depression

stuck

jade, , , , , , 4114 wordsLeave a comment

The second big homework that I had to do for my ongoing psychology treatment was about this thing called “Stuck Points.” I am sure that will be a googleable thing. This one was a bit more difficult, not in terms of the ability to do it but that it meant thinking very carefully and analytically about some of the ways I think and respond to things and while doing all this is ultimately good for me and is helping me to change the parts of me that I don’t want to be burdened by, it is also opening my eyes to the scale of damage that I have been living with for so long.

For a long time, because I have struggled so much to move past the affect of this abuse, I have viewed myself as just being a weak person. Because lots of people have had people or parents that spoke to them harshly or were strict or whatever. And they managed to be ok. So why couldn’t I? While I did understand that what she did was more than strictness and harshness, it was abuse.. I still didn’t quite grasp how truly awful it was and how much damage it did to me and why I have had such a hard time. There is probably an obvious point to be made here, also, that part of the reason why I viewed the abuse and myself this was is that the nature of the abuse made it so that I was conditioned to see myself as the problem, always. She came so close to actually breaking me and erasing all belief I had in myself and my intrinsic value as a human being and the knowledge of how close I was to that is kind of terrifying.

I want to side step a bit here and talk about “intrinsic value.” The words are something that my psychologist mentioned during one of my appointments with the observation that I do tend to struggle with the belief that the concept of intrinsic value applies to me just as much as it does to any other person. And she is right. And it is something I have been trying to make an effort to remind myself of. Every now and then I aggressively mentally shout at myself “intrinsic fucking value!” and it sounds a bit silly but inserting the qualifier into the middle helps to remind me about how important this concept is. And we all know I love a colourful word here and there. I think that I will letter this, as well as some other important bits I don’t want to lose sight of. That way I can put them up somewhere as reminders.

Back to the part about realising that what happened and the damage it did to me being way greater than I have ever realised or acknowledged. I have said before that I really can’t imagine where or if I would be, if Daniel hadn’t come into my life when he did. I was on a downward spiral where I was losing interest in things, I had hit a wall with education that I have since learned many unusually intelligent people hit where all of a sudden your innate intelligence is not enough and you actually have to make effort at understanding and completing new work and you just don’t know how to do it because you didn’t ever develop the skills to do that and so you assume something is wrong with you because everything used to be so easy and now it is so hard. I had a few friends but still felt very much out of place in the world – probably a combination of the way I had come to think about myself because of the abuse and the otherness you can feel as a probably undiagnosed and unsupported neurodivergent person who just feels so different to everyone else. I wasn’t good, really, on the inside but I think I was keeping it fairly well concealed on the outside. I knew I was heading for an implosion of sorts when I screwed up school and didn’t get the magnificent results that everyone naturally assumed I would get. Looking beyond that year was just a big void for me and I didn’t see anything with any kind of light.

I don’t know whether or not I would have actually ceased to be living or if I’d just be moving through existing, functioning barely but not caring about anything. But it wouldn’t have been anything great and I am so glad that he did appear when he did and saw that intrinsic value – and more – in me that I had almost completely ceased to believe that I had. He pulled me back, and has held me back, from that void and it’s hard to state how significant that is. The void scares me. I don’t fear being dead, but I do fear being alive and existing in that void. That is where I was looking a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t like it. The advantage (haha) of having been close to the event horizon a couple of times is that you can recognise it and know you need to take immediate action to prevent getting to a point of no return. And I did, and I’m back at a safe distance. (I am also almost completely past the withdrawal symptoms too. The sweating has stopped and it’s just a minimal amount of spasming that remains.)

