“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” Shakespeare

I wish I could say that life is better now that I have broken free from the mental health system, but the truth is that I continue to suffer what feels like a slow, agonising death. I suffer with the damage therapists and especially the drugs have caused me.

There is little I enjoy, and I find myself going to bed at sunrise as there’s nothing I want to do and I’m worn out all the time. Yet despite being worn out, despite feeling like I’ve been pounded around in the ocean by wave after wave, I still struggle to sleep. My existential crisis haunts me day and night. I drift away to a place where there are no dreams and in fact nothing at all, just endless black. I feel like I’m dead. My feel like my consciousness has been obliterated. I wonder if this is what it will be like when I do finally die: no souls or afterlife, just nothing at all. I start to come back to this world. I hear doors being opened and closed all the time: car doors, house doors. I hear bangs and noises next door, like gates of hell welcoming me back to this world. I neither want to be here, nor in the next world, if there even is one. I neither want to die nor be alive.

I wake up feeling even more exhausted than I was before I fell asleep. I feel sick.

All I’ve been eating is take away as I don’t have it in me to make a meal.

I’ve started writing a book about my 12 years in the mental health system, but everything feels pointless. My suffering feels pointless. The book feels pointless. I am painfully aware of my own mortality, and I wonder what is the point of anything?

I just want to run as far away from the city as I can get. I want to wake up to the lul of the bush, not bangs, machinery and people. I want to relax into the rhythms of nature where no body demands anything of me. I’m sick of being marinated in 5G and the other ills of civilisation. I want to live in a place so far away that no phones will work.