When Obligation Fails

Since airing my issues and my attempt on my life I've had the luxury of not having to hide my struggles. Now I just give in to it. Do I want to get dressed today? Nah, depressed. Do I want to see my friends today like I planned? Nah, depressed. Do I want to do the washing? Nah, depressed. Do I want to do anything? Nah, depressed. And people just let me for the most part. I'm now permitted to not function.

And it's like a blessing, but not. It's great to be allowed the space I have needed for so long and to be able to let a myriad of responsibilities slide while I "recover". But with the space and forgotten responsibilities I have come to have no reason to function. I have no obligation to be a human, I just exist.

I have largely gone back to the way I was, minus what I refer to as "the obligations". I don't do much but I function and I pass as a normal enough so people worry less.

But I still spend large portions of my time despondent and upset. Panicky and lost. Waiting, hoping and almost planning to die.

Because that's just it, I still think about killing myself. Everything feels hard, things aren't going the way I hoped, like I ever deserved something so good, and I'm just exhausted.

This week I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. I don't know heaps about it but it's just another drama in my endless nightmare. Every stab of pain is an undeserved reminder of how shitty the last decade has been and how it's without a doubt time that ended.

There's little indication that things will get better and I have lost all hope. I've been banging my head against a wall for years, struggling against the tide, nodding at meaningless sentiments as people try to turn my endless uniqueness that has resulted in medical professionals being unable to help me into a positive. And I'm done and quite frankly I am scared.

I'm scared. Horrified of what has been and terrified of what is to come.

I joke about my life and my problems, but I'm done.

I'll do it right this time,

- Sky

Til Death

Wanting to die and actually attempting to kill yourself are two entirely different things.

I've lived my life for many years wanting to die on and off, experiencing bouts of suicidal ideation without ever going so far as doing it. I've decided again and again to die. I've run through plans, I've mentally and then partially physically written notes. But I've never done it. 

Taking your life takes guts, guts I never thought I had. It's a pretty sick reason to live, choosing to do so because you haven't got the will to take your own life. But that's what kept me here. "Protective" factors such as family, boyfriend and friends matter not when you know deep down that it'll never be something that you can do to yourself. Putting blade to skin is reprieve enough.

Until I did do it, or try to anyway.

The hours I devoted to suicidal ideation were incredible. So often panicky and deranged, jumbled and confused. Highly emotional. In the lead up to the act I went through the two lowest days of my life. In all my years of being mentally ill I have never been that sick. I cried and I simply don't do that. I had no will to live, let alone complete a very overdue essay. Instead I resumed googling suicide methods and seeking some kind of reason not to go through with it. I had to go sit outside in an effort to stay my mind.

But I couldn't. And on Wednesday night I just went about swallowing some pills. It was the strangest thing, going through that. I snapped out of my monotone existence and became so very serene. Autopilot was switched on and it was like I just watched myself do this stupid thing in the stupidest possible way. On some level I knew I should stop but I didn't. I had finally snapped. 

Predictably I soon felt very sick and panicky and was informed by poisons information (via Lifeline) that I needed to go to hospital and had to tell my distressed mother to take me to emergency. She was distressed but not entirely surprised. My GP who I had seen that morning had rung her later that day to tell her he was worried. 

The mental health nurse spoke with me for an hour. Advised that I give up every tablet in my room to mum. I cried, made no eye contact. Said I was stupid to use the med I did. Not sorry at all that I did it. The doctor was cold, seemingly displeased. Another one of those is all I was to him.

The reality is that I didn't take enough to kill myself, and I knew it. Of course I knew it. I told them as much too. But I felt sick and panicked. Wanted it to be alright.

But days later I still know that I want to die. I wasn't admitted because I had no immediate plans to try again.

I will though. And I will die. 

- Sky

An Auspicious Occasion

Yesterday I went to see my GP to talk about my depression.

Last night I started taking an anti-depressant.

I don't really have anything to say about it, but I just wanted to mark day one of my recovery.

- Sky

Thinking, Feeling and...

I actually felt better today.

I had been reasonably well over the last couple of months. I did not ever expect it to last, but I certainly submerged myself in it.

Then I got sick again. It came slowly. Getting out of bed got harder than usual, I didn't want to go to uni, I didn't want to go out for fun. Then I got tipsy and the alcohol made me angry and unthinking. I ruined someone else's night, then cried with laughter after an unmeaning joke about jumping in front a train just to ruin everyone's night collectively. They laughed too, but the sobriety post laughing pulled at something deeper and that's when I knew. I had a pseudo disagreement with a friend and through forced laughter joking sat myself down at a seat on my own on the train, glad for the silence and isolation I needed to dam the oncoming flow of tears. And I let my sadness drown me.

