2026-04-15 (Wednesday) — I Want Out

I’m losing it.

The hairline fractures in my fragile mind have broken open, and I’m breaking apart.

But I’m a lot worse now than I was this morning. Right now I’m panicking, and I just want to die. I want to die. I want to die.

…

[the following was written earlier today]

I was up early with the early-morning sun again, and as usual, I spent a little while catching up on the news.

I also spent a fair bit of time adding pictures to the journal entries I had written but hadn’t posted, posting each one as I finished adding pictures to it.

And taking  pictures. 🙃

I also got my journal entry for yesterday written and posted.

So I’m caught up… again. 🙃

I’ve been stressing out more and more as I have zero interest in my van to go with the mountain of things I need to get done in Utah and New Zealand.

I’m just… afraid… and completely overwhelmed by that fear.

I guess maybe I’ve had so many of my worst fears realized again and again over the years that I just live in this near constant fear of everything I’m afraid of coming to pass?

I’m a mess. 😕

The girls who were parked in the van behind me were out walking the beach, and I thought maybe were looking for seashells (they were looking at the ground and bending over periodically as they walked).

Last night, as I myself was walking the beach, I spotted a perfect little conch shell, picked it up, and washed it out in the ocean, so I carefully set the shell on the driver’s rear view mirror and snuck back to my van their return and reaction.

Unfortunately, the first girl who returned didn’t notice it, and when she closed the passenger side door, it knocked the shell off the driver side mirror.

Apparently she didn’t hear the shell fall onto the blacktop, as she simply walked back to the beach.

Amazingly, the shell was undamaged, so I picked it back up and set it on the little wooden barrier thing right next to the passenger door, wondering if they might notice it there before they left.

When they got back, I didn’t see whether or not they noticed the shell, so I wasn’t able to see their reaction, but when they drove away, it was no longer there.

Hopefully, it was exciting for them to receive. 😊

Spent a little bit of time texting Heather, Jared, and my mom.

Spent a little bit of time trying to find car dealers that might be interested in buying my van… I haven’t yet asked Alex if he’d be interested in getting a commission for selling it for me, or storing it for me on the land he recently bought, or maybe even buying it from me if his van turns out to have the transmission issues he’s concerned it might have.

Hopefully, it doesn’t have transmission issues. 🤞

I’m on my way to one of those camper van dealerships now. 🤞

…

Ugh. The whole trip to Auckland was a bust in every possible sense.

What was I saying about my fears continually coming true?

[sigh]

Waste of time. Waste of lots of expensive gas. Destruction of my last vestige of emotional control.

I despise cities.

Tight roads. Busy. Crowded. Claustrophobic. I think I missed every single dealership on the first go around (though truthfully, a lot of that was being distracted), watch meant I had to drive until I could find some place to turn around.

Oh, how I hate cities.

And if navigation issues weren’t bad enough, the first place was closed. I’d driven nearly an hour to get there, but apparently (as I found out when they responded to my WhatsApp chat a fair bit later), they’ve closed for an entire month. Did they bother to post that on their website or their Google page? No. 😒

The second place I went to, after missing it on the first go round and winding around until I managed to turn around and get back was open, but they weren’t interested. Blue sticker. Nobody wants it. I didn’t do what was needed in the last six months to get it green-sticker certified.

Because I’m a moron.

He pointed me to another place, so I headed there. They were closed ish, but someone else arrived who must have been friends with the owners? So when they open the gate for him, I walked in with him. 😅

After inspecting the car a little bit, he didn’t really want it either, said that if would only be worth $500-800 to him. $800 NZD… That’s not even $500 American.

😶

Good crap.

Discouraged and frustrated, I drove away… back north, destination Waipu Caves. I wanted out of the city and away.

[back to my current mindset]

I can tell I’m actually worse emotionally and spiritually than I was before arriving in New Zealand.

I can’t do this.

I can’t do life.

There’s nothing left of me, and every time I have some flicker of hope, it disintegrates. And every time it disintegrates, the next flicker is weaker than the last, and so on, and so on.

Since I have no hope that things will get meaningfully better, I just want life over and done with.

Clearly, I don’t have what it takes to overcome the challenges I’ve experienced and the ways they’ve irreparably broken my mind and continue to paralyze me.

I literally can’t break free.

Clearly, I was broken beyond repair from the moment of my first existence, as when faced with the challenges I’ve experienced, I am too weak and will always be too weak to overcome.

Perhaps if it weren’t for the reality that I haven’t put any beneficiary on my bank accounts (apparently, I need to be there in person to do that, so when I tried while in New Zealand, I couldn’t), then I might not be coming home.

So maybe it’s a good thing I need to be there in person.

Still, it needs to happen anyway, so it’s on the list of things to take care of when I get back to Utah.

And honestly, when it comes to having the courage to call it quits for real, I doubt I have the guts. I just continue living miserably day after day after day because my mind is just… broken.

And then there’s this stupid tooth. Shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s just money and dental work.

But it’s one more thing that feels mountain sized, and it’s one more thing that’s my fault, one more evidence of the grand failure at even the simplest things in life.

Why such a focus at the moment? After a day that already found me pulverized, when I tried to chew my muesli on the left side of my mouth today… nope.

😳

That’s a different pain than I’ve had. I don’t think I’ve ever had deep pain from pressure. It’s always been shallow and sharp.

This is different.

I got away with not needing a root canal last year, but I’m thinking that my overwhelming failure to take care of myself, drinking mostly soda to hydrate myself for almost six months because I was too cheap to buy water over and over and didn’t want to carry huge water containers and didn’t want to keep having to look for water fill places, and then I got used to it and wanted the soda all the time… and and and…

And also candy on a fairly regular basis, and with one of my main sources of food being Doritos (or whatever cheap equivalent I could get when the Doritos weren’t on sale) for six months… Combined with pretty much only flossing (yes, regularly, but rarely brushing)… and well… I’m sure I’m to blame. One more thing I’ve screwed up in my life. Again.

