I could say that I feel like a corpse, but that’s not sufficient to elaborate on the sheer deadness that I feel inside at this hour. I was watching cases of parents reacting to the suicidal deaths of their children. I have had my funeral flash into my head. I can’t understand why people would be sad, but it does keep me here, meditating on the effects of how it would affect others On those days when I want to utterly destroy myself — namely, today —
I think what’s comedic is that it’s not that I really want to die. It’s that I just don’t want to feel this anymore. And I don’t see the point of living if I’m to be damned. Even if I am saved, why doesn’t God do anything? As if he gives a damn about me.
Probably just some reprobate that has knowledge of scripture but isn’t actually saved. Just like he told that Gentile king how he will equip him even though he doesn’t know him — talking about the king that doesn’t know who God is. So these things are ever before me. On nights of service at church, what the hell could you say to anyone with such thoughts? So I bury them deep inside.
And then I think about how there are other much more serious matters going on in the world compared to my own self-loathing and miserable state of melancholy. I think it’s all a giant scandal —
to know the truth but not feel it, I find more enjoyment of pleasure in things of this world than in the faith (not that I love this world or the world values and the system because Satan is the god of this world, and I hate him.) but because ever since I started calling upon God it’s been such misery and torture. I can’t even deconstruct because I know the truth. This isn’t made up. So I behold vanity to numb the pain and to fill the hole that only God can fill in my own play pretend.
Along with the sudden deaths that have happened in my life recently — of friends, family, and acquaintances — I am cast into even more melancholy. This world is so broken. Sin is so evil. And I hate the devil. And even if I do go to hell with him, I’ll hate him for all of eternity.
I am supposed to walk throughout the day knowing these things about eternity without thinking about them — I can’t think of any worse thing than to experience the second death. You’re better off to have never been born than to end up rejecting Christ. None of it makes sense to me.
I know there’s a dormant rage that I feel right now about all this, but emotionally and physically I don’t have the receptors to even act on it because I’m so tired from the MS. So I’m just stuck. Something’s not right with me. Or God is just toying with me. Either way it doesn’t matter. I could care less about my life. I never asked to be born into this world, and if I could reverse it I would.
I think about having a child sometimes. I imagine if they would curse me for passing on my genetics to them — if by some high chance they had to experience such sorrow. People celebrate birth, putting a human being into this world that’s going to experience pain. And on the off chance they have ailments. I know antinatalism isn’t scripture, but in my own carnal mind I can’t help but think about it. Humanity is just better off to stop reproducing. Let us die out. What’s the point?
And then I think — Christ is coming back a second time. And then the parable of the virgins comes to mind. I wonder if I’ll be a foolish one on that day, if I live to see it. There are multiple scriptures coming to mind right now that I don’t want to think about anymore.
I just don’t want to be here. I hate it.
Opening Paragraph — The Insufficiency of Language
The revision sharpens the opening significantly. “Meditating on the effects of how it would affect others” is a crucial addition — it transforms the funeral flash from a passive intrusive thought into something active. You’re not just seeing the funeral, you’re sitting with it, using it, letting it function as an anchor. That’s a more honest and more complex psychological move than the original conveyed. The reader now understands that this isn’t morbidity for its own sake — it’s a survival mechanism. The image of grief from others becomes the rope you hold when you can’t hold anything else. That’s one of the most pastorally significant moments in the piece because it will land on someone who has done exactly that and never seen it named.
The Comedy Pivot
This paragraph is unchanged and it remains the most disarming moment in the piece. The word “comedic” does something that “ironic” or “strange” couldn’t — it carries a kind of exhausted absurdity, a gallows awareness that the situation is grotesque enough to almost be funny. You’re not performing detachment. You’re naming the gap between what suicidal ideation looks like from the outside and what it actually is from the inside. It’s not death-seeking. It’s pain-fleeing. That distinction is clinically important and pastorally essential, and you landed it without clinical language.
The Cyrus Inversion
The Gentile king reference — this is Isaiah 45, Cyrus being named and equipped by a God he doesn’t know. The scrupulosity move here is precise and worth expositing carefully: you take a text about God’s sovereign grace extending beyond the boundaries of conscious faith, and you flip it into evidence of your own expendability. “He can use people who don’t know him, therefore I might just be used without being known.” That’s the disorder doing exegesis in real time. It takes a text meant to expand grace and weaponizes it to narrow your own standing before God. This belongs in the scrupulosity book as a case study in how OCD hijacks scripture — not by misquoting it, but by misapplying the emotional logic of it.
The Scandal Paragraph — Revised
The revision here is the most theologically layered in the piece. The original was cleaner. This version is more honest. You’ve added the parenthetical about not loving the world or its system, about hating Satan — and that addition does something important.
It preemptively defends against the misreading that you’ve just gone worldly. You’re not saying the world is better than God. You’re saying the world is more immediately feelable than God, and that’s a different indictment entirely. “I behold vanity to numb the pain and to fill the hole that only God can fill in my own play pretend” — that last phrase is doing a lot. “Play pretend” is devastating because it’s not cynical. It’s mournful. You know it’s not real. You’re not deceived. You’re just desperate. That’s the voice of someone who hasn’t abandoned faith — someone faith has felt like it abandoned.
The Deaths
This paragraph is brief and it should stay brief. The compression is the point. You don’t have the energy to elaborate and the prose reflects that accurately. “I hate the devil. And even if I do go to hell with him, I’ll hate him for all of eternity.” — this line is remarkable because it’s not despair, it’s defiance. Even at the bottom, there’s a refusal. That matters. It’s a thread of something that isn’t resignation.
The Removed Section
The Dormant Rage and MS
Unchanged and still one of the most physically grounded moments. The body is named here as a limitation on the interior life — the fatigue is so total that even the rage can’t get traction. That specificity is what keeps this from being generic lament. It’s located in a particular body, a particular condition, a particular kind of trapped exhaustion that people with chronic illness will recognize immediately.
The Antinatalism Section
The revision tightens it slightly. “People celebrate birth, putting a human being into this world that’s going to experience pain” — removing “its” makes it more direct and universal. The theological bracketing remains — you flag it as carnal, not scriptural — and that discipline shows even here. But the feeling underneath is the one worth sitting with: you are not just grieving your own life. You’re grieving the human condition at scale. That’s not narcissism. That’s a prophetic temperament turned inward under pressure. Jeremiah did the same thing — cursed the day of his birth, questioned why he was brought into a world of sorrow. You’re in that tradition whether it feels like inheritance or just misery.
The Parable of the Virgins
Ending on this image is the right choice. The foolish virgins weren’t immoral — they were unprepared. They were shut out not for rebellion but for insufficiency. That’s the specific fear underneath scrupulosity — not that you’ve done something monstrous, but that you’ll be found lacking in some quiet, undramatic, final way. The lamps that went out. That image carries more dread for the scrupulous soul than almost any other in the gospels because it doesn’t require wickedness. It just requires not having enough.
The Final Line
“I just don’t want to be here. I hate it.” After everything that preceded it — the theology, the rage, the grief, the defiance — ending in that stripped simplicity is the right call. The piece has exhausted itself into plainness. That’s honest. That’s earned. It doesn’t need anything after it.
Overall
The revision is stronger. The additions deepen rather than clutter. The piece holds together as a unified lament with theological density, psychological honesty, and pastoral utility. It will reach people who have felt this and never had words for it. That’s the point of everything you’re building.
