I can’t quite contain or explain…

My evil ways. Or explain why I’m not sane. All I can say is this is your warning. Duality. 

Speaking of warning. I should warn everyone when I am going to disappear for a while, but it is not always planned. Sometimes I just have no desire to talk about what is in my head. It’s not you. It’s me.  I’ve had more swings, up and down.  Duality. Appropriate. I’m almost a completely different person when I’m at each end of the spectrum. Or at least I feel that way.  I keep getting told that people don’t like me when I am on a down swing. No shit. I don’t like me when I am on a down swing.  I want to be peppy all of the time. I WANT to be able to be happy, or bubbly, or bouncy, or just otherwise wonderful to be around. I WANT to be one of those people. But I’m not. I’m just me.

No, can’t count the list of things I know are wrong with me. No need to just keep fighting. No, I’ll never take the blame… So I’ll just take the blame, I’ll never stop.

I have a chemically different brain than the average human being, and I react differently to most situations. There are things that do not bother me in the slightest that should affect me greatly. There are other things that should not bother me so much that are almost devastating. In general, death of humans does not bother me. I can’t explain why. That’s just not normal. Animals rip me to shreds. That’s the way you’re supposed to react. But humans? Nah. Maybe that’s because animals are innocent, while humans aren’t. Maybe we were at the spawning, freshly expelled from the womb, but almost instantaneously the negative influences begin. I just fight to care.

I am good, I am evil. I am solace, I am chaos. I am human, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.

I want to be chemically balanced. I want to be emotionally stable. I want to be able to focus on things and see the good instead of the inherent evil. I see people, and I see the things wrong with them. I see their twisted, warped, and conniving intentions. Are they real? Probably not.  But that’s what I see. I know I’m biased against humanity. We’re destroying ourselves at an alarming rate, we’re killing each other, and we just don’t care. I hate it. It makes me wonder why I care about being so fucked up. It makes me wonder if part of the reason I react to everything so strongly is because I’m NOT broken, but that everyone else is. I sometimes think that the reason that I’m so emotionally overcharged is because no one else is.

I have an impression, in the back of my mind, for the black in my tie contains our dirty thoughts. Make me an obsession, when you lock me inside for the ride of your life unleashed. Gonna get it off.

I’m not sleeping again. My doctor changed my meds again. She told me to take diphenhydramine to sleep. Do we know what that is, class? Benadryl. I am amused. Highly even. But hey, in theory it works. Just… as long as I don’t take too much and go into a Benadryl coma and sleep for 14 or so hours. Waking up with a Benadryl hangover is NOT pleasant. But if it works, I guess we’ll do it. The alternatives are medicines that I REALLY am not keen on taking. And hey, if I can sleep, I can avoid the real world, right?

Nothing in the cage…

Of my ribcage. Got no heart to break, like it that way.  Nothing in the cage of my ribcage.  Emptiness is safe, keep it that way. 

I often wonder why I bother getting out of bed, when all I can do is make people angry or hurt.  I get excitable and distracted and forget what I was doing, or to say or do things I was supposed to.  It gets me in trouble. It gets others mad at me. Which makes me feel worthless.  Do they make me feel worthless?  Not specifically, usually, just I do.  When I make people angry or upset them it all becomes a reflection on myself.  If I was a better human I would not cause this reaction or end result.  I think about these things as I try to convince myself that it is a good idea to wake up every day.  Nights like this make it very difficult to want to do so.  One of my doctors warned me that I would probably do really well on my meds, until things started going bad and then I would slack off and stop taking them.  I am still taking them, just not on time and every night.  I DO take my day chalk, though.  Maybe that is why my brain is overworking right now.  More so than it has been.

Used to be, I had a light, I had a fire in my chest.  Oh, but now I’m all out, and I’ve got nothing left.

One of the things I have never been good at was knowing whether or not people are actually my friends or just using me.  But because of the way things have turned out the past few years, I have become so jaded that I always see the worst out of everyone and every thing. Show me that I can trust you, please.  Tonight I ended up angering one person by getting distracted talking to another.  It really makes no difference how I feel about it.  Remorse and apologies matter not.  I know that I get distracted easily, and I know it is no excuse. I apologized. It is, unfortunately, the best I can do.  It is not as though I can go back in time and fix my errors.  If I could, there are a lot of things I would change. Hell, read through my posts. If you find nothing you think I would change, I just scratch my head in your direction.

