of my favourite musicals twice in one week. And I recognise, I do, that life is only defined by time and a timeline if you allow it to be, that you define your own destiny and your own sequence of events, but good grief I blink and it’s four days before I leave for a trip on The Ghan through the vertical middle of Australia, a trip I planned in December. And this is something I have dreamed of for a while, but it does not change the fact that I have no other ambitions in life and still live with my parents and still worry everyone stares at me like the complete disappointment I am turning out to be. In the eyes of what you should be doing with your life, so you aren’t Shaun and Ed from Shaun of the Dead.

            It’s either take out zombies or be taken out by them.

            I don’t have the energy.

But I do seemingly have the energy to want the things I cannot have. The moments I cannot have, the affection I cannot have. Ever since I committed to not wanting a relationship, I have had emotional attachment after emotional attachment that would never last. Attracted to the wrong people, attracted to people who don’t live in the state or in the country, attracted to people who would want more out of me than I am able to give. I am the most comfortable I have ever been in my sexuality, comfortable and at ease to talk about being a homoromantic aegosexual—a large term you never need to remember, so long as you know I’m queer as fuck but not in the have-sex-and-enjoy-it way. I am the most comfortable I have ever been talking about it, understanding it, expressing it, but I am reminded almost daily that eventually I disappoint. Nobody wants to flirt with someone who, doe-eyed, prefers kisses and cuddles. I feel childish every time I type it. I feel the sort of pressure a disgruntled parent would have for their child who has just done something stupid—you’re an adult so act like an adult.

            But I love how my sexuality makes me feel, how my sexuality interacts with the self. How comfortable in being alone I can be.

            But if all I ever want is to be alone, jobless, and aimless, I may as well be dead.

            [Please, no one call Lifeline or the police on me, I’m far too busy to deal with a house call. Maybe I should take a brief moment to say a few brief things: I don’t plan on killing myself today; I don’t plan on doing it until at least December. I make references to “wanting to kill myself” often because of my depression, but I am okay, just disappointing. But even if I did want to kill myself, that’s not really something you should be interfering with, right? You understand how a person’s life if their own, and if they decide to kill themselves, they should be allowed to because they do not need to keep surviving to benefit society. You understand how truly terrible that perspective is, right? The idea of thinking about yourself and the greater bounds of existence when someone is just sick and tired of being in pain and suffering. We live in a truly miserable world, maybe let someone slip out the side door if they want to. I know this incredibly morose, and there is always some reason for me personally to continue living, but I think if anything, in 2025, we can reassess exactly why a suicide becomes everyone else’s business.]

Anyway, I was talking about who I’m attracted to, right? It’s awfully depressing that, without the invention of a teleportation device, I have to just continue having these silly feelings for people without being able to immediately assess whether the feelings only exist over social media or not.

            Life so miserable I’m simultaneously in love with multiple people and in deep loathing of most of the human race.

            Life so miserable I want to kiss someone right now but I haven’t in months because I only feel comfortable kissing people I’m both attracted to and don’t think will sexually assault me, and a large portion of these people either live too far away from me or won’t actually kiss me. The last part might just be anxiety on my part though. I apologise. I live in fear of alienating everyone.

            Life so miserable I’m writing this instead of blissfully binging reality tv.

I want to leave for London for a month, but if I quit my job and keep spending my savings I am going to think my life ruined, unable to find something new to bring in income that I won’t think is a perpetual waste of my time. You only live once, and yet you have no time to organise yourself if you aren’t in the lucky crop who comes pre-installed with instructions.

            [Work would never approve of a month leave for a lowly employee like me.]

            I want to quit my job, I want to do a photography course, I want to be a tourist in London, and I want to do all these things without feeling the pressure to not be merely attempting to outrun the problems. Life so miserable I can be grateful for everything I have and still think I rest on this comfort like a crutch to avoid every aspect of my life being a chronic pain.

            Help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope.

with ambivalence,

Keeley Young