The stories of veterans losing their lives to suicide that NPR has been sharing recently have stopped me in my tracks. I tried to hold back the tears since I was sometimes in the process of applying makeup.
Veterans have a suicide rate that is 1.5x more than non-veterans, according to a VA report in 2019. And men die by suicide 3.5x more than women.
***
I suffer from suicide ideation and hearing the stories of those who committed suicide is an automatic tearjerker for me. (Really any story where someone or something is suffering gets the tear ducts going, a sad result of being an empathetic person.)
I’d usually be at the gym, sweating and motivating with the other members as we always do Memorial Day Murph to honor Naval Lieutenant Michael Murphy who was KIA in Afghanistan in 2005. But I was triggered this morning and I haven’t stopped crying since.
I’ve put more effort the past couple of months into creating content, making sure I tweet with photos a few times a day. In addition to my usual masochistic routine of training at the gym for several hours a day. But my increased efforts have resulted in fewer subscribers and my numbers remaining stagnant. As I see others gain more popularity, while I struggle to make $200 a week from my OnlyFans, I’m back to feeling worthless.
I got pissed at Zeke for not making a sandwich to bring to work the past few days. He’s had plenty of time to make himself one, instead of playing one more video game. I hate wasting food. I hate wasting money. I hate worrying about the cost he’s spending on lunch when I’m still trying to pay off the $3,500 vet bill from October.
“You better be ready. I might die of cancer,” he said to me last night. Cancer has taken the lives of some of the men in his family, including his father at age fifty-six.
“Well, I was planning on committing suicide anyway,” I replied.
I have the constant fear that most women do; he will leave me for someone younger. (I think this fear is worse for women who are with someone that they are nearly a decade older than.) I also fear that he will leave me to raise his son one day because I honestly do not want any part of raising a child that has lived their formative years with such an unstable, racist mother.
But what if he dies before I’m hit by an oblivious driver along the terrible roads in the suburbs of Clark County? What if I don’t get a chance to kill myself before cancer destroys his body?
I’ll be alone. Again.
For those of us who lived alone last year, and didn’t have a partner, or a family member, or even a good friend who wanted to hold us in the beginning months of the pandemic, it was difficult to feel motivated to even just be alive.
I did not have a strong and stable foundation of love and appreciation in my early years, and hence why it was so difficult for me to love myself. It is still difficult for me to recognize my value.
Zeke’s love has helped me and he’s been so patient with me. I sometimes step outside of our relationship and observe the power of what loving someone does for another person who has struggled so much to find love within themselves. I’m not losing as many days to just sobbing into my dogs and contemplating how I should attempt to kill myself next.
If you just show someone respect and adoration and give them your undivided time and attention, watch them become less of a downer. Perhaps you’ll see more of their radiant smile that you keep demanding they falsely plaster on their face.
But it’s been almost a year we’ve been together. That means almost a year of boy/girl content my fans had been asking me for. Almost a year of the NOT “Nyomi might kill herself tomorrow” performer. There still have been plenty of ups and downs, but I know that with my not being suicidally depressed all the time, I have been more productive.
However, my increased efforts advertising myself on social media over the past few months, and the increased productivity has just brought another “I should just kill myself tomorrow” episode.
Why do I keep trying in this business? Am I just that stubborn? Is it a touch of narcissism? Knowing that I’m putting up just as much content as others. Knowing I’m just as gorgeous as other performers, if not more so. Knowing that I have trained my body with over 3,000 hours of sweated effort in the gym over the past four years. Or knowing the hundreds of hours I have spent editing content when other creators have an editor or a team that does that for them. Who the fuck knows? I’m going with stubborn and masochistic.
Just when is my time going to come when I do not have to worry about paying bills? The lack of people who want to spend $5 a month on me is making me resort back to feeling like I should just end things now. Zeke might get cancer within the next twenty years if he doesn’t leave me for either his son or a younger woman before then. My menagerie will all pass in ten years (maybe not the turtles), so why do I keep spending my time and efforts in an industry that does not see or care about me and my efforts?
I wanted to switch careers and concentrate on my art and writing, and hence why I created my Patreon, but then I got sucked back into my masochism and continued to focus on taking selfies and filming myself blowing Zeke.
My plan to make enough money by selling my body to be financially stable enough to educate myself in a different field, and/or spend more time on my art & writing has been crushed by my stagnant followers.
***
I cannot even begin to comprehend the trauma soldiers experience in battle. I am only able to empathize with trauma in general terms and empathize with the feeling of not wanting to be alive anymore.
You just wanted to stop hurting.