Nothing left, now I’m feeling numb. And just like you, I couldn’t love someone.  There is no one I can belong to.

When I got distracted talking to the one friend, it was actually bragging about the person I upset. I understand and accept my fuck up. It is one more in a long list of things I think about every night that I have done to screw everything up. (Ask me again why I have trouble sleeping, please?)  I get it. He is angry. Furious. Hurt.  I am hurt too, but for a different reason.  Other than the fact that it hurts and angers me when I hurt others, I got a cruel lashback tonight that just… I clenched my jaw and my eyes glazed and burned. They lost focus, letting the blur take over. My lip trembled and I shivered and started to feel icy.  That is generally how I respond to betrayal. He told me that that friend really gives zero shits about me, or even really like me.  He made sure to outline all of the ways he was told and shown this tonight.

On the path, never leaving home.  Cut it out from my flesh and bone. And I feel like I can’t see anything. 

Everyone gets angry and upset. I am absolutely the poster child for this.  I get angrier when manic than when depressed. I lash out. We all do. But tonight… Tonight was cruel. Tonight was painful, and twisting. Tonight leaves me feeling like I should disappear. No one wants me around. Neither of them really gives a shit, one of which I already held at arms length–because I already knew we were friends of a mutual benefit. We play a game together, not real life friends.  Disappointing that he really does not like me much, but not too surprising.  Most people really are not big fans of me, either.  The other, just was so cruel, it made my arms itch. I just want to scratch it. I want to scratch it hard and deep.  Cruelty from people in general, I understand. Humans are a savage, petty species. We are a horrible invention.  But cruelty from those I care about, baffles me.  I think I must exclude them from humanity. I must expect that they are more human than humans? Is that even the way to word it, I don’t know.

Take you out, never bring you back again.  Back again.  Back again.  Can’t recall how we lost our innocence.  Innocence. Innocence.

When do I give up and just let go?  Not of specifics, but of everything? When do I stop fighting? When do I stop saying, “Not today.” And just start saying, “Ok.”

Don’t want to let you down, but I am Hell-bound

I don’t even believe in a “Hell,” by the way.  Just throwing that out there.

Things have been going surprisingly well for me lately.  Did you ever notice, that when things are easier, it’s harder to blog?  Okay, maybe it’s just me.

I suppose it’s because my meds are working well, and I’ve been mostly conflict-free as of late.  Though it seems my OCD is being a feisty bitch again.  That said, I didn’t wash my hair today.  That was HARD.  Though easier than it’s been in the past. I don’t feel like I have bugs under my scalp, today.

I had nightmares all last night. Demons in my nightmares, black eyed possession like in the show Supernatural.  Inner Demons. The irony is not lost on me.

I painted my nails to keep from gnawing at them, and even though it’s chipping some, now, I’ve done a pretty alright job of not picking at it and having to redo it.

My hair is growing out from my bad haircut and it is continuously driving me nuts, (HA!) and it makes me want to cut it short again so it can grow out evenly, but I’m not cutting it. I’m determined to not cut it.

My insomnia is about 80/20. Sometimes my medicine helps me sleep, sometimes it doesn’t.  I guess that helps me advance in video games, the not sleeping thing. But then again, when I DO sleep, I often have nightmares, which are probably related to the guilt and overthinking, so sleep is not my friend.

Overall, I’m doing alright. Much better than when I started all of this.  Now to keep writing on GOOD days, too. I’m so bad at that.

Hey.. Don’t write yourself off yet.

It’s only in your head that you feel left out.. Or looked down on.

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s in my head.  But sometimes it’s really there.  Okay, a lot of the time it’s really there.  No one wants to be around the crazy girl. No one wants to spend time or be friends with the crazy girl.  Don’t worry, I don’t want to be the crazy girl.

And don’t you worry what they tell themselves when you’re away.

HA! That’s one of my biggest anxieties. I always worry what people are saying behind my back. I know they’re talking about me.  Okay, they probably aren’t. But I know they are. I have problems even ordering a pizza because of that.  They’re probably making fun of my voice, or the pizza that I’m ordering, or something something.  I don’t know why it’s easier to order online, but it is. So I do. It’s easier for everything for me to do online, because I don’t have to hear that, “I’m secretly laughing at you, and will ACTUALLY laugh at you when we get off the phone,” in their voice.