Last night I asked Daniel a question. I asked him if he ever felt “attacked” or “accused” whenever I react to things in a way that was not appropriate, because I am reacting out of fear and he has never given me reason to have to fear and so surely sometimes it must seem unfair to him that it happens. Because I’m not stupid and I know that having someone (metaphorically) flinch when you move even if you weren’t going to hurt them has to be difficult to deal with sometimes. And he said it is frustrating sometimes. Not that he is frustrated at me, just more of a “here we go again,” thing. I’m glad that he didn’t try to say it never bothered him. Part of what makes me angry about having experienced this and the way that it has left me unable to respond to certain things like a normal person is that it has unfortunately, unavoidably also affected the people around me that I am closest to and care about the most. She didn’t just abuse me, she has indirectly also abused my husband and my children and I would say my mother but it wasn’t always just indirect with her either. Not that I do feel particularly inclined towards forgiveness for everything that she said to me directly, but I feel even less inclined when I think about how it has harmed them too.

There’s another aspect to the “why?” question that I sometimes wonder about, and that is what the motivation for the abuse was. I don’t think it was to make my mum love her more or pull attention away from me on to her. She had plenty of my mum’s attention because I was a kid who was, for the most part, happy in my own company. I don’t think there was ever any conscious thought on her part that she was doing this to achieve any particular goal but I think that ultimately it just came down to the fact that I was there, and I was there all the time because of my dad’s death. I ruined her HEA, and so she reactively set out to ruin me and my opportunities for it. To hurt me as much as possible and destroy my sense of my own humanity so that any and all relationships that I might have would be ruined. But she never “won” anything with this, except maybe satisfaction for hurting me and trying to take from me what I took from her.

Part of this process is realising just how thoroughly she did do that and how it isn’t that I have been weak because I haven’t been able to break free of it, it’s actually been me tenaciously not giving in and not letting it eat me all up. And there have been times when it sometimes just seems SO FUCKING hard, the thought of having to tell myself every fucking day that I am worth something and that I do have a place in my family’s lives and that they do want and need me here. I have wondered if I have to keep doing that all the time then what is the point and maybe I should just give up. Sometimes I have wanted to give up and the only thing that stopped me from giving up was that giving up would prove that everything she said and taught me to believe about myself was right.

But I didn’t. And I’m working on giving myself more credit for that.

And trying to figure out what to do with the anger that I feel that I have suffered this much and the fact that it was essentially, all for nothing. She got nothing out of it. The instant that my mum ended their relationship she just began acting as if I did not exist. I remember having to ask her a question once, after that but before we had moved, and her reaction was such that it was obvious she was wondering why I would ever even conceive of addressing her. She was nothing to me, I was nothing to her and there was no reason for us to ever interact. I was pretty used to that by then, being ignored for days or weeks at a time. It was a relief kind of that the ignoring didn’t have to be preceded by the brutal dismantling of my sense of self. But none of it ever had to be that way. I would have happily co-existed in a loving and welcoming way. I didn’t have any interest in threatening her relationship with my mother. She made me into an enemy when I never had any intention of being one. And I suffered all of those attacks and the subsequent years of mental and emotional struggles .. for nothing. She got nothing from and she suffers no punishment for it. Part of me wants her to know that she didn’t win. Part of me just wants to not know if she’s dead or alive and stay entirely away from that.

But I did survive and I am surviving, even though sometimes I don’t much want to; and now I am hopefully healing somewhat, even though that’s also fucking hard and emotional talking about all of this and exploring it from a different viewpoint and scary when I consider the times I have tried before and not made any positive progress. I think it is different now because I finally have someone asking me the right questions to help me see things in a fair and realistic light. But it is also true that in seeing the light I am seeing how much darkness I have been in and that’s hard to come to grips with.

Another to add to my painting / lettering list: I AM SURVIVING.

Below is a copy of the “Stuck Points” homework I did for my therapy. I just want to make clear that the example stuck points are from a worksheet that the psychologist gave me and not necessarily talking about situations that are relevant to me – it’s the feeling or reaction to them that is what I identified with.

Stuck Points

I have copied a few of the points from the examples that related a little but below each I have expanded on how they are/aren’t relevant to me.

7. If I hadn’t been drinking, it would not have happened.

Well, for this one, it’s not “if I hadn’t been drinking,” it’s “if she hadn’t been drinking.” I very rarely drink alcohol and I have never been drunk, probably not even tipsy. Those are not necessarily bad things, since it is actually not good for you; but I avoid it more out of fear than only informed choice. I avoided it even before I became educated about the many and varied health risks. I do generally think that occasional alcohol use is fine, if that’s what people want to do. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind it, even. But the primary reason I don’t consume it is because I don’t want to take the risk that under the effect of alcohol, I behave differently and in a potentially harmful and hurtful way to people that I care about.

