You want to give up, is that right? You're at the end of your rope and you're ready to hang yourself with it? I can't stop you, anon. If that is where your peace lies, then who am I to deny you that choice?
But, before you go, I'd like to share a small story with you. I've had someone fairly close to me die. She didn't pass away, with a gentle nobility that the phrase seems to imply. No, she died a severely harsh, painful, and disgusting death. Disease had wracked her body, so my last mental image of her was not that of the beautiful, confident, dangerously intelligent, and willful creature I had come to admire. Instead, our very last interaction presented me with an emaciated, skeletal husk that could barely manage a whisper. Her time was drawing near, and she knew it. She wanted to cry, for she would be leaving her family behind, but the therapies she had gone through destroyed her lacrimal glands. I could only sit in silence as she wailed and groaned, expressing to me over and over the same sentiment.
She did not want to die.
She was 37. She was on track to become the director of her department. She had a husband and two sons, who will now endure desperately to adjust to a reality without her. If I could, I'd appeal to the universe or God or whoever to swap your life with hers. But I can't. I must accept that this exceptional person met her end in such an unceremonious and cruel manner.
Meanwhile, here you are. Alive. Struggling. Ready to call it quits because you feel as if you've reached your limit. You're not alone in this regard, as we're all dealing with our own issue or five. Moreover, we are united in the regard that life is forced upon all of us, with a completely arbitrary set of initial conditions. We are born, with no say as to who our parents are, what our disposition would be like, what sociopolitical circumstances we will be born into... What I find tragically comical about this is that one could adapt successfully, survive, thrive, do everything “right”, only to come up short at the very end. My colleague that died is the perfect example of this. It's absurd. Life is so stupidly absurd.
Anon, we are built to struggle against this absurdity. We are meant to suffer through this circuit of triumph and despair, tirelessly. For what reason, you might ask? For the hope that something meaningful comes out of it. Something noble. Something brilliant. Something beautiful. The objective changes across people, but the process through which we must go through to achieve it remains the same. Often times you will find yourself weary, unsure of yourself. Perhaps unsure of those around you. Maybe, unsure of your efforts thus far. During this time is when life will appear the most absurd. It will insist on the pointlessness of it all. It will scream it at you.
In the face of such savagery, you have options. One of them is to scream back. Rebel as violently and disruptively as you can. Refuse the circumstances that life has thrust upon you and take action, do anything at all, failure or success be damned. Not content with your home life? Take what funds you have and move out. Your job is unfulfilling and miserable? Quit and apply somewhere else. Your therapist isn't working out for you? Fire the bastard and get a new one. All of these things may appear reckless, but that is the point: prove that you are not a slave to circumstance. Should you fail, you fail on your own terms. There was no slow decay to this new low. You didn't stand idly by as life tried it's hardest to lay you down. No, you exploded outwards against it's grip, out of it's reach, and after a magnificent flight above the horizon, drove yourself straight into the ground. And you can damn well do it again, as many times as it takes.
[end transmission]