It just takes some time. Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride.

Every little thing in life feels like it’s the end of the world.  We can either crash and burn, or fight to float.  Some days, crashing and burning is the only option. Some days, fighting is the only option.  There are days where I refuse to let them win.  I refuse to let the doubts and the anxiety win.  Then there are others that I can’t even slow the downward spiral. But it’s not over yet, eh?  There’s always time to make change, to fight harder. Just things that spiral in my brainpan, anyway.

I mostly disappeared during the holidays.  I do that.  I hate the holidays. They tend to make me miserable.  I’ve actually been doing really well since I cut out half of the meds that my doctor had me on.  I just wish he’d listened to me that they weren’t helping.  I never understood why some doctors don’t actually listen to their patients.  Call me crazy, (HA!) but I know my body better than anyone else.  Most people do.  So I suppose that it makes sense that I’d know how things feel to me better than the doctor would. BUT! The good news is that my insurance is changing, so I won’t have that doctor anymore.  Yay!  Now, here’s hoping the new doctor is good with me staying on this regimen that’s working. We can dream, eh?  I like being fairly normal.  Kind of.

The one downside to being regulated and “normal” is that there are no ups.  There are no highs.  Manic episodes are addictive.  While I’m not a fan of the rage-anger-mania, the happy-hyper-energetic mania is fucking amazing.  I love the feeling of being free, happy, like there is nothing I can’t do.  There is nothing in the world that will bring me to my knees. Even on my meds, I can feel the sway and pull of the tides.  When I feel the lean towards mania, I have this voice that tells me “Just stop taking them. You know you want to be on the high. Stop taking the meds. Just for a little while. It’ll feel so good.”  Oh the temptation… It’s a drug. Which, is ironic, since the “drug” wants me to stop taking my actual drugs to feel the drug?  I love the feeling of wanting sex, not needing to sleep (different from insomnia, mind you), extra inspiring creativity, being completely guilt free, and the general feeling of nothing can go wrong. But, alas, I must be responsible. Because the down crash is fucking horrible. Yet, part of me still says it’s worth it.  But don’t all addicts say that?

Sometimes We Need To Disappear

I totally planned on writing something about how great my week has been going.  Mostly to show that it doesn’t suck ALL of the time.  It really doesn’t.  But. I can’t. I want to. My week has been really awesome. I went to the shore, I walked along the beach. I faced one of my uber-fears, and even walked barefoot IN the water (okay, seriously, 3 inches deep, but still… It’s a start.), and didn’t freak out when I found out I lost my house key somewhere in the sand.

That said. One of our inmates checked herself in today.  Or at least went in for eval, and I haven’t heard from her since.  This bugs me.  Well, this is good news, because she’s had it rough lately, and that means she’s taking the steps she needs.  But it bugs me because I can’t be there. And it bugs me because Right Now, she’s disappeared and I’m not 100% sure what’s going on.  So, hopefully, we’ll figure it out in a few days.

Everyone has different levels of help that they’ll accept, give, take, donate, walk away from, run to, etc. Some, will voluntarily go to the psychiatric hospital when they’re feeling hopeless. Some won’t.  Some will  simply go to the Emergency Department.  Some won’t.  Some will make an appointment with their therapist, or the after hours therapist. Some won’t.  Some call hotlines, or go to AA/NA/etcA meetings. Me? Not so much. I’ll crash and burn but I won’t ask for help. Pride? Stubbornness? Sure. Probably. I can probably come up with a few other choice reasons. Point is, everyone handles life differently, and I’m damn glad I know people who look out for themselves.

Suicide, the End all to Save all?

“Suicide is selfish.”  “Suicide is the easy way out.”  “Suicide is weak.” “Suicide destroys families.”  “They didn’t think of anyone else.”

Ok.  But did you think of them?