Overall, not drinking alcohol is not a bad thing and it’s one that I am ok with living with. I classify this as a stuck point because I recognise that there are multiple logical flaws in this belief.

A lot of the time, she was intoxicated and drinking when she was speaking to me and saying horrible things – but not every time. Some of it clearly came from her and not just the alcohol. It’s not reasonable to attribute all of the abuse to the effect alcohol had on her.

I know also that this fear and avoidance of alcohol or drugs among people who have been harmed by addicts isn’t necessarily uncommon; but because the harm often came at the hands of a family member, the fear is linked to a real understanding that because of shared genetic heritage you also likely have traits that could predispose you to the same kind of behaviour. I don’t have any reason to think that but I still have an intense pushback towards the consumption of alcohol, not just in myself but in people around me. I’ve struggled at times with being very uneasy when Daniel consumes alcohol. Though this is mitigated somewhat by his own lack of interest in alcohol, because his mother was also an alcoholic, and she died about 9 years ago from multiple organ failure following many years of over-drinking.

So that’s a bit messy and I recognise that I have some irrational thoughts and beliefs about drinking and alcohol, but in the grand scheme of things they are ones that I am ok with having because the amount of harm they do to me is fairly minimal.

10. Expressing any emotion means I will lose control of myself.

I think it would be more accurate to say “expressing any intense emotion means I will lose control of myself,” and what that means is probably that I do or show some kind of physical manifestation of emotion that other people have taught me to feel is a bad thing. Like crying. I cry at movies, at books, occasionally at toilet paper ads with cute puppies. Those things aren’t so much the problem. I cry when people are angry at me, I cry when people are mean or cruel or unfair to me. But their reactions tell me I shouldn’t be so affected by things that involuntary physical signs of my emotion become apparent. I shouldn’t be so weak that I can’t stop myself from the inevitable tears when I am feeling something intensely. I just shouldn’t be. It has made me hate my emotions sometimes, because it is something else that sets me aside as being different from other people and sometimes that they either ridicule or accuse me of doing in an attempt to manipulate them somehow. When my involuntary tells of emotion offend someone else, they seem to forget that they are involuntary and seem to perceive it as an expression of weakness that I choose to not stop. And people’s criticism of this just compounds the problem and it does become something that becomes too much for me to be able to consciously take control of and stop. I need a break and change of situation to let it all subside. 

Logically I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of feeling things, and people probably get angry at me because my display of emotion has made it obvious that they have caused some hurt in me and that makes them uncomfortable. So it’s easier to blame me for being too sensitive than it is to acknowledge that they behaved in a way that was unkind. The problem is that I have become so conditioned to hearing criticisms about the way that I exist that I just assume that these are just yet more ways in which I am flawed.. and that makes me even more bereft for the person that I am not that I apparently should have been.

14. Mistakes are intolerable and cause serious harm or death.

Mistakes cause anger, derision, frustration. I don’t want to be the subject of anger et al, so I try to not make mistakes. The difficulty is that it’s hard to know what is going to be a mistake before it happens. Even situations that feel like it’s not possible to make a mistake in.  So it becomes a balance between trying to anticipate every possibility in order to choose the one least likely to be the one that causes anger or trying to make yourself as small as possible so that you do not get noticed because if you aren’t noticed then they aren’t noticing that you are making mistakes.

This is a game that can’t be won because there are no rules, and what constitutes a mistake one day might be the right choice the next day. I’m still desperately trying to win the game in fear that the people around me will become my opponents, even though they have never heard of this game and could never in their wildest dreams imagine playing it.

