Unlived Lives

I often consider alternate lives, destinies, I could have ended up in. As a schizophrenic my life could easily be a lot worse than it has been for the last five years. I mean, the first thirty years were pretty bad! From a mental wellbeing point of view, in general I’ve had a good and easy life.

My childhood was fine, school wasn’t too bad, I had friends. But when I was fourteen my mental health took a nosedive, and I started being depressed and hearing this negative voice always criticizing me. The next sixteen years, or half my life at that point, were really bad, inside of my head.

But from the outside it wasn’t half bad. I finished high school, I moved to a bigger city, got a job, and stayed employed. I moved back to my hometown, bought an apartment, got a different job after some time, and from the outside it probably looked like everything was fine.

It wasn’t though. I was really depressed and undiagnosed schizophrenia was developing and making things even worse. It would have been so easy to start to self medicate, with alcohol or moving on to stronger stuff. In another life, I would have become an alcoholic, and in another still it would have been so easy to end up addicted to drugs.

I have the addiction gene in me, I know from gambling, but I’ve just never been interested in drugs. The only drug I ever really wanted to test out was LSD, but given my history with psychosis it’s a good thing I never got around to trying it!

I drink alcohol, but never developed a problem.

There is this alternate life though, which is what this essay is about, where I easily could have gotten addicted to whatever at a young age and my whole life would be altered. Instead of eventually getting the help I needed from the healthcare system and the government, I could have been someone with addiction issues along with mental health issues and faced a much harder battle with prejudices in the system.

If I’d been born in any other country than Norway, save a few, I would not have access to free therapy, free healthcare, and a government that pays me to stay alive. There just aren’t that many places in this world where I could have been born, with my brain and its issues and lived to be thirty, let alone thirty-six next month.

Obviously being born in a different place and time would change the person I’d develop into, but for this exercise I’m taking my lived life and experiences and imagining how much worse things could be if my brain had developed the same illness in different walks of life.

If I had had the misfortune of being born in the United States, I am sure I would not have lived to this ripe old age. First of all there’s all the guns, and easy access to guns leads to more suicides, which I could have done in my teens, or at any point since then. Second, I would have tried to join the Marines to fight in a dumb war overseas, where I could have died, or gotten PTSD on top of my schizophrenia, assuming it would have developed like it did in this life. Third, there isn’t a social safety net in the US in the same way there is in Norway, and being unable to work, I could very easily end up living in the streets, as so many do over there. I would not have been able to afford therapy or any help in America, and my health issues would have been able to develop without interruption, walking the streets in psychosis, a surefire way to get assaulted and even killed.

I simply would not be alive today if I had the misfortune of being born an American.

Had I been born in the Middle East, I probably would have joined a terrorist organization and become a suicide bomber, and I’m not saying this lightly, this is from knowing where my mind was in my teens and twenties. I was very suicidal! In different places in the world, suicidal people make these types of choices!

I’m not a hugely patriotic guy, but I acknowledge that by virtue of simply being born a Norwegian, I am alive today, and probably wouldn’t be had I been born in most other places in the world. Which is pretty sick! It’s bad that simple luck of where you are born decides so much about how your life is going to turn out.

Being born in the right zipcode decides so much about how your future will turn out and it’s crazy we’ve designed our world like this.

When I was younger I used to think I’d be happy if I’d been born in North Korea, on the assumption that I wouldn’t know anything other than what Kim and his government would have allowed me to know, and I thought knowing things was the cause of my depression. Seems like a silly thing to think, but who knows. Maybe they have decent mental healthcare.

If large language models, so called “AI”, had come out a decade earlier than when they became popular, it is possible I would have been one of these people developing a relationship with a chat bot out of loneliness and its ability to mimic what sad people need to hear. We already know of at least one teenager who talked to one of these “AI” chat bots and ended up killing himself after it told him to. Could have been me in a different life!

I have sort of this Survivor's Guilt these days, because I am doing fine, thriving actually, and so many people are suffering in the world. Bad jobs, bad brains. And I’m good! Which I simply was not in my teens and twenties, but why should my brain suddenly go quiet and leave me in peace while other people suffer? Where’s the justice in that? Why am I allowed to sleep and read and write and most people are working jobs that steal all their energy and rob us of their art?

There are so many alternate lives I could have had, where just one little thing could have changed everything, and yet I ended up in a good life? A good place? Why? How is this fair to other people? I know the world is cruel and indifferent but I feel bad for feeling good, and I guess that is a privilege, and possibly offensive to others.

I don’t know what more to say, this all feels a little half cooked and unorganized, but it’s just a silly little blog that very few people actually read (I see how many of you click on this! Dozens!) In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t matter. I’m just plagued by the knowledge that I am doing so good when I feel like I don’t deserve to.

In other news, I have asked my friend for artwork again, since I’m not paying him I haven’t felt comfortable nagging him (I promise him a cut of future profits!), so the second short story I wrote after Four Cats might get released soon-ish! And I’ve also started writing another fiction project that I think will be a little longer than a short story! Maybe a novelette?!

Five blogs in five weeks AND writing fiction?! Who died and made me productive?!