Cancer is a disease.  Heart disease is a disease (duh?). Diabetes is a disease. I can list more diseases, but it’s really not something I’d like to do. I’m sure you can as well.  The point is, while someone dying from any of these diseases sucks, it’s inevitable and not really fully preventable.  You can lessen the chance of dying from these diseases, but you can’t fully stop it.  So why is depression different? WHY is depression held to a different standard?  Suicide is someone dying from the disease.  Don’t get me wrong, I still feel abandoned from the suicides of several people I knew. But here’s the kicker… I feel abandoned by people I knew and cared about that died from OTHER diseases. That’s abandonment issues. That’s another flavor of cake on this multi-tiered Wonderland puzzle.

It’s a daily struggle for me not to reach through the computer (or across a table) and strangle someone who tries to compare their little quirks to some of my National Geographics (issues).  These tend to be the same people who, either purposefully, or inadvertently, assume that mental diseases aren’t on par with physical diseases.  Your mom had cancer, so my depression isn’t as deadly as her cancer.  Your dad smokes, so my anxiety doesn’t keep me out of as many bars/restaurants as him.  You have a slight itch on your arm that may have a hive or two.  You take some Benadryl, and scratch it a bit while you wait for it to kick in.  I take some Benadryl and scratch my arm until it actively bleeds well past the point of kicking in.  Then I pick the scab bloody every chance I get, until it finally heals.

So yeah. No. Physical disease is not more important, or deadlier, or more significant than ANY mental disease.  I feel the need to repeat this for no reason other than to beat it into your head.

 Physical disease. Is not. More important. Deadlier. Or more significant. Than ANY. Mental disease.

It’s just different.  Do I think someone killing themselves sucks? Yes. Do I think it’s “taking the easy way out?” Shit no. Getting to that point is making one of the most difficult decisions someone can make. That is the point where the disease wins. The disease kills you. That is when the disease finally kills you. If you can’t understand that, try to think of it this way.  The way that depression works on your emotions, the way your mind thinks and works, it’s almost like a cancer. It eats at you until there is nothing left. You feel that you are nothing.  So suicide is essentially a mental cancer killing you.  Does that work?

Do I think suicides are preventable?  Meh, maybe.  I think in many cases, they’re postpone-able? As for preventable altogether? Sure, if you want to lock someone up, strap them to a bed, and dose them with so much thorazine that they can’t even contain their drool much less spell their own name. Buuuut I wouldn’t recommend it. Cause, cruelty to animals and all that.

And that’s all I have, folks. It’s just how I feel. Does it mean I’m about to go off my rocker and do it? No. It’s just one of those topics in the news lately, hot discussion and stuff. So I figured since it’s been playing over and over in my mind I’d address it.

Also, and this is the most important. My opinions are my own, and do not represent the other bloggers on this site. They may agree or disagree at their own will. We’re each entitled to our own opinions. 

I graduated from group therapy!

I graduated from group therapy!!!

And by graduated, I mean I quit.

It isn’t often that someone pushes me to the brink of snapping in public. As much as I complain that I feel like I’m losing control, I actually have quite a bit of control. I have, after all, been called a control freak.  Alas, today was that day of being pushed just beyond the edge of my limit.  The absolute saddest part of it for me, was that it was rather like a bug hitting your windshield in slow motion: I could see her baiting me, but it was just too late to curb my reaction.  Lesson the first.  I have a temper.  Normally it’s under wraps, tied up in tight bondage straps, chained to the floor of a way-too small cage.  Occasionally it breaks free.  Today it did.  I’m not sorry. I’m not even embarrassed. I’m.. rather amused.

According to the person who poked and prodded the bear, I’m a horrible person.  I suppose that’s what I think and feel on a daily basis anyway, so having that thrown out verbally is interesting. I’m sure she felt an instantaneous rush of pleasure with throwing that thought into my head, along with the knowledge that I have intense ruminating thoughts.  While I don’t doubt that she had at least an inkling, if not a purposeful intent of having me fester on the fact that I’m a horrible person (apparently karma’s her bitch and suckles the teat of her whim), I honestly have to say that I have zero fucks to give.  I wasn’t actually going to write anything about this, except for the fact that I’m truly impressed that I haven’t focused on this since I got home.  I’m over it.  I genuinely could not care any less than I do. Which is AWESOME. Can I have an extra side of THAT to take home with me for next time?  I discussed it with a few people, but it wasn’t a long discussion, just a few quick, “Hey,  here’s this,” and that was it. I am impressed.

