Focused blindness

This weekend is lasting much longer than I have ever experienced time before. Its almost as if time is not real for me. As if I am watching my life from afar in slow motion. Yet the slowness is refreshing, I am learning so much about my fucked up and naive mind.

I find myself looking back at my life with retrospect, and wondering if I have made my life so unbearable by my thoughts and judgments then surely I can also make them stop, right? Now, just to figure out how to do that....

I am deeply ashamed that I have been such a bitch to my mother, she is the only person who truly loves me unconditionally and all I do is push her away. There only way I can describe it is to explain how I hate wearing glasses. I am totally blind, as in I can't even see the number on the bus 5 meters away and have to ask the other people at the stop what it is. And when there is nobody there I wave my arm out praying that I get lucky. So why don't I wear them? Well I hate the clarity that they give me. I can't stand to see others faces and eyes peering at me. I can see the dirt and grit on the windows and all the flaws in the world. I hate it. No, I much rather the safe haze of partial blindness with no sharpness or scary lines.

My mother in my life is like wearing super strength glasses. She forces me to see the dirt and grubby stains in my life without offering me the choice to have an intermission and take them off for a while. She makes them be super-glued to my face. Permanently. While my father and  my therapist offer the safety of the blur and let me keep them off for as long as I want, even though it is only making my eyesight worse in the end. I control the focus with them. 

Yet I know that how hard my mother pushes me is only for the best. And that how hard I push her away is only making me worse.

Giving up

I always dwell on the most negative. They say that we human beings are programmed to survive and to overcome and forget pain in time. Not me. The times when I feel grief and emotional distress are the memories which stick with me the longest. This week has gone by so slow, its agonizing sitting and waiting for this wave to die out.

All I keep thinking about is how I am unable to keep going on with DBT. It is exhausting me. I simply can't keep it up anymore. But I am afraid to give up totally just yet, so there must be something inside me willing to keeping pushing past this horrible disorder. I have been making endless amounts of PROS AND CONS list about it. I fought so hard to get into the program, and I know how lucky I am to have even been considered for treatment in Ireland. There are others here literary dying to get this level of support. Yet I wonder if it is the right thing for me, maybe it just is not the right time, perhaps it simply worn't work for me.

I know I have improved since starting this journey, but not enough for the tremendous effort that it involves. It is too hard and I am too exhausted. Then there are all the people I would be letting down if I were to simply give up on yet another thing in my life - My parents, my employers, my partner, my friends, my therapist, my doctor, my readers of this blog, my housemates and all the well wishers. I don't want to let them see me fail, again! So for now, I will try my hardest to battle through this, one second at a time.

Panicked and afraid

I came out of my one to one therapy session yesterday feeling utterly ashamed of myself. I am a fraud, a fake, an undistinguished manipulator, who's sole aim is to gain attention and pity from those who are only trying to help me. I can't cope with life. My miserable and  shameful life. I have no clue who I am, and the scary thing is that don't think I want to find out. I am terrified that when I find out who I am, I won't like the real me.

It's better to be unwell, and use that excuse to explain my horrible personality than to accept that ultimately this may be who I am and that I choose to behave the way I do. I am so afraid of myself.

I found myself calling a suicide hotline last night and wondering if I would ever have the courage to go through with it, but I am too weak. That is the conclusion I came to, that my drive is there, but I am to scared to really go through with it. Its like a marathon runner who has trained for their entire life for a big race. The have the ability and the drive to run, but the day before they break their foot and can't go through with it because they physically can't.

Today I panicked again. I need answers to the hazy questions circulating in my mind. I didn't go to work and instead festered in bed with my unwashed thoughts.  I don't care about anything. I didn't even pick up my social welfare payment this week. I am back to thinking about starvation and attention seeking.

I called my Doctors office not to long ago knowing full well that my therapist was out of the office today and couldn't call me back. Now I am waiting for a call back from some randomer and I have no clue what to tell them about why I called. All I know is that my insides are screaming in silent agony with confusion and guilt and that I am terrified of myself.

