Dead to the World
I am dead to the world and I feel dead inside.
I am dead to the world and I feel dead inside.
That’s been my day today. Feeling invisible from society, culture, capitalism, everything. It’s as if I’m a ghost inside my own life.
I often find myself inside my head devising ways to try and explain what this thinking and feeling is like so that others could at least have some vague idea of what this experience is.
I’m aiming for communicating unknown and unspoken things that a majority of people feel and a majority of people hide.
Since the summer of 2023, I’ve felt dead to the world.
I’ve lost count of how many months it’s been that I’ve been chronically unemployed—the last I looked it was 30 months. And since it’s Friday and the weekend is upon us, this marks over 80 weekends that I’ve sat inside and done nothing because I have no friends, no resources, no transportation.
I’m about as perfect a definition of destitute as there is.
Right now I’m recording this as an audio file, and I’ll have it transcribed to post it online. I wanted to share that I’ve been fighting all day to try and get one thing done, and I had to force myself to get the microphone, log into the computer, find the software to record audio, and then to actually hit record and start talking. It’s taken a lot to do that because I didn’t want to do that. At least a very depressed and isolated part of me didn’t want to do that.
However, I remembered that if I don’t capture this when I’m in the middle of it and I don’t share it, it goes against what I’m trying to do.
Having “lost my life” and grieving it daily, and at the same time grieving the loss of a spouse who is still alive and who I still love, the remaining members of my family still live in the same house. Other than me not living there, life goes on largely the same for them all—rearranging furniture and removing me from any photos lying around. In the abstract, it’s as if I was kicked out of my life and left on the side of the road while the family took off.
I’m really struggling to find the next words here. The recording has gone on for a few minutes, but I’ve said so little. Perhaps that’s the message.
I’m unsure.
Which is how I am most of the time.
I’m unsure because I haven’t had solid ground to stand on in well over two years. I’m still homeless right now. I’m still unemployed. I did fail to mention that it’s also very hard to imagine anything beyond 24 to 48 hours. This is due to living in my car for 16 months. When you don’t know where you’re sleeping every night and if you’ll be safe, it’s hard to simply think about next week, let alone plan or organize something.
I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to access therapists in the past few weeks, and it’s been helping me reframe some things and reflect. However, what I have discovered in all my years of being stuck in this place of depression is that there is a story that was told to me when I was young. And the story wasn’t something said to me verbatim. It was a combination of words, actions, things that compiled and compounded over time.
And that story is that I’m not good enough.
Not good enough at everything, pretty much. That is the dominant thought.
And the cognitive dissonance that comes along with that is huge because there are places in my life I can point to where I’ve had success, and I’ve had confidence momentarily. Coaching soccer is one thing that I have done and I had success. I coached a league-winning team. We got promoted up a division. That’s certainly good enough.
Yet the story of “not good enough” is so woven into my subconscious that any amount of thinking and logic in my conscious mind can’t uproot what feels like a nasty weed stuck in my subconscious psyche that will not let go.
I have felt very alone for many years now and that feeling simply grows day by day.
At present, I don’t have any friends.
I have family members who talk with me because they’re related. But otherwise, I have no social circle where I am, here in upstate New York where it’s cold, gray, and depressing. I have not one person that I could call up and ask to go to the coffee shop or ask what they’re doing and maybe go hang out and just talk. I don’t have that in my life.
Do I want it? I do, but in limited doses. I’m highly empathic—I pick up and absorb other people’s energy. I basically feel what they feel. So while I crave connection, I can’t take on other people’s emotions anymore. It’s exhausting in ways most people don’t understand.
I believe it’s Jean-Paul Sartre who said “hell is other people.” I can definitely see how that could be very true. I feel that way many times. But here’s the thing—I’m also using isolation as protective armor. The fact that I have no resources, no transportation, no place of my own keeps me from going out and meeting new people. So my situation, by its nature, isolates me and makes my psychological situation far worse. It’s a trap: I need connection, but I can’t handle too much of it, and my circumstances make even limited connection nearly impossible.
All of this makes feeling grounded a huge challenge.
I’ve put in over 30,000 minutes of meditation over 1,300 days and still struggle to find solid ground under my feet.
Since I’m not truly alive, and I only exist, I can say that there are so many days when I’ve simply wanted all of this to end because I’ve had enough.
Over 80 weekends of sitting inside, isolated, watching everyone else live and love their lives while I fight to barely exist.
It feels harsher than solitary confinement because I get to see what I’m missing. I get to witness life happening all around me while I’m stuck on the outside, ghosting through my own days.
That said, you’re reading these words, which you wouldn’t be had things turned out the other way—since I’d be dead.
I’m still here. I survived today, this week, this weekend. I forced myself to hit record. I captured this. I’m sharing it.
That has to count for something.