Anger gets you no-where except a referral to the lunny bin.

I need to expel all the overwhelming lunacy that perpetrated my day onto something objective, so I turned to here, to my blog, to the only healthy coping strategy I seem to possess. I don't even know if I will post this, or keep it as a draft, just an arbitrary exercise to rid my big BPD head of the emotions which churn and mangle my thoughts.

I had my INDIVIDUAL session with my DBT therapist this afternoon. It was only when I was waiting for her in the lounge of  the clinic that I noticed how grumpy I was. I was frowning and gritting my teeth and really quite narky. I didn't have enough time to figure out what the route cause for my agitation was as I was minutes away from therapy so I just tried (read FAILED) to push it away as I didn't want to waste a session on  what I felt to be an unnecessary topic. Well, boy was I mistaken for thinking I could just will it away that easily.

Within minutes of the session the elephant in the room was not only noticed but pulled out by the tusks and made to take center stage. T:"whats going on right now?"All I wanted to do was scream at her. Me: "what do you mean?" now  I was screaming at her, well in my head anyway. "SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME THE F*^% ALONE!" I can only imagine that I looked like an cartoon character, you know the one where where they turn red and steam starts coming out their ears.....

It was clear I was in no mood for therapy, and thank God she realized this and moved swiftly on to discussing what the DBT process calls THERAPY INTERFERING BEHAVIORS. I call it being stubborn and headstrong. Its the ultimate no-no in DBT. She asked me about the plans I had to end my life I had mentioned in an Email, and I point blank refused to talk to her. I picked a point on the carpet and simply stared at it praying that she would just give in and ask me something else. I knew I was being childish, but it was the only thing I could do to stop me from storming out of the stuffy office in a huff and making a holy show of myself.

We sat in silence for a while longer until she pointed out that I had agreed to at least give DBT a shot, and that not saying anything was not participating. I was shaking all over now, gone beyond the point where I might cry and was just plain mad. I didn't care anymore. I told her I wished I had never said anything to her about suicide, and that I felt like I couldn't be honest with her anymore if this was how she was going to react. (and I wonder why BPD has such a bad name....) I was being a bitch.

I do get her point. I mean I can't expect the skills to work if I ain't willing to give them a shot first. This includes staying alive long enough to learn them. So after the fickle silence, we agreed that my lack of structure and routine is not helping my mental health at the moment. Which is very true. Then she landed the shocker on me....

She was referring me to the hospital and wanted me to do the 'center for living' program. This is ultimately a babysitting service for the emotionally challenged, run by possibly the most invalidating health care workers known to this planet. I mean the nurses are straight out of the old Victorian asylum era, where they think that shoving drugs down your throat to keep you quite and throwing patronizing advise about sleep and diet at you will cure you enough to get you back out the door for another few months. They expect to see you again at some stage. Recovery is simply not in there limited vocabulary. 

I have no choice in the matter, so for the next few days until they can organize themselves, I am a 'danger to myself' and must check in with the nurse on call every morning. So much for a life worth living......

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

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