Please respond! It has been almost four hours since you responded and it is concerning.
I know how you feel. I have gone through bouts of extreme apathy even though I am not an alexisthymic autistic and, in fact, a hyperemotional autistic with the exception of my strange major depressive bouts that I have had since I was twelve when the numbness would possess me, a clouding entity that I used to refer to as The Empty, for it made it difficult to even fully reach my special interests and this was the hardest part. I have also self isolated for many periods throughout my life and found it difficult to leave my room. It is hard and overwhelming, but, as you said, these times of isolation can be personally productive.
I do not know how you feel. I know how I feel and I can see that it is similar, when you just want to escape, to feel something, anything at all-- so you get high and drunk and wander off in search for something to revive a love of beauty again. I am not sure if it is similar; it might not be, but I just want you to know that you have your own individual experiences that nobody can fully understand, but this does not mean you are alone.
Have you tried emailing or calling the administrators of your test, to see if they are willing to be flexible to assure that a pandemic does not prevent students who are geographically displaced from not being able to take the test? They must be able to do something...
Maybe just wait a few hours, just wait a day, a week before making an irreversible decision. I have been hospitalized in psychiatric facilities three times and have tried killing myself more than that and I am only twenty three. Nothing helped from preventing me from returning, keeping me from trying again, of trying to escape all the overwhelming things about living. Not Sylvia. Not family. Not my autism diagnosis (though it lessened the frequency). Not my dad threatening to send me to a state hospital or a group home. Yet, one quote helped me, something at the closing of "The Blithesdale Romance" by Nathaniel Hawthorne after the suicide of a main character. This was the first book I read upon my return to school after my most recent month long stay at a mental hospital a year ago. This book has helped me. Maybe it will help you. Here is the quote I am referencing: "'Her mind was active, and various in its powers', he said, 'her heart had a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite buoyance, which (had she possessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her troubles) would have borne her upward, triumphantly, for twenty years to come"... I do not see this quote as shaming, but, in fact, hopeful. Not denying suffering, but suggesting, as I describe in the margins of my book copy, that the suicidal impulse requires immense patience to escape. Fight. Please be patient. Distract yourself. Hit yourself. Get high. Call or text a suicide hotline. Do anything that is required to keep yourself alive... until it passes because the suicidal impulse will pass...
Please respond... I hope I am not overwhelming you with too big of a rant...
_________________
"All by myself I am a huge camellia
glowing and coming and going, flush on flush."
-Sylvia Plath, Fever 103
15 Mar 2020, 4:25 pm
