text: Patrick Tobin on 'Taking My Own Life'. – Porchester Press
  Patrick Tobin on 'Taking My Own Life'.
  Sometimes I hear a final shot which ends my life.
  In the hallucinations or the lucid dreams I have, I can't decipher whether I hear the shot after I wake up or just before I wake up. It's so confusing, this verge of death thing. The not knowing if I'm alive or dead. It has led me to put myself in situations which would endanger me, just to verify my existence.
  They tend to be dangerous for me even though terrifying. The more I did it the more these situations would give me a severe lack of choice as to how to avoid the danger that I would place myself in. Consciously or not, I was trying to get to that exact point where I could allow myself to hear the clarity of a gun-shot. Where the flash could be seen in the distance before it hit me painlessly between the eyes finally to end my life, and without me being responsible for any of it.
  So I began taking risks and chances with the way I lived my life, not really caring about the outcome or how things would work out for me. What actually kept me going was the thought that I could hang myself while drunk and psychotic, as though it wouldn't really be me doing it I suppose. It is this thought which influenced me and fuelled my thirst for alcohol in some ways. It was also a way of numbing all the abuse and those bad memories. It was as though I kept this thought as a 'Happy Thought'. This encouraged me to carry on because if the condition overwhelmed me again, at least I had some sort of option to stop the suffering in some way. It made my day bearable just thinking about it. I know this is macabre but it was just how things were for me. In the meantime I could continue to abuse myself by drinking heavily, looking for trouble which surrounded me like a bad smell surrounds a corpse.
  It was as though people looked into my eyes and saw I had nothing to lose.
  Patrick Tobin 2010
  Posted on June 8, 2019 June 15, 2019 Author adminCategories Patrick Tobin - Sections from MemoirsTags death, existence, hallucinations, memoirs, psychosis, suffering