16. If I let myself think about what has happened, I will never get it out of my mind.

This one relates pretty strongly to #10 about the emotions becoming too much and me losing control. Thinking in too much detail about people and events that have hurt me do make me feel bad and that seems like a pretty good reason to not think about them and start that descent into the loss of emotional control. On the other hand, not thinking about them means that I have been stuck in the peak effect of like.. grief right in the very immediate after someone has died, and I have been there for nearly 30 years, and it’s not just the bad things that I can’t think about but also even happy, normal or neutral memories from my childhood that just happen to have her in them because she was there.

20. Other people should not trust me.

Other people should not expect to receive input of value from me to their lives because I always manage to do the wrong thing. I might do some right things for a while but eventually I will screwup and they will realise that I am not worth the time and effort.

25. I am damaged forever because of the rape.

I am damaged forever. Sometimes the rest of the sentence is “because I am just a fundamentally useless human being” and sometimes it is “because of the abuse.” It probably depends on how my general mood is. If I’m just feeling really, really down on myself it will be the former. I do think this is a less of the time thing than the latter ending, that I am and will be damaged forever because of the abuse and the behaviour/adaptations/coping mechanisms I have developed as a result of it. I do think it’s relevant that part of why I sometimes think or fear that I will be damaged forever is because thus far, every attempt I have made to engage with mental health professionals so that I might learn not to be “damaged” forever has always been a failure because they always seem to tell me that I don’t actually have the problem that I am telling them I have. That if I can identify that it is a problem then fixing it is as simple as just deciding to not have that problem. Whereas for my part, if it was that simple then I wouldn’t be seeking them out in the first place. As a result, it has reinforced the ideas that I’m just a not-right, flawed, broken person and I will probably always be that way.

I am, for the most part, not “stuck” in this point at the moment. There are moments of doubt but I am mostly able to push them away and tell myself that things are different now and I am finally working with someone who knows the right way to manage the things that I am dealing with. I don’t think I’ll necessarily be the most zen, chill, go-with-the-flow mentally healthy person on the planet following this treatment but I can see, finally, hope that I can learn to not be always burdened by this. Some of that has already started, some ways of looking at things and even simple reminders to myself. Intrinsic value. I have been repeating it to myself and reminding myself that it applies to everyone, even me. Even with flaws. And just existing is not a flaw.

28. I deserve to have bad things happen to me.

It’s more of “I don’t deserve good things to happen to me” than I deserve bad things to happen. Which is now an interesting thought to me because it suggests that somewhere deep inside my mind I do (and have) held onto the belief in my own intrinsic value, because if I didn’t then I don’t think I would believe that I don’t deserve bad things. Somehow having that realisation makes me feel a little better, and like there is a little bit less distance to go before I can truly break free of this stuck point and natively believe it rather than just having to tell myself it.

When I think about what “good things” are, it is very varied, it ranges from something as significant as my husband loving me to things as mundane as buying a tube of paint that I like the look of. In terms of whether or not I deserve for Daniel to love me, a lot of the time I am telling myself that at the moment he does, so even if I can’t understand why, just go with it and make the most of it for as long as it is going to take for him to realise that he’s misjudged. But actually.. even that is contradictory because at other times I reassure myself by reminding myself that even if I don’t feel like I am worth anything, he (and other people) do, and I trust their judgement even if I don’t trust my own. For the paint, or any other material type stuff, I don’t think all of this comes from inside me, some of it is fairly obviously the influence of a society that tells us our worth is directly linked to the ability we have to generate income, and if you are limited in that then you do not deserve to have nice things, ever – the “avocado toast” premise. This all borders into some societal issues that are much bigger than just me, and I know that they affect millions of other people too. When I think rationally about this it is easier to see that it isn’t true because there are so many other people pointing it out, both people in situations like me/us and people who are more fiscally fortunate. I can believe that I don’t know what I am talking/thinking about but it’s a lot less easy to believe that all of these people are also sharing the same delusion.

