The Desire to Not Exist

বিজ্ঞাপন

I didn’t want to die. I just wanted everything to stop, and I didn’t know how to explain the difference.

You know that feeling when you’re so tired that sleep doesn’t even sound good enough? That’s where I’ve been. Not wanting to die, exactly, but wanting to not exist. There’s a difference. A real one.

I used to lie in bed and imagine what it would be like if I just… wasn’t. Not in a violent way. More like rewinding a tape until you reach the blank part before the recording started. Just nothing. No pain, sure, but also no need to explain myself, no need to keep going, no need to be perceived or to take up space or to disappoint anyone. The relief in that fantasy was so intense it scared me.

There’s a way your mind can turn on you, quietly, convincingly, until you start to feel like you’re a burden just by existing. Like your presence is an imposition on the world. I’d calculate how much easier everyone’s life would be without me in it, running the numbers like some twisted accountant. My parents wouldn’t have to worry. My friends wouldn’t have to check in. The world would just continue, maybe even better, without the weight of me in it.

For a long time, I thought this was insight. Like I’d figured out something honest and uncomfortable about my place in the universe. But it turns out that wasn’t philosophy at all. It was illness. It just spoke in a voice that sounded convincing.

The desire to not exist isn’t the same as wanting to die, though they can overlap. It’s quieter. More passive. It’s exhaustion so deep you can’t imagine carrying yourself forward another day. It’s looking at the future and seeing only more effort, more heaviness, more of this. Why bother? What’s the point? These aren’t rhetorical questions when you’re in it. They feel urgent. They demand answers you don’t have.

I remember sitting with my therapist and finally saying it out loud: “I don’t want to kill myself. I just don’t want to be here.” She didn’t flinch. She said, “That makes sense. You’re in pain, and you want the pain to stop.” Something about her saying it made sense, like it was a reasonable human response instead of proof that I was broken, cracked something open.

We talked about how the desire to not exist is often really a desire for this version of existence to stop. This pain. This situation. This way of being in the world. When you’re desperate, your brain gets narrow and unimaginative. It can only picture one exit: complete absence. It doesn’t offer alternatives. It doesn’t suggest different ways of existing. It just wants relief.

For a long time, that felt like the truth.

Later, much later, I started to see it differently. Not all at once. Not in some cinematic breakthrough. Slowly, unevenly, with medication and therapy and time. Meaning didn’t return in any grand or cosmic way. It came back in pieces so small I almost missed them. The cat is purring on my chest. Light slanting through the window in the late afternoon. The taste of coffee. A message from a friend. I hadn’t known I missed these things until I could feel them again.

It doesn’t move in a straight line. I still have days where the static is so loud I can barely hear anything else, where existing feels like the hardest job in the world. But now I know it changes. I have evidence. Last month was bad, and then it wasn’t. Last year was unbearable, and I’m still here.

The desire to not exist still shows up sometimes. But it doesn’t feel like a revelation anymore. It feels like a symptom. Like a fever. A signal that something needs attention.

So I’ve learned to ask different questions. Not Why am I here? but What do I need right now? Not What’s the point? but What’s one small thing I can do today? Sometimes that thing is nothing heroic. Sometimes it’s just staying. Just breathing. Just making it to tomorrow.

And that counts. There’s a strange kind of gratitude that comes from living through this. Not the kind that pretends everything is fine, but the kind that comes from choosing to exist even when it would be easier not to. From letting yourself take up space even when every instinct tells you to disappear.

I’m not glad I went through it. It was hell. But I’m glad I stayed.

Especially on the hard days, because those are the ones where existing is a verb, something I do, not just something I am.

source: Medium/Kay

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