Dying of Boredom

To: Ms Susanna Boyd
From: The late Elizabeth Boyd
C/O: I. M. A. Foni Mediums Inc
Subject: RE: Is ya dead?

I never really believed you could die of boredom. I'd heard the phrase, of course, even used it myself on occasion (on numerous occasions, in fact, towards the end) but I never really thought it would actually happen.

How wrong I was. All it took was one particularly slow day in the office, followed by a rainy evening spent playing the latest in a long line of 'hidden object' (instant eyestrain) and 'time management' (virtual wage slavery) games, to tip me over the edge. Monotonous toxicity, the nurses muttered as I was rushed through A&E in a state of semi-conscious paralysis, unable even to lift a finger. Overexposure to lack of stimulation.

It was a lifestyle thing, apparently. I'd long ago exceeded my boredom thresholds, developed a hefty tolerance to all things mundane and repetitive, and in doing so had damaged certain regions of my brain beyond repair. They'd usually have recommended some form of boredom offsetting – generally a cocktail of prescription drugs and a course of therapy - long before it reached this point, but of course, what with the near-total lack of public awareness about this surprisingly common complaint, and with the NHS in the state it’s in, it was easy for things like this to slip through the net. I’d been misdiagnosed a couple of times, in fact: depression (the commonest misdiagnosis for someone in my condition, apparently, due to a striking similarity of symptoms), alcoholism (my attempt at self-medication), even borderline personality disorder from one particularly creative psychiatrist with a penchant for exotic labels. No one had hit on the right answer. Not until it was already too late.

There wasn’t a lot they could do for me. They tried everything they could think of: TV, women’s magazines, the latest pop music (all along with the finest pharmaceuticals, of course), but nothing helped. It got to the point where I couldn’t even focus my eyes on anything without a sharp pain stabbing through my temples, followed by a wave of despair when I realised that what was causing the pain was the fact that I’d seen it all before. Nothing new under the sun, so the saying goes. Never thought that would end up seeming quite so true.

And that was it really. Nothing seemed to hold my attention. I started sleeping more and more. Pretty soon I gave up waking up at all. They kept me dosed up on hallucinogenics for a while, monitoring my brainwaves and picking up flickers of interest, but even that soon got old. I got sick of the sight of my own subconscious: it was all so derivative, so disappointingly clichéd. I learnt to control the trips, dig deeper, peel back layers of neurotic obsession, post-religious pseudo-revelation, hall-of-mirrors identity crises, misdirected libido and all the other detritus of my Gordian-knotted psyche, but however far in I got there was always another layer beyond, another heap of junk for me to tear my way through. I was trying to find something inside me that was worth hanging onto, something that hadn’t been done before, but the harder I looked the more I realised how much of me was just bits of other people, movies, books, internalised cultural assumptions. In the end I just gave up. It was all so samey, so passé, so, well, boring. Time to make my exit.

It’s not so bad, being dead. In fact there are a lot of advantages. Not having a body is a big plus. No more junk food, ready meals, weekends spent juggling different states of inebriation, trips to the gym for a shot of endorphins and a bit of penance for it all. No more hangovers on a Monday morning, aches and pains from god knows where, no more listening in the night to the incessant beating of a heart that just doesn’t know when to call it quits. Then there’s all the things you see, the things you start to understand and even accept. Like the fact that we’re all pretty similar really, whatever we might like to think, and that we don’t really know shit about all the things we take for granted. It doesn’t seem so bad on reflection. In fact, life looks pretty good from out here. Pretty amazing, actually. Not boring at all…