—

To try to sum all of these partial related pieces into a grand unified stuck point:

If I try hard enough, I can manage to never do anything that will cause someone I care about to see me in a negative light and that will prevent the possibility of them ceasing to love me or wanting to be around me.

stuck

all in

jade, , , , 837 wordsLeave a comment

I’m really scared

but I don’t want to be

and I was trying to just hold on and hope that this would stabilise after a bit, after the dose reduction on Sunday

but I don’t think I can
it is clear that I have passed some kind of threshold in the medication and I am not handling this

and it’s terrifying to me to admit this to you all because the overwhelming dread in me tells me not to because you will think I’m .. pick any negative word really, and that works.

there is still a little bit of rational mind in there that tells me that’s not right and I need to try to trust you all to help me and not be disgusted by me. well. I hope this is the rational part, and not the other part.

so I’m doing the opposite to what feels like the smart thing to do and telling you and asking you to please help me and please be patient with me and please not let me lose myself to this darkness

because I don’t think there’s an immediate fix. I am obviously feeling this way because I have been decreasing the amount of Efexor over the last 3 months in the hope I will learn to sleep again, and I have reached a tipping point in the depression side of it where I can tell that I actually need the drugs to balance some shit in my brain so that I can actually experience life the way I want to. but I can’t just start taking the Efexor again and be fine, because the lack of proper sleep was .. well, is.. also really fucking me up. and I haven’t felt any improvement in my sleep quality, so the Efexor needs to keep decreasing.

but I have other fears too. what if I get all the way to zero on Efexor and I still can’t sleep properly. what if that ends up being another incorrect theory and all of this was for nothing.

what if I try other medicines and they don’t work or they have side effects? I know you can’t always avoid side effects but I just need to find some that I can live with and tolerate. and even if I do try other medicines they don’t usually work immediately. maybe I will be a little better off in that regard because I do have the Efexor still and that is already doing part of the job and something else can just pick up the slack and slowly build to doing the whole job as I continue to decrease the Efexor.

I don’t want to keep living like this and I am doing this to try to be better. more clear minded. more energetic. maybe even less pain. I don’t know if I am doing the right things or if I am just going to make more problems. I thought I was doing the right thing taking this medicine for so long like they told me to do. it scares me a little bit that I don’t think anyone actually really knows “the right thing” because I don’t think there is one single right thing and even the doctors are just giving their best guesses.

but I am trying to do something and I hope that me trying is enough and that if I fall further into this darkness you will help me keep trying until something makes a difference. it’s really scary to acknowledge that I need to change things and try something new and to know that things might get worse before they get better and know that means I need to trust the people I love to keep me moving forward when the overwhelming feeling inside me tells me that I am not worthy of you all and the much safer thing would be to try to pretend I am fine and not give anyone reason to doubt me or get frustrated with me. it tells me that by doing this I am just giving you the reasons you need to see that I’m a waste of time.

that feeling is so loud and overwhelming right now. I can only push it away for short bursts.

and i’m just really fucking tired of always having to push it away and so I’m saying to that depression and disease.. fine. prove it. either way, it will be proved right and I won’t need to bother trying to counter it all the time or the sliver of hope in here that keeps trying to tell me it’s wrong will be proven right.

but I’m tired of fighting and tired of being scared and just begging you please to tell me that it is worth it. I am worth it? I need you to tell me you believe in me and want me to keep trying and push through and get better because you want me and need me. because Ive run out of believe in myself at the moment.

all in

hah, suck it

jade, 1452 wordsLeave a comment

That’s what Daniel said to tell the voice. The one that keeps trying to make me doubt myself. Isn’t it kind if interesting, in a psychology type of way, how it is always about doubting my value to him, my worthiness of him, my competence as a wife and mother. It’s never “does he really love me?” but more like “why does he love you when you are obviously rubbish? what have you done to make him think that you are not?” Sometimes it is more like.. “one day he will realise that you are not actually any good and will find someone who really does have all of the qualities he thinks you have.”

As ridiculous as saying “hah, suck it” to this inner part of myself is, I have actually been trying to do it. The levity of the words actually kind of helps, as well as of course the deeper meaning of what he was actually saying when he began with that. It’s almost a kind of… hmmm, juvenile comeback and the incongruity of that to the heaviness of those thoughts and feelings is great enough that it helps to break the hold.

