The more you want to live, the closer death gets

Some of my most vivid and easiest to remember dreams are those in which I am having a good time, hanging out with others, chatting, drinking and eating and not having a care in the world. Other than this pesky voice in the back of my mind which has to keep reminding me that tomorrow I'll be executed. This reminder makes me feel angry for a moment, at those who had to condemn me to die. Yet soon that fades and I just feel resignation and a profound sensation of incredible sadness. I feel I do not wish to die, yet I know that I am helpless to stop it. Come tomorrow morning my existence will end.

These dreams are in many ways a succinct summary of my life the past decade and some. Anything I try, anything I do only reminds me that no matter which way I turn only death awaits me. My only options are whether it'll occur at my own hands,or whether it'll happen through the unavoidable complications of the intersex condition I was cursed with. The latter is the option I'm facing now, as I failed at the first one, and I'm too afraid, too frightened to attempt to end my own existence again. Ironically this is mostly because I want to live more badly than I did two years ago.

Yet the more struggle, the more I fight against what feels like sheer inevitability, the more this net and its strong knots tighten around me until I can no longer draw breath. By fighting to live it becomes harder to do just that. At the same time resigning myself to the inevitable and just going along with physicians and psychologists leads to the horrible emotional numbness while my mind tries its hardest to ignore the fact that my body is destroying itself. Yet medical help is impossible, as the past decade has made abundantly clear. They never find anything. I must simply be crazy. There's no escape, just the noose further tightening around my neck as I struggle to get free.

I'm now living with chronic pain since the beginning of this year without any hint of what's happening beyond the appearance of more and more confounding and seemingly impossible symptoms. For all I know I'll be collapsing next week on the streets, at the office, while shopping, or at some other completely arbitrary location and point in time, and die before I can be brought to a hospital.

The irony is that the more real and tangible the prospect of me dying gets, the more I realize just how much I want to live. Sure, many things are still horrible and need to be fixed, but that can all be done. I just need to get that fair chance which I haven't missed out on so far. I'll beg, plead, steal and cheat to be able to live a normal, pain-free life. The prospect of being told a few weeks from now that they were unfortunately too late in catching it and if only someone had bothered to examine me sooner... I think I'll just resign myself to the end of this existence. I did my best.

Yet just like in my dreams I will be going through all the inevitable stages before resigning myself to such a tragic fate. Right now I still hold hope that it'll all turn out fine.

Naive hope based on no evidence whatsoever is such a comfortable lie.


Maya