Decades of Gaslighting and Abuse Have Me Considering Death as an Option to Make it Stop

Editor’s Note: This story is a social commentary on bullying and gaslighting. It does not glorify nor encourage suicide. Rather, by shining a police-intensity spotlight of interrogation upon the misanthropes, miscreants and malcontents that seek to make other people miserable in order to keep themselves company, seeks to promote mental health awareness and thereby prevent suicide attempts and mass murders.

Author’s Story

I think I would love life if I had had a more normal life. It’s complicated. I don’t want to die, I want to live, which is why I’m considering dying. I have been humiliated repeatedly. Degraded and discarded more than can be humanly expected for me to continue living.

My life has been under systematic attack for decades. I was born to be abused and blamed. It feels as though humanity has put all their sins onto me for me to bear. Now, they wait, impatient and irritated that I haven’t killed myself yet.

I know how absurd that should sound. However, it’s as if every day I’m given confirmation of the above. My own father says I should be embarrassed to be alive. My regular interactions with other people inform me that they are irritated by my existence. I am harassed, blamed, and assaulted as if they have been given permission to burden me with all of their pent-up anger. It feels like confirmation that I deserved the abuse and neglect I experienced in my early life.

The world hates me for some reason and there is nothing I can do about it. I was called “boy” at my first job 35 years ago. At nearly every job I’ve had since I’ve been subjected to mistreatment. My entire working life has been a string of supposed “bad luck” episodes of discrimination and abuse.

It feels like each person in their turn is allowed to subject me to their own personal choice of torture. I have been made to believe that I am so inferior that if I believed everything negative said about me, I certainly would have killed myself by now. To take on everything said or believed about me as true about my incompetence would leave me too full of shame, embarrassment, and negative self-worth to continue living.

I feel as though I’ve been subjected to enough attacks over the past 35 years to lend justification and credence to the idea that people want me dead — that I am nothing more than a breather of other people’s oxygen.

I’ve just begun to internalize all the insults hurled at me over the years. It took persistent effort on the part of others to make that so. I’m not depressed. There’s no chemical imbalance in my brain.

I am the target of an irrational group’s irrational hatred.

Keep in mind, I’m not suicidal. I don’t hate life. I still wake up every day with the hope that the abuse has stopped. Yet every day I’m pushed back down to where society must think I belong. Every day I wake up feeling fine, so I know these feelings originally didn’t come from inside of me, they are forced upon me by an external reality. A reality that is full of people who seem to think that I am the worst example of a human being to ever walk on the surface of the planet. By the end of each and every day, I don’t feel like existing anymore, if that means I have to exist with these people.

I know, or I used to know that good people are out there somewhere. Somewhere I am not. Now, I’m starting to doubt that there are any good people left. Everyone around me proves to me that good people no longer exist. There is no one who will back me up, which just proves my hypothesis.

Ironically, that is the only support I receive.

I haven’t been hugged in over a year. No one cares about me. Most of my family is dead. My best friend died just over a year ago. The only people near me now reinforce the idea that my life isn’t worth anything, that I am scum, that I am despised, and that I don’t deserve the life I have now.

I’ve been set up as the scapegoat at work more times than I care to recall. They don’t even bother to cover up their abuses anymore. They know no one will come to help me. They know that there won’t be any repercussions for scapegoating me for anything and everything. The logical inconsistencies don’t seem to phase them at all. As long as they are assuaged of their guilt, they don’t care if they have an innocent blameless target absolving them of their responsibility.

So, I am considering death. It seems the only way to escape this externally enforced pattern of continuous abuse. The only thing stopping me is a false hope that people will suddenly realize what they have been subjecting me to for 35+ years. The only thing stopping me is the unbelievable logical impossibility that I am actually the only person that the world at large wants dead. I am flabbergasted at the daily reaffirmation of that idea.

I don’t know what I did to earn humanity’s wrath. The most likely explanation is that those around me are acting unconsciously reinforcing the years of suffering, abuse, and neglect I experienced as a child. They are unconsciously agreeing that I deserve such continuous horrific treatment for my crime of being born, disrupting my parent’s lives.

It feels as if there is this secretive cult that has been following me my whole life, tracking me, inserting themselves into my life to make sure I know that I am unwelcome in life among them. This is their world, and I am an unwelcome and uninvited guest in it.

My latest piece of evidence regarding humanity’s hatred of me as they set me up to be blamed for everything, a permanent failure and embarrassment, I copied today. I had a report at work that’s been bothering me for several days. No matter what I do to correct it is wrong and unacceptable. I’ve been told on a daily basis for going on a week now how incompetent I am, how much of a failure I am, and how I have been performing incredibly poorly at my job, an extreme disappointment.

I copied my coworker's report. I immediately noticed 15 items that were approved as acceptable on her report which were deemed unacceptable on mine, although they were identical. Over the years, I have discovered that no one cares, no matter how much smoke is billowing from the gun used in the crime to gaslight me.

So, I’m considering death. I realize that there’s nothing I can do to ever make this report acceptable. I realize that I am to be the whipping boy, set up for failure for the rest of my life. I don’t want to live like that.

It would have been nice if someone with the power to do something about this daily nightmare of abuse stood up demanding that these people stop their criminal behavior by now. But that hasn’t happened in 35 years, I don’t expect it will now. I don’t see an end. And I’m tired. I’ve been knocked down so far that my smile is becoming a faded memory. My mind has been warped by lies and deception to such a degree that I don’t know that even if this nightmare ends that I could ever return to being a normal productive member of society again.

Author’s Note: I’m not suicidal. I don’t want to die. To be clear, I want this abusive behavior from a supposedly small group of people to come to an end. Sorry for using Medium to express my frustration. I know I should keep quiet and suffer alone.

Editor’s Note: I am glad that you are speaking up. You should be proud of yourself for not being bullied into submission. The publications of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications proudly offer a safe and inclusive space for writers of all walks of life to share their views with the common goal of elevating each other. Those who only seek to denigrate will be turned away at our gates.

To anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, we encourage you to contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1–800–273-TALK (8255).

This lifeline is free and confidential. It is open 24 hours a day and provides support, information, and local resources to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress and those around them. Call for more information or visit www.suicidepreventionhotline.org.