Crack

Ring ring. I’ve been trying to ring my CPN today but she’s not answering. I simply no longer have the energy. I rang ERC last night who told me to wait until today.

I’ve been quite quiet here recently. I have nothing intelligent or insightful to say at the moment. I’ve mostly been stuffing my fist in my mouth and biting down hard. And I didn’t want to write here and publicise private troubles that might upset people close to me. The last thing I ever want to is upset or hurt anybody. But I eventually ended up talking about it last night. So I guess I can talk here now.

I don’t like talking about depression here. I don’t like it because, despite everything, I still feel like it is my fault, and I still feel like it is happening to me because I am weak or bad. I know that I am told it is not true, and I know it is part of this illness but I still believe somewhere that I do this to myself and that I deserve it.

Because of this blog’s previous popularity I sometimes feel like I should be stronger than I am and should be an example of how to get better. I don’t want to be too emotional here because it is too public. But I set out to be honest in the first place.

I haven’t been doing very well. I have been trying not to cut myself and to be cheerful so people don’t know how I feel. I am still sort of functioning but with amazing difficulty. This crept up on me- I thought I was fine, and then I found I was crying everywhere I went. Walking to walk, from work, going to bed. I am not used to this because my depressions are usually wildly manic or cold and still. This adolescent despair is new to me and it is frightening.

Most nights I have been curled up in my room crying. I have been unable to stop crying for weeks. When I am alone I cry, not because I am alone but because I can’t stop crying. I go to the toilet and I’m there for half an hour crying. I feel exhausted, I feel broken and alone. I have been onto the Samaritans a lot but it is depressing me further. Talking to someone helps insofar as I am then not crying to myself but I don’t know what more to say. In the past ten years it has all been said. I have long since felt that there are no more solutions. I am taking the pills, eating well (or trying to, because my appetite has disappeared), being social and I don’t feel better. The more I talk about it, the less I feel there is any way out. It is why I have stayed quiet. I feel like depression is all I have to look forward to. It comes so suddenly. I know there are real life things right now to be sad about, and I am sad, but it is more than sadness.

I am trying my best to write this rationally with an even tone as I don’t want to upset anybody. I can write but I find it extremely difficult to actually talk and harder still to ring a friend or something like that. I feel like I’ve driven everybody away and it is in part true. My illness, or whatever you want to call it, has driven such a wedge between me and people I love, time and time again. People are tired, frustrated, bored, it has damaged the relationships I have with people I love, time and time again, to the point where someone doesn’t want to be with me, where some people are not speaking to me because they no longer know what to say. I can’t deal with it. I try to read things and think it’s not my fault but it has been so long I feel that this is now part of me, and it is my fault and I hate myself for it.

The idea that people have of depression is that you must be laid up in bed unable to move. They don’t concede that that is what you want to do, or you can’t sleep anymore. They don’t remember the people who go to work and just about struggle through at their desks with their head filled with self loathing. My energy is gone, but I have not entirely lost the ability to enjoy things. People still make me laugh. But it all feels very hollow and pointless, completely directionless. The hours I am here are just holding it together. I feel that I am holding it together for other people’s sake.

I have been suicidal and hopeless. Feeling literally gutted, as if myself has been ripped out. I have stood by rivers trying to let go off the railings. Last week I researched anti nausea medication to overdose on Lithium without throwing up. I couldn’t buy them, so I took all the Lithium anyway. It made me very sick so I tied my dressing gown cord around my neck and the other end to the cupboard and kept kicking it shut to try and break my neck.

It was pathetic and I felt pathetic. But sometimes I feel I am here only because I have to be for other people. It has been a long decade of illness and I feel that this is never going to go away. I can’t take antidepressants and my lack of mania is the start of recovery in the eyes of the doctors. It has left me as a depressive shellshocked person. I feel like this is forever and that if it is I don’t want to live anymore. I can’t see a way out and I am exhausted and sick of suffering so much.

But it just looks manipulative and I know people think I am being manipulative. I didn’t talk to anybody about what I did because I know some people are still pissed at me for the Seroquel overdose, thinking it was to get at Rob or to manipulate, which I would never, ever do. The Seroquel overdose was out of desire to sleep, not desire to die.

And this is good, this is recovery. Then what is sickness? How will this ever get better? I can’t take antidepressants. Talking therapy only works so far. What do I do? I am terrified of hospital. This time I would be alone, I would come home to my cold bedsit with the mice for company. The past two years have been so difficult. But there were not the first two years of difficulty and pain. And do I only have this to look forward to, is this my life? I can’t imagine anybody ever wanting to be with me or loving me because it is too much to ask. I cannot cope with this, asking someone else to is too much. Antipsychotics and Depakote make me quiet and tired but they do nothing for depression. I know it is self pitying I don’t feel as though there is any way out of this.

I am trying to be even while writing this. I want to emphasise that this is the way I get, I get depressed and it’s nobody’s responsibility to make me feel any better. It never has been. I am not the kind of person who feels comfortable inviting people out and that. I don’t know why.

I don’t understand why I feel this way. I know deep down I am not this person.