I do not fall asleep for a while, actually. I usually don't.
As I continue my thoughts on being a burden to the world, the circles get smaller and smaller, and two uncomfortable things start happening. The first is that it gets more personal, more emotional. Saying that I am in part responsible for the death by starvation of children in Africa is one thing; saying that my life is a nuisance to my parents and my siblings is completely another. Because (and this is the second disturbance) my parents and my siblings would not call me a burden.
I have caused them so many difficulties. As a child, sick and insomniac, my parents took it in turns to carry me through the house, trying to get me to sleep, all night long. My mother once fainted with me in her arms. For years she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
But my parents have never given the impression that this was too high a price to pay for having me.
I remember as a child, pulling my sister's hair. She was crying from the pain, but she was far too good to retaliate. She just took it.
And my brother, he suffered the most. I had an unpredictable temper and beat him up regularly, all the way into my teens. Once I hit him so hard he blacked out. In my mind I can still see him staggering backwards against a wall, his eyes glazing over and him sliding awkwardly, sideways downward and collapsing on a heap. Once I threw a deodorant can at him and hit his forehead. Again, there is an image in my mind of him reeling backwards, his eyes tight shut and his mouth open in an expression of pain and holding both his hands against the blood flowing over his eyebrow.
But even worse than the physical abuse were all my other forms of lording it out over him. All of his ideas which I quenched, all the times I ridiculed a song he liked or an opinion he held, all the times I discouraged him from following a goal, all the optimism and excitement which I put a damper on. I often wonder what sort of person he would be today, how much more his personality would have unfolded, had I not throttled so many developments.
But I am loved by them all. I'm not sure how I would really know what love is if it weren't for my family. And the truth, the difficult truth, is that I am the only one in my family who believes that my family would be better off without me. And what's more, my view of myself as an unjust transaction towards those around me is much more hurtful to them than any of the other injuries and inconveniences that I have ever caused them. No one else blames me for being alive. No one else sees it as a difficulty or an injustice. But they all suffer, not because I exist, but because I wish I didn't.
It gets complex. It becomes a whirlpool. My best (theoretical) solution to every problem I've caused (or faced, for that matter) is that this problem would never have existed had I not been born. Including the problem of me hurting those around me by wishing I had not been born. Thus my theoretical solution becomes a non-theoretical problem.
But still, it persists. If I had not been born, it says, I would not cause anyone pain by wishing I had not been born.
But still, it persists. If I had not been born, it says, I would not cause anyone pain by wishing I had not been born.