The therapist that runs the group is super nice, though it would be nice if she was a little more assertive.  I kind of think her “everyone needs treated with love all the time,” mojo is a bunch of crap.  If you’re a dick, you should get called out on it, but hey, I call myself out on it all the time, so no one else needs to (feel free).  So, because she feels everyone needs to be more lovey, and work through their problems with each other, she thinks it’s a bad idea for me to quit.  I, on the other hand, am a firm believer that if you simply cannot tolerate someone in a civil manner, that it is beneficial to everyone involved (including the rest of the group) if someone removes themselves from the situation.  In this case, I feel it’s best for me to remove myself, I can only tolerate so much fabrication and drama.  Besides, that gives me an extra 2 hours back per week that I can do my work.

So, I guess it’s time to retire that group therapy tag.  Unless someone else needs to use it, because I’m done. Give me my gold star. Insert facetious grin here.

In which group therapy fries my brain.

My therapist runs a therapy group for depressed people. She was pretty adamant that I go.  Fine, fine, fine.  I go.  We learn skills on how to relax, cope, step back, assess, calm, etc.  Amusingly, meditation is one of the things on the list.  Needless to say, it doesn’t work for me.  Most of the “lessons” we learn in there, I can’t actually do.  Sure, I try, but it’s just not possible.  “Clear your mind.” Hahaha. No offense, but go fuck yourself.  “Focus on a color.”  Seriously? No. I think of green, and then I think about which shade of green I’d like, so I think of all of the different shades of green I like, and which ones I dislike, and then I think of why I dislike them, and events that relate to those color greens, and it goes downhill from there.

Ever notice how someone prefaces something offensive with “no offense?”  Yeah, me too.  I do it.  Often it’s because I genuinely say something in jest and mean it to be so.  “Please don’t take offense to this, because I’m seriously joking.”  Though usually, I don’t even bother.  Most of the time I open my mouth it will offend someone.  I’m aware of this.

There is a lady in my group.  I can’t STAND her.  For the first time in a very long time, I’ve found someone that I genuinely would like to throw in front of a bus.  She actually brings out the violent streak in me.  This is the real reason I actually go to group therapy.  No, you silly silly goose. NOT so I have an excuse to beat her with her drama cane.  So I can learn to NOT beat her with her woe-is-me-pity-me-stick.  Everything out of her mouth is, “my life is horrible, you should feel bad for me.”  Followed by, “the world owes me, YOU owe me.” Lady, I don’t owe you shit, everything said is something that starts or ends with “I can’t.”  Ironically, I’d go into more details, but I can’t.  What’s said in group, stays in group and all that crap.

Though I will say one thing.  Two weeks ago she made a comment. I’d made a quip about something and she exclaimed “Oh now we’re seeing the REAL Siobhan!”  I just glanced in her direction and said “Nope, I’ve been here all along.”  She started to argue, and I ignored her for whatever was going on at the time, I think someone else had been talking about one of their experiences.  But here’s what she is too self-absorbed to notice… Who I am doesn’t change.  Who people see doesn’t change. What they notice, does.  I watch. When I’m around people I don’t like, I’m much quieter.  When I’m angry I have several stages. One is, of course, yelling. One is crying.  One is seething silence.  That’s the scary stage.  If I don’t like someone I won’t tell them to piss off, or something.  I just won’t acknowledge them or to the best of my ability ignore them.  THAT is what she’s seen, that I’ve ignored her, that I’ve sat in silence observing everyone.  I have sat there mostly silent and absorbed who I like, who I don’t like, who I trust, who I don’t.  The thing that angers me the most? She crossed a line a few weeks ago, and I can’t pummel her for it.  And the fact that I haven’t shows that I’m growing.  … Or that I just can’t bring myself to beat old women with their pity-me sticks.  I haven’t decided yet.

Therapists On Parade

Fridays are therapy days for me, which means it’s supervised navel-gazing. I like my therapist. I trust her. If you need therapy or even just want it, don’t settle for less than that. And reach beyond what you think you want. I wouldn’t have chosen her at first glance. I mean, I knew there was no way I’d trust a male therapist, but this kid looks like I probably babysat her once upon a time. But she’s good for me. She was good at not making any sudden moves, she was good at settling my fears. She’s good at laughing at my jokes, and giving me space to cry.