I don’t have the emotional presence of mind to have proper perspective to recognize my behavior, understand consequences… I’m always overwhelmed and barely hanging on.

Isn’t that so absolutely pathetic?!?!

And when I do think about consequences, I often can’t function enough to act on what needs to be done, even in areas as small as just brushing my teeth!

I’m that far gone. 😞

I literally can’t take care of myself anymore.

My issues… they’re pretty much always my own fault these days, because I live in daily, consuming fear that only constant escape into different beautiful natural vistas or into my cell phone screen can relieve me of.

I simply can’t face life.

So many years of giving everything I had. So many years of struggle and sacrifice. And everything fell apart anyway.

I’ve simply got nothing left.

Hope is a little more than an errant reflection that flashes across my eyes but whose source I can’t find.

I can rarely get myself to try again, because nothing ever changes.

I try. I fail. I try. I fail. I try. I fail.

I live now in a reality where the mere thought of trying brings a sort of PTSD response within me, because nothing ever changes. Life only gets worse. And every time I miraculously come up with enough hope, enough courage to try again, I try, and I fail, and each successive failure makes the next miraculous discovery of hope and courage further away than the last, reinforcing more and more that hope is vain and trying is foolish, because I’ll never succeed.

Those are the experiences I’ve had, and such is the world I see from within this broken mind of mine

And I want out.

This van… my tooth… the mountain of stuff to figure out in Utah. The even bigger mountain of stuff to figure out in Arkansas… even the continual pain and discomfort that’s easily the worst of everything…

All that is just surface stuff, but it’s what tips the scales and sends me into a consuming state of fear and maximum overwhelm.

It’s the underlying inability to find a foundation I trust to stand on that has me stuck in this veritable purgatory, because I don’t know what the truth is.

What’s real?

I have experiences with God I can’t turn my back on and still have integrity.

But I don’t have knowledge.

To me, knowledge has zero doubt. If there’s any doubt, it’s not knowledge: It’s belief.

And without knowledge, all the sacrificing, trusting, giving up what I want so badly, because, to the best of my understanding God directly told me to… for now… because the time is not yet…

It’s terrifying.

Because it’s not knowledge: It’s belief. Yes belief strong enough that I can’t turn my back on it and have integrity, but still, it’s not knowledge. There is doubt.

And doubt for me brings fear.

And with the enormity of the consequences for me in following the course I felt God direct me to follow… every. single. day I’m alive I choose to continue following that belief, and because it’s belief and not knowledge, and because I’m so prone to be afraid, I do so terrified that I’m wrong, that I’ve lost and continue to lose the hopes and dreams that were most most precious to me, and all… for nothing.

But I don’t even have the strength or courage to live what I believe.

I can’t live it. I can’t walk away from it.

If there is a hell, could it be worse than the agony in my own mind?

And so I self medicate.

Constantly.

In some way or another. And I have no strength. I have no resilience, because I have no hope.

I just want it all over, but I’m trapped in the prison of my own devastatingly powerful fears. I can’t ever truly escape. I can only numb out for brief periods of time… And I stack them together, and I prolong them, and I despise myself for so doing…

But I continue… again and again and again…

And here I am, lying down on my bed inside my van at the Waipu Caves dirt parking lot (after first stopping off for a bit to revisit Piroa Falls).

Waipu Caves. One of my happy places…

But I’m a mess. 😕

Six months here, and I wasted it all. I accomplished nothing of any meaningful consequence for my life. I’m mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and financially worse off than I was before I came.

I had a pretty good idea that I was going to fail on this trip, and exactly what I suspected would happen happened.

I’m broken.

Please God, just end me.

…

It’s 10:10 now, and I just got back from enjoying the glow worms, perhaps the best display I’ve ever seen inside Waipu Caves.

Lovely escape from the fear and pain.

Met a couple of Florida girls who were hanging out at the beginning of the cave, staring at the water and debating whether or not to go further, as it would mean getting wet.

I encouraged them to keep going, offering to show them around, and they came along. 🙂

I first took them up to the limestone ledge directly below the big show of the first big room, and we sat there in the dark admiring the view as our eyes grew more and more accustomed to the darkness, and the luminescence of the worms correspondingly appeared all the brighter.

It was actually my first time climbing up to that ledge as well, having just had the idea before meeting the girls.

Then I walked them back to the other big room that had more glow worms on it than I’ve ever seen in that section of Waipu Caves before.

There were probably four or five times as many glow worms there today than in the first big room!

What’s interesting is that though there were more of them, somehow the ones at the beginning of the cave seem brighter.

I think they are, but I’m not sure why that is. 🤔

Anyway, the glow worms provided a really cool show tonight, and it was fun to be able to share it with the girls, who thanked me for guiding them along and said they never would have known of and never would have had either experience (neither the perch atop the ledge that provided the best view of The Geode [what I’ve named the first big room], nor the wonders of Starry Night [the name I gave the other amazing room deep in the cave]) had I not offered to show them around.

So that was nice. 😊

Nice end to a really rough day. No… this post isn’t just a passion piece, an exaggerated expression of a much more tempered reality.

These feelings are frequent. They are more the climate than the weather. I’m just usually hiding–consuming whatever beautiful vista or adventurous experience, or immersing myself into a TV/movie/sports/news/porn fantasy world.

[sigh]

😞

Here are some other pictures from the day, speaking of the escapes…

~ stephen