Emotions and reasoning, the two horses pulling in opposite directions. They are the subjects of so many movies, plays or novels, and also quite a few philosophers have tried to tame them [1]. However, what if one of the horses is incredibly strong but pulling the wrong way? What if you feel miserable and empty, just like a useless piece of dung lying in the way of everyone around you? I am not able to rationally estimate my value, evaluate only what I hear or see. Something inside of my brain just crooks everything, and this feeling is hardly bearable. Then I often just want to cease my existence.
To simplify the matters and to explain it a little further, imagine we all have two buckets. One is for happiness, it fills every time you are enjoying a moment or when you for example achieve something you are proud of. And then there is the second one, which is for woe. The imaginary fluid pours into it each time you let something or someone hurt you, or when you feel shame, disgrace or loss. To some extent, you can rationally affect how much the buckets fill each time you are experiencing something, but very often you can't. And because the emotions linked to a particular experience weaken with time, the liquids can evaporate or spill out.
In my case, however, those buckets don't seem to work right. The one filled with sadness is tightly sealed, almost never letting anything out. However, the bucket for joy has many holes in it, so any time the glittering liquid pours in, it almost immediately leaks out. Therefore, in the very moment the happiness trigger stops affecting me, the emotion is gone. I don't know why I am not able to keep happiness within me, while pain takes ages to leave even when its source is irrational, or even absolutely ridiculous. I only know this is not a pleasant way to live.
And it is not just about feeling sad. There are also various physical symptoms related to the imbalance of my joy and woe buckets. Very often I feel as if my entrails, particularly my stomach and my heart, were tied by cords. On these occasions, it is hard to breathe, and I often feel like I am about to throw up. The worst thing is that these feelings can be triggered by pretty much anything, something you say or do, something I see or smell, a random thought, or even a dream. Sometimes it is seemingly nothing at all. You can maybe imagine that all this is not only annoying, but also incredibly tiring, and now try adding up the side effects of the antidepressants I am taking. As a result, I end up sleeping all day long or at least I am feeling fatigue, which is close to unbearable, almost all the time. Then, the world often hides behind a sheet of glass and all subjects come to me a fraction of second later than they should. It feels like walking in a tube, or like a strange virtual reality experience. My therapist explained to me that this happens when my brain wants to detach my inner world from the outside.
All this together, the inability to preserve joy, the despair I am feeling inside me, the anxiousness when the worst-case scenarios start to unfold in my mind, the omnipresent feeling of loss and being lost, the fatigue and the desperate beating of my heart, is terribly hard to control. I keep doing my best but it only works in an insignificant minority of cases. Most of the time, the emotions just smash me, leaving only emptiness and hopelessness behind. It was not always like this, there were moments in my life when I had everything, a job I liked, a band, hobbies, and a partner I loved. But then it all broke apart, just like a card house. The pain resulting from the loss of all this is devastating and incredibly exhausting, believe me that I am sick and tired of it indeed very much. But I don't see any way out. And this is how my suicidal thoughts are being born.
Here you can read a nice article dealing with the difference between reason and emotion:
[1] https://sofiatok.wordpress.com/2015/12/08/reason-and-emotion/
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