I think I have probably specified before, but I’m not certain, so.. there is no actual voice that exists as an entity that I perceive as separate to myself. It is a hard concept to translate into words. Although I have an inner voice (and mind’s eye), I am aware that not all of my thinking happens on a verbal level. Some things seem to exist also as a kind of hybrid of a thought and a feeling, or they are thoughts that have such intense attached feelings so as to be essentially inseparable for the purposes of trying to describe and define them. Generally, I think that you don’t really consider where your thoughts come from when they make their way from the subconscious part of your mind into the conscious part. I don’t always. But when I do, I can tell the difference between thoughts that have come from the part of my mind that is entirely me, versus the part of my mind that exists in a permanently brainwashed state of self-doubt, self-hate, self-loathing. If this was a physical wound it would be a scar, a large, rough, discoloured and unsightly one that frequently pulses with pain despite the original thing that caused the injury being long gone, because the nerves and tissues are damaged. So when I talk about ‘the voice,’ this is what I mean. If I don’t pay close attention, it sounds and feels enough like my own natural, unadulterated self that it is essentially indistinguishable. Only when I take the time to consider the detail and content of these thoughts and feelings that come to the surface via the medium of my inner voice can I tell that some of them come from something else, some part of my mind that isn’t working properly and isn’t genuinely reflective of me.

The hard part of that is that it is really exhausting all the time to have to question if my thoughts and feelings can be trusted, and if the answer is no, to try to convince the rest of my mind that even though they look and feel native in so many ways, these are very much actually an invasive species and should not be given any room to grow. I devote so much mental energy and bandwidth to trying to stop the invasive thoughts from taking over, and sometimes I wonder what else I could be achieving with my mind and thoughts if I was not using so much of my capacity to do that.

Those can be dangerous thoughts to have, too, though. Like what could I be doing, what would our situation be if I didn’t have fibromyalgia and hadn’t lost so much ability to be productive? What if I hadn’t spent the last fuck-knows how many years slowly losing my ability to sleep – would I ever even have been diagnosed with fibro? Would it have been as hard as it is to manage the thoughts and feelings? It’s an interesting thought experiment but it is both too tempting to consider that I could have been “completely fine” and too difficult to imagine what that actually would have looked like. Despite the limitations that these states have necessitated that I live with, I have tried to carry on like they weren’t there and sometimes probably to my own detriment. So I don’t know that I would have actually done that much more, I just would be a lot less decrepit for it.

Something that often seemed odd to me was that if I forgot to have my medicine for some reason, the next day I would be fully unable to stay awake. Like, falling asleep with a cup halfway to my mouth kind of absolute inability to do stuff. Even worse than what I ended up like the last few months where I frequently fall asleep, just never literally in the middle of having a drink. And this did not make sense because when I first started taking Efexor, it made me drowsy like that within an hour or two of having it, which is why I switched from having it in the morning, as is usually recommended, to having it at night instead. So I didn’t understand how a drug that made me sleepy could also make me sleepy by it’s absence.

I think I have a kind of theory about that now. On Sunday, I made the second dose reduction in my initial phase of this plan to improve my sleep. For four weeks I was taking 262.5mg a day, and now I have begun four weeks that will be at 225mg. Then there will be a 187.5mg period before going to 150mg. At that stage I want to assess how things are going both mentally and sleep-ishly before I decide how to proceed further. Over the last month I haven’t really noticed any lessening of the day time sleepiness, but I also haven’t had any of the incredibly unpleasant side-effects of SNRI dose-reduction, which is a big positive. I have noticed a difference between the days where I’ve had some valium before bed and the ones where I haven’t. Even though I’m only doing that at the weekend, the effects on my day time state last a day or two longer – it is usually Tuesday or Wednesday before I am struggling markedly more with staying awake. Yesterday and today, though, there has been a small but noticeable difference in how sleepy I am, which I wasn’t really expecting. But that brings me back to my theory. So for whatever reason I had a side-effect of essentially immediate onset sleepiness when taking the medicine. And over time, it’s also had a more subtle side-effect of cumulatively interrupting my ability to go to Stage 3 and REM sleep phases up until I got to this point where I was like, come on there’s seriously something wrong. I think the reason why I feel such overwhelming sleepiness when I have missed a dose or even the subtly increased sleepiness yesterday and today when I’ve had just a little bit less of the drug is that something in my body and/or brain is recognising that the substance that stops it from reaching those stages of sleep is absent/reduced and the response is, well then, let’s go to fucking sleep finally! Because the lack of those types of sleep have become such a dire need that it’s almost like my body is constantly attempting to begin that process instead of just restricting it to night time like a person with a normal circadian cycle and undamaged sleep ability would do.