Despite having a friend staying with me that night, I felt triggered and I wanted blood. Truthfully, it had been vaguely on my mind for weeks, possibly months. Ever since I abruptly forced myself to end a cycle rather than riding it out to spare someone I care deeply about the horror at its most grotesque, the thought continued to cross my mind. Not enough to urge me, to be a want or a need. Just a thought.

But that night it was a desperate, desperate desire. Despite the presence of a friend I sat on the bathroom floor and tried to help myself in the only way I know how. My favourite/least favourite part of the process is feeling better afterwards. But this time, and for the first time in my life, I only felt shame. I felt genuinely bad about it and I think that was because I knew, and truly knew, for the first time in my life that I would not be able to hide it. And I guess that's the only pitfall for me about being so intimate with someone. It's that I can't hide it and it would hurt him if I tried.

I have been asked, repeatedly, how I feel about my cuts and scars. And mostly I feel nothing. They're just... there. There in the way my pencil case is. Or that book is. Or that pile of clothes on my floor is. Feeling bad about it is foreign and unwelcome but as a week has now gone by in which I have continued to indulge myself, not enough to make me stop. I have to not want it, and right now I do. So not knowing how else to live with myself won out, the guilt/shame/array of awful feelings taking a back seat.

And that is how my week has gone. In seven days I emptied a box of one hundred band aids, last night I added twenty marks. For the whole nine days it has been? I can't even count. It stings and I deserve it. It's ugly and I deserve it. I feel a bit better, maybe I deserve that.

But this morning, after the best sleep I've had in two weeks, I felt better. Not great, but better. Today I actually woke up. It was sunny and warm and nice. I felt serene enough to be able to sit on the box housing every dark thought I have and not acknowledge its presence.

Though unfortunately my reprieve appears to be short lived. There is a solid ache at the base of my spine between my hips, a frustrating reminder that I'll never be healthy. But more so there is an emptiness inside me that I don't feel capable of filling.

I guess I'll leave you with that

- Sky

Is my eating disordered?

Train Ride Musings

It's funny coming home drunk, riding the train in an empty carriage. The world around you rocks but nothing in the carriage moves at all. And you can imagine hanging yourself from the loops designed to anchor people to life.

It's funny coming home drunk unscathed after a night with friends. You should be whole but pieces of you have gone missing and suddenly you notice. And to balance them out you take deep, bloody pieces from yourself and use band aids to stop the damage hitting the floor while others use them to heal.

It's funny coming home drunk and listening to music in the night. The song is upbeat but somehow the chords strike the blackest parts of your heart. And you believe no one will notice if you sleep away while everyone else sleeps.

It's funny coming home drunk and realising the damage the you keep.

I hate this blog because it reminds me of what a shitty, whiny, undeserving person I am.

The problem with a blog (even if you're the only one reading it) is that there's this unspoken rule about the writing needing to be fluent and cohesive. Which is why I post infrequently. Because my experiences, thoughts and feelings relating to my own suffering are becoming increasingly fragmented and difficult to relay. And I hate reading back over things that don't flow.

If you've seen or spoken to me lately you might note that things are not going well. If you've been on other blog forums that I use you will have noted that even more. When the sad spell that wouldn't come eventually came it came with suicidal force and it seems it has come to stay. It's funny I guess, because to contrast how this year is going with how last year went - I don't think I was quite so bad. The huge thing that sticks to me was the constant state of anger and aggression due to sleep deprivation. I'm still experiencing bouts of frustration, but mostly I'm leaning towards the pointlessness of this entire exercise that I am putting myself through; and I guess that exercise is life.

I suppose it's difficult because you get one shot at life. And I find myself of the opinion that it is entirely wasted on me. I take at least an hour to get out of bed most days and then I drag my feet through the entire day and hope it somehow won't get worse. I'm not using my life for anything, just following the flock. I'm meandering aimlessly about vaguely hoping something will go right or something will happen and I'll find the direction I'm supposed to go in. But these things aren't happening. And I think about suicide a lot. 