Why did I call? It was an instinctual reaction to the emotional pain. My head wants me to be devious and secretive yet also wants to let others know when I am hurting too. As if by sharing the hurt that it will somehow soften it and justify its reality. But the instant I open my mouth it won't let me explain it in a way that gets me any help.

Oh I am not making much sense I know, and I am also well aware that this blog has taken a radical turn from recovery to something much more dark and disturbing and I really am sorry about that.

Just off the phone with the on-call doctor there. He was nice, but detached and was reading my notes as we spoke. We agreed that I must put in place my distress tolerance skills and reminded me that these feelings rarely last... so in the words of Marsha.... I must ride the wave of the emotion.... I fucking hate surfing. Could never stand up on the board and always got thrown off into the white thunderous water. But she tends to be more wise than me when I am feeling like this so I'm off to self soothe in a hot shower and wash away the dirt of my anxiety, then I will paint my nails and paint a half smile on my face in order to ride out this period. 

*****TRIGGER*****My favorite quotes which express the topic of suicide

It’s a physical urge, huger and stronger than thirst or sex. Halfway back on the left side of my head there is a spot that yearns, that longs, that pleads for the jolt of a bullet. I want that rage, that fire, that final empty rip. I want to be let out of this dark cavern, to open myself up to the ease of not-living. I am tired of sorrow and struggle and worry. ... I want to turn out the last light. –Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. –Graham Greene, The Comedians

There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die. –Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity

Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it. –Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

I don’t know when the idea of suicide first occurred to me. In some ways, it had been in the back of my mind for years. Yet, oddly, I would never have thought of it as an option. It was the perceived lack of options—the final, unacceptable solution to a grave and insoluble dilemma. I had always thought of it in the same way: If all else fails, if I have nowhere else to turn, I can do this. –Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression

Even at this stage, my preparations were like strapping on a parachute in an airplane that was about to crash; the whole time I was preparing to hurl myself out the door, I clung to the hope that something would happen at the last minute to forestall that terrible necessity I felt—not hostility, as psychiatric texts would say, or vengeful rage, or a desire for attention. This was done in secret, out of a need to alleviate pain which was as implacable as thirst. –ditto

Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn’t talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die? –Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

But just as a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little bit of energy, in the hands of someone hell-bent on suicide, is a very dangerous thing. –ditto

I guess I realize that I don’t want to die. I don’t want to live either, but—there really isn’t anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it’s the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it’s easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that’s how it’s going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy. –ditto

Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it’s hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive. –Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

And what I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way … They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them … We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that…it just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder. –ditto

The knives in my apartment are only sharp enough to open envelopes with. Cutting a slice of coarse bread is on the borderline of their ability. I don’t need anything sharper. Otherwise, on bad days, it might easily occur to me that I could always go stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror and slit my throat. On such occasions it’s nice to have the added security of needing to go downstairs and borrow a decent knife from a neighbor. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it’s always there. –Joyce Carol Oates, “Summer Sweat”

It was my last act of love. –Sylvia Plath, after her first major suicide attempt

The only option for a pure idealist is to commit suicide. –Wu Guoguang, “Gate of Heavenly Peace”

Though this was my only bona fide suicide attempt, it began in me a lifelong relationship with that temptation. It seemed to me I had a “virus” inside me like malaria that could flare up at any moment, and I needed always to be on guard against it. On the other hand, I would court it, even in times of seeming tranquility. I seemed to derive creative energy from the assertion of suicide as an option. This morbidity left me freer to act or write as I wanted, as much as to say: No one understands me, I’ll show them. It also became my little secret that, while going about in the world, and functioning equably as expected, several times a week I would be batting away the thought of killing myself. How often have I thought, in moods of exasperation or weariness: “I don’t want to go on anymore. Enough of this, I don’t want any more life!” I would imagine, say, cutting my belly open to relieve the tensions once and for all. Usually, this thought would be enough to keep at bay the temptation to not exist. So I found myself using the threat of suicide for many purposes: it was a superstitious double hex warding off suicide; it was a petulant, spoiled response to not getting my way; and it was my shorthand for an inner life, to which I alone had access—an inner life of furious negation, which paradoxically seemed a source of my creativity as a writer. –Phillip Lopate, “Suicide of a Schoolteacher”