That makes me a bit mad about all of the times when I was fucking exhausted and even had a headache or something and I forced myself to not have a nap, because all of the doctors told me that if I napped in the day time it would just make it that much harder to sleep at night. Yeah, maybe if those naps ever had the potential to provide me with sleep of adequate quality and quantity, they might interrupt me sleeping at night, but they never fucking did. So in denying myself those, I felt shit physically, I felt shit emotionally and mentally because I felt guilty about wanting a nap I was being told I shouldn’t have, and I was even in small ways contributing to the worsening of this problem by exacerbating the sleep deprivation when I didn’t have to.

hah, suck it

thursday

jade, , , , , 759 wordsLeave a comment

i learned some new words a few days ago. it seems there actually is a term to describe the feeling of not really wanting to keep living but not necessarily wanting to be dead. it’s called “passive suicidal ideation.” as opposed to active, where you, you know.. want to kill yourself.

the thing about it is.. what appeals is not the state of being dead. the fantasy is about the state of not being in pain, not having to struggle so much, not feeling like a burden, not feeling pathetically weak, not feeling like you are failing at something that is supposed to be easy. not hating yourself. not waking up in the morning (or the middle of the night) and wondering how you will get through the day.

i’m struggling with this a lot right now. apparently the doctor i spent several months seeing and trying all those treatments with is not good enough for the purposes of confirming that i have a condition that makes my life miserable and painful. it has to be a specialist. like a rheumatologist. who declined the referral i had because they didn’t think there was any additional useful treatment to offer me. i don’t know how it is even possible for doctors in the public health system to refuse to see you. like, if you’re getting referred to them and willing to wait however long it takes to see the, it’s not for fun. it’s because it’s the only option you have.

i know that they want me to give up and that this is how they convince themselves that people are asking for the dsp when they don’t really need it.. by making it so fucking difficult and kicking you so many times that you simply don’t have the energy or money to keep trying. knowing that doesn’t really help, though, does it? the requirements for evidence are designed in such a way that it’s almost impossible to meet them. because it has to be all about how it impacts you in your everyday life. so you explain that to them. how you sit down to put washing in the washing machine. how you take breaks every 5 to 10 minutes to stop your body from protesting at the being in one position for too long. how some days it hurts to move the bar of soap across your arms and legs in the shower. how some days it even fucking hurts to fuck. oh.. but none of that is relevant. because that information has not come from a suitably qualified medical professional. but how can a medical professional tell them about the ways that it impacts my life when they are not the ones living my life? literally all they can do is repeat exactly what i tell them.

lots of times i just feel nauseous. i don’t know how to find my way out of this darkness, i feel the weight of it every time i make a mistake or forget something or do the wrong thing because i am so fucking tired. i ask the kids a question and i know that i asked it and that they answered but the answer just disappears from my brain and i need to ask it again. and that annoys them. i start to feel like i am having a good day and getting things done in a reasonably ok way and then i realise that i’ve just completely forgotten something else that was important. and all of the other things go to shit. because i used to be able to manage everything and keep track of everything i had to and it was effortless.

and when there is a piece of paper sitting on my desk saying that “we have decided that that you are not eligible to receive the disability support pension,” what it also says to me is that you are a fraud and you are weak and you should be able to cope with the shit you claim is wrong with you because anyone else could. and i wonder: am i weak? am i not trying enough? and if i’m not, where on earth can i possibly find the energy to try harder? i am already pushing myself to being so exhausted that if i sit and let my mind relax for a few minutes i am falling asleep. i am already doing things despite them causing me pain. and if this isn’t good enough and i should be doing more.. then where does that more come from?

thursday

not thinking

jade, , , , , 980 wordsLeave a comment

It is kind of like when you are trying to go to sleep it becomes really hard or even impossible to actually go to sleep. Trying to not think about something is an incredibly difficult task. Luckily I have somewhat figured the trick is to come up with other things to occupy my mind and focus on those rather than trying to not focus on all the things that make me feel weak, pathetic, panicked, picked on and terrified.