I don't know that I'd go through with it, but I certainly have a plan. A plan I've had for awhile. A lovely little plan B, if you like. But instead of engaging plan B I've leant heavily on my old cop out of self harming and that's a dangerous little game in itself. It's not a constant every day thing but it's happening more often than it's not at the moment. Towards the end of last year I said to myself 'this will not happen again'. And I went about fading my scars so I could wear shorts etc and I felt good for awhile and I thought I might have been happy. But there are scores of new marks over those faded ones now, and it's exactly like looking at a semi-permanent reminder of how much I suck and how little resolve I have and that things are not going to get better because I don't deserve it and no one really seems to want me anyway because I'm actually a really shitty person and no one likes to hang around with cynical, pessimistic depressed people. They're exhausting, I know. But I don't have the luxury of escaping myself.

I think that there's definitely a causal relationship between uni and how utterly awful I feel. I enjoy a really minute part of it and in a way the struggle to make friends and even some of the coursework itself has been triggering in that it reinforces my overall inadequacy. I walked out of a tutorial faster than anyone could get out of their seats yesterday because I mentally could not handle it, I could not hold it together anymore. And on the drive home I just thought that this was it. That I was going to go home and do myself some serious harm and maybe leave. I was wild, I was unhinged and I think in that moment I truly understood just how someone could take their own life. 

So it's lucky that a friend who seems to have a sixth sense intervened. I had pizza and watched a movie with her last night instead of letting go. 

To finish, I think that I should at least try to affirm myself for not being an unmotivated, life-failing piece of shit some of that time after all that. Because I finally did it, I finally lost all 15kg I put on during the roaccutane course. And further to that I have maintained my goal weight for more more than a month. I am healthier, my body (bar that piece of shit knee injury I'm still somehow carrying) is stronger and though I am far from happy with my appearance at this stage (that and my relationship with food) I can look at myself sometimes and see that I'm on my way to something better. Slowly.

In the centre of this eternally dark cave, there's a tiny light. I just have to make the extraordinarily difficult decision to pursue it. And I'm worried that I won't. 

- Sky

The Sad Spell

I'm so glad that it's Wednesday night. Thursday morning is going to dawn and I don't have to be awake before 11am. 

The last five and a half weeks have seen me sleep deprived and angry because of it. It's been interesting to see that it was the sleep deprivation all along that made me angry and not my old job. Any vented frustrations or problems I seemed to be having their could almost certainly be attributed to my state of sleep deprivation. I'm seeing nearly the exact same patterns - to the less extreme - here. Uni has been interesting and I think I'm handling it okay at the same time that I am not handling it all. I'm not wholly convinced I like it and I feel like I don't fit in. Things I worry less about include the impending death of a relative doing his last battle with late stage pancreatic cancer and the tenuous family situation that seems to be forever ongoing. Sometimes I feel like my emotional priorities are a little backwards. Particularly when presiding even over my uni concerns (my most common reason for being near tears) is my ongoing obsession with my weight and the continuing warped perceptions I have of my body.

I've skirted around the edges of this depressive spell for weeks. I waited for it to come for a long time, but the mandatory time for being more severely depressed (comparative to the remainder of time) came and went and I didn't for a moment think it wouldn't come but I'm still a little rocked all the same. I think it was held off so long by a sudden improvement in the condition of my knee (very short lived) that led to an increase in exercise that made me fly. But with the regression of condition came with it the depressive state and instead of being just angry, as I am want to do, I find myself genuinely sad. 

I always get a little scared when I have these sad spells. They're more difficult than being low and quite a lot more aggressive than usual. Usually when they come around they hang around and end in a complete disruption to my life. I've never felt more alone in a place as big as my university then I have this week. I just feel lost and this great need to cry the many tears that always threaten but never come. It is clear to me that I need to sleep a lot more than I do but in order to balance my life in other ways that has become impossible.

So all I can really do now is wait for this to pass. And it will. As always I just have to remind myself of that fact.

Isolation and Jealousy and just generally being pathetic

I think that over the last day really, I have realised for the first time just how isolated I am becoming.

In many ways I feel like I'm stuck between two world's and I'm not sure which way to go. The result has been this growing isolation.

I am a lazy friend. The worst kind of friend. I very rarely seek people out. This is due in part to my not wanting to bother people/inflict my company upon them and that I just think they don't want to talk to me anyway. And really, who does want to talk to me? If I had a choice, I wouldn't be talking to me. The way I view myself is so negative that I frequently wonder why some people do occasionally pursue my company.

So I'm not surprised at all to be slipping out of contact. I don't give anyone any reason to think I'm of any value.