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night. –Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

An English novelist who had made two serious suicide attempts said this to me: “I don’t know how much potentially suicides think about it. I must say, I’ve never really thought about it much. Yet it’s always there. For me, suicide’s a constant temptation. It never slackens. Things are all right at the moment. But I feel like a cured alcoholic: I daren’t take a drink because I know that if I do I’ll go on it again. Because whatever it is that’s there doesn’t alter. It’s a pattern of my entire life. I would like to think that it was only brought on by certain stresses and strains. But in fact, if I’m honest and look back, I realize it’s been a pattern ever since I can remember.” –ditto

Who am I?

I have no stock answer to offer about a life-changing experience or a moment of enlightenment, and it is hard for me to give a comprehensive proclamation of who I am, for my identity unfolds more every day as my experiences grow.

I dislike saying "I am trying to find myself" because my identity is not lost, it just needs more uncovering. Luckily for me, what I love to do and want to be helps me uncover more about myself. I want to be a writer. I may not end up a professional writer but I will always write, even if I am the only one interested in my work, because writing is my self-reflection.

When writing, I sometimes get worked up into such a fervor that I barely know what I am saying. I just let my fingers fly over the keyboard and the ideas pour from my head. When I go back through the jumble of unpunctuated ideas, I notice a theme running through the writing. I don't try to put a moral in the theme, but invariably it happens. Evaluating the theme and the rest of the writing helps me interpret my own character and decipher my at times bottled-up feelings.

Prozac Mind

Oh wow, what an odd week this has been. Trepidation and deregulation have burdened my mind with troublesome thoughts, causing me to suspend life and live apprehensively, awaiting some unforeseen dreadful event. The sensation lies deep in my thoracic cavity, somewhere between my heart and soul, like a boil ready to burst and spread its nasty disease to all unlucky enough to be nearby. 

My family are worried, heck my WISE MIND is worried too, but at both ends of the pole, the two destructive EMOTION/RATIONAL MINDS are at war. Devoid of emotion my RATIONALITY states that “all is lost, there is no hope, no-one wants you around, and no-one even likes, let alone loves your fat ass!” With that spurring it on, my EMOTIONS are loaded to attack and pounce on an opportunity to destroy myself with all the vigor and drive needed to succeed. So what’s stopping me? 

My exhaustion is. I have barely made it out of bed all week, too afraid to even go to the kitchen or bathroom for fear that something will happen, afraid of others and ashamed that they might see me this way. Surface to say, food is not high on my agenda. I haven’t eaten a real meal for days, and I am scared at the all too familiar glory I feel from my hunger pains. “Success!” whispers my ED in a snaky slighter of a voice! “Keep it up and soon you won’t feel anything except thinness and happiness!”

As long as I can stop myself from binging I think I will be ok, just until I see my Consultant on Monday and therapist then too. Just have to keep myself safe and out of the kitchen, away from temptation. Restricting is less destructive for me than binging and purging.

The dose of Prozac (20mg) makes me nauseas anyway so eating is not all that appealing to me right now, Add the intense anxiety I feel and a weak stomach is an understatement. Food repulses me at the moment. Long may it last!

Beautiful Suicide **Trigger**

I want a beautiful suicide
Where the night skies are dark
And the stars shine brightly
Yes tonight I’ll make my mark

I want a beautiful suicide
With a knife next to me
Alone in a room
How good will this be

I want I beautiful suicide
I’d already planned
Alone in silence
Nothing could be more grand

I want a beautiful suicide
I’ll have to no longer life this life
No hurt or pain
All it takes is a knife

Do I want a beautiful suicide?
I don’t think I could die
Come to think of it
It’ll make others cry

I don't want a beautiful suicide
I’ll no longer commit
I’ll just mend what’s wrong
That was stupid I admit