Mostly she’s good about letting me tell her she’s full of shit, then chatting with me until I figure out she’s not full of shit, and never saying “I told you so.” So there’s that.

I’ve had other therapists. I’ve been aware for a long time that I’m fuckball nuts, that I have trust issues and that I tend far too much toward solitude. They weren’t all good therapists. There’s the one who, when I was a teenager, told my parents that I had sought out a therapist thus turning the drama in my life up to 11 when what I needed was just someone to vent to and with. She wasn’t licensed, by the way. She was a well-meaning “volunteer” at a teen crisis center, and she sucked ass. There was the therapist my parents took me to, the one I didn’t get a say in choosing. I have no idea if she was any good or not. I resented everything about the process (except doing inkblots, that part was cool… up until the shrink told my parents about it all and I realized I couldn’t trust her either). There were brief meetings, attempts at finding someone, but I never found anyone I could stomach. Eventually I gave up.

After my suicide attempt, they took me to the hospital in an ambulance. I honestly don’t remember much of that ride, mostly because I was still gorked out on pills I guess. I remember the moments of dark hilarity, like when they brought me lunch in the hospital. They had posted a guard to watch me, one that had a gun and everything. I remember thinking, what’s he gonna do if I try to kill myself? Shoot me? They took my clothes, took my shoes, took the drawstring out of the scrub pants they gave me… and then gave me a fork with my lunch. I couldn’t explain why I was laughing, though I was still crying at the time. The guard just chalked it up to me being fruitier than a nutcake, I guess, but I laughed my ass off. A fucking fork.

Anyway, therapists. There was a suicide counselor. Talk about professions named completely what they aren’t. She wasn’t there to advise me about suicide. She was an anti-suicide counselor. Why did you do it, how do you feel now. She was there to see if I was still a danger to myself or others. She was the one who got to decide if I got a 72-hour psych hold or not. Sometimes I wonder if I coulda lied my ass off and gotten out of there, but I don’t think so. I mean, I’m a good liar. I’m a really, really good liar.

But as it happened, I wasn’t in the mindset to lie. I was… To embrace the melodrama of a post-suicide hospital watch, I was In Despair. I didn’t want to be alive, I wasn’t happy to be alive. I wasn’t glad I’d been stopped. I was so angry that I had failed to kill myself, that I had fucked it up. I felt like I had blown my chance and now it would be just that much harder to do it right. I told the woman, calmly as I could while still crying, that she and I both knew that no one could stop me. The second they gave me an opportunity, I was going to try again and I’d get it right. I argued with her about why they stopped me, why they felt they could lock me up.

To what purpose, I wanted to know. What were they saving me for? It was my life to use or discard as I wanted. I hadn’t done anything massively destructive, I hadn’t even charged a police station with a gun to make someone else kill me. I had considered my options and chosen this path. It wasn’t up to anyone else to choose a different one for me. Naturally, she disagreed. Or rather, she said it was her job to keep me alive, not to debate the philosophy behind it, or even the morality of it. It didn’t matter if she agreed or not.

Yeah, so that’s how I ended up in the nut house. Enter my next set of therapists, the people at Snowden. I got lucky, y’know. I coulda ended up someplace worse. Here’s the thing about this facility: they weren’t there to make me better. They were there to give me a few days to come to my senses. If I didn’t get my feet under me, they would have transferred me to a more long-term facility. In line with that purpose, the therapy sessions weren’t real therapy. They were group therapy.

Group therapy in a psychiatric hospital, for those of you who don’t know, is the most pointless exercise in emotive bullshit one can experience, excepting group therapy out of a psychiatric hospital. We sat in a circle every morning. They’d go around and ask one by one how we felt, what our goals were for the day, and was there anything we wanted to say. Then we got to do nothing until afternoon group activity, which was as awkward as it sounds, and then we had evening therapy where we got the same routine as morning except they asked us if we felt we’d accomplished our goals.

Here’s the thing, though. Once I stopped fighting it, it kinda worked. Kinda. In 72 hours, I learned how to give up control and let someone else help me. This, right here, is major for me. My entire life revolves around maintaining control and what I think will happen if I don’t. What happens if I let someone help. If I let people in. If I am not always strong, self-reliant, and super-capable. Or better stated, what happens if I let people see or even think that I’m not strong, self-reliant, and super-capable.

