Not A Happy Birthday For My Friend
Today, I am going to selfish and actually, going to talk about myself.
I am used to writing for textbrooker.com. On textbroker, they give you a set of assignments and you have to choose one of those assignments. They are often in the third time and you are not allowed to express how you feel about something.
On March 13th, 2021, I honestly feel broken physically and emotionally. The last year has been hard on us all and I am no exception.
Yesterday, I received an email from Facebook that told me that it was Matthew Beckham’s birthday. The unfortunate part is that he is no longer among the living.
Who is Matthew Beckham? He is one of my oldest friends. I met him in my sophomore year at the International School of Bangkok. I took a course that put the magazine together for the school. He was my partner in writing articles and we became quite close. I would sleep at his house and then he would sleep at us.
He is one of the reasons that I went to Baylor University. I thought it was nice to go to a college where I actually knew somebody. Unfortunately, Baylor University was not the college for me. It is run by the Southern Baptist Convention and the students are quite conservative. I am from Boston and I lived all over the world. Most of the students are not stepped outside of Texas. We did not get along. They also sexually harassed me over the phone while I lived in the all-male dorm. The harassment drove me to commit suicide so I transferred to Emerson College. The only time that I saw him when I was at Emerson College was when I went to visit him at the State University of New YorkBinghamton. He was going to graduate school at this college.
It was not a good time to visit him. He had just committed to babysitting an actress who had just broken up with John Leguizamo. I spend the whole time with him, keeping this actress from falling apart. I could not really talk to him and the trip ended up being a bust.
Since I graduated from Emerson College, I had not seen him face-to-face at all. I did try to keep in touch through e-mail, but it is not really the same.
I should say that since 2000, I have been living in Thailand.
Through circumstances that are too complicated for now to explain, I had ended up homeless in San Diego, California in 2011. One way that I saw getting out of being homeless was becoming a security guard. The problem is that in California, you need a license to become a security guard. This license cost $150. I only needed 50 dollars to get the license. I emailed Matt, who lived in Houston, Texas at that time, to see if he would send me 50 dollars. He said in the email that he would not send the money because he wanted to take care of his wife and her family. This did not make me happy and I did not contact him for a long time.
In 2015, my brother committed suicide. He stood in front of a train in San Francisco. I was looking for answers from the Christian church on how to deal with suicide. I asked a church in Bangkok and they provided no answers for me. I asked Matt because his parents had been missionaries and he is one of the reasons that I had become a Christian. He was no help. It left me disappointed with the church and him.
In 2019 or 2020, I wrote him an email to tell him why I had not emailed him for awhile. I was angry about him not helping me when I was homeless or when my brother died. I was also disappointed that Christians in American had supported a scumbag like Donald Trump,
Last October, Matt Beckham went into the backyard and took out a gun. He then shot himself.
I can only imagine why he had committed suicide. He was an actor and due to the pandemic, the acting scene has been rough. He had ended up as a professor at a community college in Texas. His wife is a nurse and he probably had a daily reminder of the pandemic.
I have now lost two people that I loved and cared about to suicide. I feel like suicide is a pandemic and I am the spreader. I have tried to kill myself three times and I still have thoughts of killing myself. I know that it is not really my fault they killed themselves, but I can’t help myself. The narcist in me thinks that I must have done something to cause them to kill themselves. They did the deed and I should stop beating myself about it.
The email from Facebook brought all the guilty feelings that I feel about being a survivor. About 530,000 Americans have died from the pandemic. Two people that I loved kill themselves. Why is it me that survives? I am a selfish, pathetic, arrogant human being who is mostly known for not really anything.
I hope that you don’t think I am pathetic and keep on reading my articles, or listening to my podcasts.
I only ask that wherever you listen to my podcast, Apple, Spotify, or Powercast, you give me a good rating.
I will occasionally talk about myself if you don’t mind. Have a good day and be safe.