But the event that brought all this on I guess... well it's really dumb. It is. It's just a simple and small event that's resulted in a bit of jealousy that's snowballed because I'm entering the depressive episode period of the cycle. When I was out last night, I met a guy and yeah, I think I'm a bit keen on him. And not even in that way where I just wanted to have sex with him to be honest. We'd been chatting and he knew all about me (which really caught me off guard actually; racing is a funny industry like that...) and he remembered beating one of my favourite horses in a race back in January 2012. We did end up hooking up, but I was ultimately shafted for one of my best friends. And yeah, it's a bit wounding. Has caused some jealousy. Made me reconsider everything. And it's ultimately just pathetic, and I hate and ridicule myself a lot as a result.

But it did make me wonder if I would ever be 'enough' or wanted. Perhaps these are normal fears, things you can talk about with your friends. But when I thought I might want to talk about it, not one person came to mind.

But I did this to myself.

- Sky

I'm not sure where this leaves me

The only thing that's changed in the past few days has been the violence and volume of the voice in my head as it drops pushing my psycho weight issues and starts forcing me to see that I'm not needed, nor wanted and that even I don't want to stay anymore. Not really.

- Sky

Do I posses humanity at all?

I thought for awhile that I wouldn't end up here again. But there's nothing comparable to the comfort of a blog that has held your demented thoughts through some of the worst times of your life.

I've been reflecting a lot lately on the kind of person I've become. I think that most people are somewhat unhappy with some aspect of themselves, but I very rarely find a moment where I am happy. A lot has happened to me recently and through all my life. And these experiences, good (it happens, rarely, but it happens) and bad, have created who I am. With all the catastrophes that follow me around I suppose it's not a great surprise that I'm a difficult person. I go through long bouts of emotional unreachability, even with people who know me well. This makes me difficult to get to know when I shut you out at every possible angle. This is such an ingrained personality flaw that I don't even notice I'm doing it anymore. Someone who get especially annoyed at me for being like this pointed it out and I found myself actually surprised to hear that that's what I had been doing. While it's a handy defence at times, I'm not sure I like it. I think that that being like this shows on the outside to some degree. I'm standoffish, rude, I don't think. Everything about me is repellent. Part of me does want to be a much softer person, but that part is shouted down by the greater part that knows the consequences of being soft are not worth it.

People learn from pain.

I'm also afraid that I process and feel emotions wrong at times, that is if I feel them at all. I think that I feel most things okay, or 'normally', but sometimes something is off. Or I believe that I'm not feeling something as I should. What I'm unsure about is whether I'm incapable (as a result of my mental illness) or my subconscious is deliberately repressing the emotions and coinciding reactions. There are a bunch of minor incidences that make me wary of this aspect of self, but there are two that stand out. Firstly, my brother. I can't recall how much dwelling I've done on him on this blog, but at this stage the relationship has frayed to absolute hostility on my behalf. I can't make myself be nice to him in greeting or action. No one else in my family has this trouble with him - despite that he almost certainly deserves it - but I just cannot conjure any other emotional reaction. I don't get properly angry anymore, I just regard him with absolute hostility. I'm finding my inability to use text to explore in this instance debilitating and annoying, because there's a lot I want to say here but can't. Fundamentally though, I have this nagging thing that something in me is broken. The second instance involves Mum's uncle who was recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He will die. Not now, but within the next year. I'm watching my whole extended family start to feel this and get torn up by it and I've known for two weeks now and there's not been a single feeling. Not one emotion. Am I heartless? Am I broken? Am I just not as human as everyone else? Being unable to process and feel emotion as I suppose most people do is isolating. It makes me feel completely alone.

People communication through emotion.

I also fear that I've been using my emotional deadening for the wrong things. Losing my virginity has opened up an entirely new forum for risk taking, I'm not going to lie. And engaging in it has the potential to satiate the sex drive, boost my self esteem and reduce my need to take other risks. Because I feel so little and feel so greatly disinterested in many people it is so easy to go home with a boy and then walk away. Free. The ghost I should have been in the lives of those who do know me. This behaviour is more than helped by my tendency to excessively binge drink. Another of my favourite games of risk. It is at this point that I'm wondering whether I'm using risk to feel alive.

Living and risk taking are not one and the same.

I really am very unhappy with the person I've grown up to become. But changing myself is one of many changes where I can't predict an outcome (not that my life has been predictable in any way). In a way it's like I've gone into survival mode and have adapted to suit. My mind intends to stay the course as wholly as it can, and this is the price I'm paying. My continuing inability to express myself the way I intend is infuriating... Does it show my confusion?

My next move is so undecided it burns me,
- Sky