The melancholy of survival

It's now just over a week since I got hit by a car while riding home from work on my bicycle. Despite having every opportunity to grievously injure myself, or even be killed, I got off with just severe bruising and - as I learned from my doctor today - a haematoma in my right shoulder. Walking is also still a bit iffy, with my right leg still not supporting my full weight for extended periods of time. Yet I survived, seemingly without any permanent injuries.

It's all just a little bit tiresome.

You know, there's just something about having survived so many things. I have crashed with bicycles over the years in so many interesting ways, and survived everything virtually unscathed. I have been psychologically and physically tortured by the medical establishment in the Netherlands and elsewhere, yet managed to survive that and flee the country to a better existence. After multiple decades of all this it just leaves me wondering what the heck the point of it all was.

Getting hit by that car last week to me was more of an annoyance than a real shock. More of a bother because it'd just set me back and force me to demonstrate my super-awesome survival skills of toughness. After so many times and so many years it's really lost its shine, at least in my own eyes.

There's the resignation and bitterness that it's pointless anyway, because I won't get any further than this state of confusion about myself and my body, with no medical help to ever clear anything up. This year I'm apparently facing the first real major medical complications of my intersex condition as it's wreaking havoc with my abdomen, causing increasing pain, swelling and pinched nerves. Cue another survival story involving getting a physician to take me seriously enough to examine me. Likely it'll just be another repeat of the past ten years of finding similar help, but that's what survival looks like: you keep surviving until there's nothing left to survive any more.

After last week's accident I have found myself in this weirdly melancholic mood. Part of it is reminiscent of the period after my suicide attempt four years ago and coming to terms with the fact that I had failed at it, but survived instead. It was a similar feeling of pointlessness. True, I was still alive, but what kind of life did I have at that point? I was still stuck at the same point with no chance to improve anything. Compared with the incredibly peaceful feeling I experienced during my suicide attempt, every waking moment after surviving it felt like part of a living nightmare.

Survival in itself is pointless. It's just another confirmation that you didn't die and that you still exist. If you cannot move on from that point and thrive, what's the point of surviving?

These coming weeks I should have more or less reassembled my life the way it was before my accident and it'll soon fade in relevance. I'll just be left with the same agonized thoughts regarding my inability to move on from where I have come in life, because others do not want me to move further. I can survive such oppression and struggle through life until I'll die, but what will it change?

Surviving truly is such an inconvenient bore.


Maya