It’s really fucking hard right now. We have been struggling, just keeping up for a long time. And that is part of the reason we decided to apply for the DSP again. Because it’s not my choice to live like this. To hold the windowsill for support to get up out of my bed. To stand first thing in the morning making lunch for Daniel and feel pain with every thing I reach or bend to get, each step I take across the kitchen. To stop to talk to him for a moment while he is in the bathroom getting ready and have all the muscles in my torso suddenly spasm, causing me to grab at the door frame to stop myself from falling.

And yet.

It’s 8 or 9 months since we started the application and every time I am doing something and feel exhausted or feel pain I hear the words in my head that it said on the first letter we got from them: “there is insufficient evidence that this is impacting you in a serious way.” And it makes you hate yourself and doubt yourself and feel so weak. Because when you’re at what feels like rock bottom and you beg for some fucking help and instead of compassion they say, “but are you REALLY? Please prove that you really do deserve some help and show that you have done everything possible to try to not need the help.. and then we will think about it.” How can you not start to feel like the problem is you? When a certain state of being becomes normal and constant for you it takes active effort to keep reminding yourself that it’s NOT actually normal for people to have to do the dishes in ten separate small batches because it starts to hurt if you stand there too long. It’s not actually normal for people to vacuum half a room and then need to sit for a bit because of the shooting pains in your hips and legs. It’s not actually normal for people’s backs to start to burn with cold, prickling pain when trying to fold up clean clothes. But knowing all that and having provided all of that information and having supporting letters and stuff from the doctors listing all of the things you tried taking to try and making it better – some of which literally made you gag to try to swallow – and waiting all this time with no response. Maybe it is me. Maybe I don’t deserve help or compassion. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.

But I don’t know where to find the energy to try any harder. I already push myself so hard, push to exhaustion and push to make myself do things even though I know it will hurt and push to not let the tears come when I feel so, so tired and sore and there is still more to do.

Just to keep things interesting, since Stephanie completed year 12 our Family Tax Benefit was reduced by $263 a fortnight. Obviously we missed the memo that the government is privy to about how to make kids become free to feed and clothe and educate once they finish high school. Oh, but wait.. she applied for Youth Allowance as a student and that told her that she’d be assessed according to her parent’s income because she is under 18 and people are considered to be dependent on their parents until they are 22. Such logic. And in the meantime we are trying to figure out how to spend $530 less each month when we were already having trouble managing everything.

How do you not feel guilty about the glaring reality that you are the one who is not making a financial contribution to the family – in fact your inability to do things actually COSTS more money – and not start to believe that you are a burden and you are a terrible wife and terrible mother. Because if you were stronger and better at pushing through the pain you’d just suck it up and get a job.

Except the thing is, I know what happens when I push past what I can handle. For several days I am in blinding, nauseating pain and I can’t even take anything for it because the only medicine I have that makes even a little difference means I cannot drive or even think clearly sometimes and people need taking to school and appointments and if I stay resting and not moving for the rest of the time I can just about manage the half hour or hour it takes to do those things that must be done and get back home before I am hot and I am cold and I am sweating and I am trembling and I feel like I really might actually vomit and I need to get back to my bed so that I can let go of the huge force of mental effort that is needed to keep my mind focused and present when all it wants to do is just let go.

It is quite possible that I shouldn’t be doing things when I am that bad, but if I don’t do it, who else is going to? Where is the sweet spot between not neglecting your children’s needs and not doing things that are potentially dangerous in trying to meet those needs?

not thinking