G******U
发帖数: 4211 | 1 Bill Zeller
I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'
ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe
it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at
least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of
how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don't want people to
wonder why I did this. Since I've never spoken to anyone about what happened
to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.
My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has
affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can
describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and
overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I
couldn't use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to,
which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage
that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally
, but now it's less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what
was done to me.
This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing
with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks.
Just waiting for everything to end. It's the same thing I do now, but
instead of legos it's surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball
game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my
body to catch up.
At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected
this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay
for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense
concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for
this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically
inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the
darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because
programming has become less and less of a refuge.
The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is
covering me. I feel like I'm trapped in a contimated body that no amount of
washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and
itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours
of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours
straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I'm
exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.
Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes
me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like
hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I'm
reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my
life.
I've never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this
hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and
then be interrupted by someone saying "Hi" or making small talk, unable to
understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the
outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal
human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people
without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people
had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.
Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always
find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and
it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of
the darkness. Obviously I'm responsible for every decision and action,
including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.
Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my
situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no
future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was
better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched alcohol or any
other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved
when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and
clear way. There's no future here. The darkness will always be with me.
I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he
would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of
my problems instead of something that I'll never be able to change. I
thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost
weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs
that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York
or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace
and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in
how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling.
I'm not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.
I didn't realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first
relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me
personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and
protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape
from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how
entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to
release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact
with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn't
stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the
focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.
Relationships always started out fine and I'd be able to ignore him for a
few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and
every night it'd be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome
threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the
more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we
were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and
kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too
and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt
like I was infecting anyone I was with.
Relationships didn't work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought
that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me
knew that finding the right person wouldn't help, so I became interested in
girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay.
I convinced myself that it wasn't the darkness at all, but rather my
orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn't feel
"right". The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely
made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number
of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told
people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn't
attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if
being gay wasn't the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my
orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I'm
straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness
will never leave.
Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met. Someone
who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could
care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for
the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She
liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn't
matter because I couldn't be alone with her. It was never just the two of us
, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got
, the more intensely I'd feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my
emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony
that I couldn't stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to
give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without
the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the
darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be
at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility
of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have
realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with
. It's likely that things wouldn't have worked out with her and we would
have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of
relationships do) even if I didn't have this problem, since we only dated
for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the
darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not
enough. Nothing is enough. There's no way I can fix this or even push the
darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy
feasible.
So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time
limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the
darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of
problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have
been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was
actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to
talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because
of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the
realization that I would never have another relationship and because it
signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have.
This wasn't apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the
real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it
was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with
anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could
have asked for under the circumstances. I'll never forget how much happiness
she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I
had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it
. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days
before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this
were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we
only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She's just one
more person in a long list of people I've hurt.
I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I've had that were
ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I'
ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to
experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be
honest with people about what I thought was true.
I've spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.
I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone about
what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to
realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim
to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years
ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret,
the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People
don't care about their word or what they've promised, they just do whatever
the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to
realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between
just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in particular, I guess it's just
how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I
have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the
other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So
even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them
about what happened to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows.
I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to
stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something
that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened
to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to
prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate
what I'm capable of.
So I've realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with
it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.
I'm just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has
defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the
monster I am and there's nothing I can do to escape it. I don't know any
other existence. I don't know what life feels like where I'm apart from any
of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally
broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a
human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures
it doesn't understand and can't connect with.
I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a
relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the
comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated
intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone
who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have
children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a
good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had
children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done
that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I
know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope
that you can at least forget about me quickly.
There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to leave
it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something
that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.
You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've
seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues
and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never
given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large
part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no
interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it
wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I
know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality,
growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental
illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through
generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting
enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to
contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her
decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it
takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who
I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced
to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I
realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're based on
a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound
disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.
People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to
continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won't feel
sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary
problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that
grows more intense and overwhelming every day.
Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have
it worse than I do, and maybe I'm just not a strong person, but I really did
try to deal with this. I've tried to deal with this every day for the last
23 years and I just can't fucking take it anymore.
I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel
the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can
experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can
experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery.
I wonder who I'd be if things had been different or if I were a stronger
person. It sounds pretty great.
I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no
longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will
probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My
only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.
—-
I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise
everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional,
dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a
better place when they're dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist
Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when
I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.
They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for themselves.
They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything
they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don't understand that
good and decent people exist all around us, "saved" or not, and that evil
and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take
advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same
hatred they practice.
A random example:
"I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the
Koran, he will be a terrorist." - George Zeller, August 24, 2010.
If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who
are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to
Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice,
but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If
so, fuck Him.
Their church was always more important than the members of their family and
they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their
contrived beliefs about who they should be.
I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never
believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was
literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by
two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were
around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to
Hell because she's Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then
talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other
examples, but it's tiring.
Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal ways.
I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure why. Maybe
because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can
talk to about what's been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it's not
real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this
reconnection to happen.
I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At
other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe
the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much
and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know
how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn
't "saved", since she believes I'm going to Hell, which is not a sadness for
which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she
believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state
of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing
how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how
much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn't deserve to
live. All I know is that I can't deal with this pain any longer and I'm am
truly sorry I couldn't wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this
could be done without hurting anyone. For years I've wished that I'd be hit
by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more
acceptable, but I was never so lucky.
—-
To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my
shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted
to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe
not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.
I'm sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I
hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can't understand
this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.
Bill Zeller | G******U
发帖数: 4211 | | G******U
发帖数: 4211 | 3 这篇遗书条理清晰，非常详尽地写了他最终自杀的心理历程。
无论如何他没有伤害别人。他甚至没有试图去追究伤害过他的人。他也有过他
的moments.可能比我们大多数“泯然众人”要多：上普林，也交过爱得不得了的女朋友。
一个男人死了。此文是他生命中最后的存留。他的遗愿是公开此文，尽可能公开。
我们可以不同意，但不能不同情。可以不理解，但也决不能误解！
Bill Zeller. RIP.
I'
Maybe
of
to
happened
can
【在 G******U 的大作中提到】
: Bill Zeller
: I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'
: ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe
: it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at
: least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of
: how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don't want people to
: wonder why I did this. Since I've never spoken to anyone about what happened
: to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.
: My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has
: affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can
| f********m
发帖数: 8 | | f*****g
发帖数: 9098 | 5 none of my business, 但听到死亡这个字眼，尤其是自杀，总想说两句。一个是惟一
被决定的事，一个是惟一能自己决定的事。
我觉得bill zeller心理还是很强大的---在身体和人格被暴力侵犯后，与心理阴影搏斗
了23年，才投降。这也说明被同性强奸不是他自杀的直接原因。应该是心理阴影导致他
这么多年来无法正常与人交往，无法维持长期稳定的人际关系包括男女关系，然后最终
使他意识到他一辈子都不可能做到，才让他选择走向绝路的吧。
我们大多数人是在一个较浅的层次上挣扎。科研停滞不前，单身，低薪，这个做不好，
那个也做不好，两难的抉择。。。这些是个人境遇和个人能力的困境。
不过内心的痛苦不能比较，就像幸福也不能比较。自我调节和承受能力因人不同。
Oprah曾经是最有影响力，最有钱的非裔女人，也曾9岁时被强奸14岁生娃早夭。
做不到最好，就争取做到最好；鼓不起斗志去争取，就潇洒的一笑了之。
能把握的，敢于try our best;把握不到的，懂得let it go。
我们常问自己活着的意义。没有意义。人类都是偶然，你更是偶然。
活着，不论幸福或痛苦，还是往前走吧。
有时就连走，都是一件难以为继的折磨。
We are all blind. |
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