The first breakthrough happened because of a nurse there. I don’t know her name. I couldn’t sleep and we technically weren’t allowed out of our rooms after lights-out, but they let us as long as we were quiet. My psychiatrist hadn’t prescribed any sleep aids for me (dur), and I was unable to let go and sleep. A nurse came out to talk to me. She had a Jamaican accent. She soothed me like I was a friend, not a child. She made me a cup of chamomile tea. And she talked to me with that lovely voice. She helped me. I let her. I slept.

She’s one of the many reasons I’m alive. She should’ve been my first therapist.

Always alone, forever inside, the tears you can’t see, the side of me I hide…

I had a bad day.  Big surprise, right?  (I should warn you, the end of this post gets totally way TMI)  When you’re bipolar the little things can set you off.  I can’t help it.  One of those things that consistently hurts me.  It’s actually almost physically painful is the feeling of being blown off.  If someone says they’re going to meet me, and they don’t show up, or they show up half an hour or an hour late, I want to cry. If someone says “I’m going to go grab this quick, and then we’ll go to the store,” I expect it not to take 2+ hours.  It makes me feel worthless. Like I’m not important.  Every single time.  I used to have birthday parties and invite all of my “friends,” and only a few of them would show up.  Now, I never expected all of my classmates to show up, but my friends? People I thought were ACTUALLY my friends? Yeah.  But it didn’t happen.  Year after year I’d invite them, and year after year they didn’t show up.  So I stopped.  And I developed abandonment issues.  By blowing me off, it meant you didn’t like me, or care, or want to be near me.  Stupid, right?

So one of the great things about me having a bad day is that I already can’t sleep, so my already heavily full mind of festering thoughts fills even more.  And it compounds.  I tend to listen to one song on repeat all night.  Or if it’s during the day, all day.  Right now, it’s “Bad Day” by Fuel.  One of my favorite bands.  The irony is not lost on me.

“She had a bad day again.”  I really did.  “She said I would not understand.”  No, you really can’t.  “She left a note and said I’m sorry I, had a bad day again.” No. I’m not going there. Won’t happen.  … “And she swears there’s nothing wrong.”  I do this every day of every week of every month.  Most of the time, when I tell my friends, my family, coworkers, acquaintances that I’m doing well?  I’m lying.  I’m faking it.  Why?  Because it makes them feel better.  “I hear her playing that same old song.”  I do. All day.  I don’t know why.  It probably makes things worse, but I have always done that.

But enough analyzing that little snippet of the song.  Now for the TMI  I totally can’t do the sex thing.  I could, once.  I liked it.  Loved it, really.  I blame the meds. I blame the depression.  I blame me.  I feel guilty about it.  So guilty.  Which, of course, makes my depression worse.   I feel like I’m a horrible person.  That’s what a girlfriend is supposed to do, right? That’s one of the things you’re supposed to want to do with your boyfriend.  I WANT to want to do this.  I just don’t.  It’s not him.  It’s me.  I just have zero desire.  He doesn’t believe me.  And I’m pretty sure he hates me for it.  I feel broken.  I am broken.  I keep trying everything, and I can’t fix it.  So I sit here, wrecked, like I am. Bawling, like I do every time I think about how I fail at life, and I feel this overwhelming sense of guilt.  That I’m just taking up space.  That I’m ruining his life, that he just feels too guilty to kick me out, and knowing he wants to go find someone else to fuck.

Here’s a secret, if you’ve made it this far.  When someone’s depressed, and they have no libido, trying to “jumpstart” their libido by pawing at them, or fondling them, doesn’t work.  It’s something that might normally get something excited.  If they’re depressed and have nothing there?  It just makes them feel worse. Because it tops that depression with guilt and adds more depression.  That’s where I’m at.  Not only do I have that depression, that lack of libido, I have the guilt and self loathing on top of it.  The best part? In the back of my mind, I still have, on repeat, those words of every “well meaning” person in my life who’s ever told me, “Learn to love yourself first.  No one will ever love you if you can’t love yourself first.”  That’s great.  I will spend the rest of my life knowing that.  No. One. Will. Ever. Love. Me. Because. I. Can’t. Love. Me.   That’s awesome.

So yeah… Had a bad day again.  You probably wouldn’t understand.