Life of the Midnight Demon

Every morning is a struggle. I wake up and the first that goes through my mind is damn, I am alive. The urge to cut is ever present at these moments and I have to fight the urge not to do it. I then hear the voices argue that I might as well get up as I am awake and what is taking me so long. Thankfully for today, it is not 3 am but instead noon time. It has to be the first time in a long time, that I slept this late. 

So the routine starts. I get up and the first thing that I do is check facebook and see what my friends are doing for the day. Then comes the ordeal of what to wear today. Half the time it is the same pants I wore yesterday because I don’t have the inclination to change pants. It takes too much effort to decide of the 10 pairs of jeans, in various colors and styles, which one to choose. Some times I have decided I want to wear a particular style, but not today. I don’t need the voices commenting on why I am choosing the blue jeans with the side pockets over the gray pants with cargo pockets. I already don’t want to get up but have to because it is expected of me. By whom, I am not sure. But I know that if I don’t get up now, I will be late for work by the time I finish with facebook gaming and maybe getting a few hands of poker in. I am really surprised I have been able to sustain my $200k chips for the past several weeks. I must be getting better or just caring whether I win or lose.

After taking care of something called personal hygiene, I am back to my room to get dressed, when sure enough the fights begin in my head over what I am doing and how I am doing it. Then the fight of what kind of socks to wear begins. Short or crew, ankle or the shorter kind. Man life is full of decisions and you haven’t even stepped out the door yet! And of course there is the argument of why this one over that one. You would think that I could decide on my own which socks to wear but these voices have taken over and I don’t think any pill can stop them.
I then take my meds, a tiny rectangular pill that is supposed to bring me sanity. It might bring me sanity but it does not bring me joy. More like cause me to be impotent in regards to my writing and reading processes. Luckily just the reading is affected as I have been able to journal write for the past several weeks. That too has become a ritual. After I get dressed and maybe squeeze in another hand of poker while doing so, then the real reason why I get up in the morning, Starbucks. Their mocha is the real reason why I am here and go through these battles just to face the day. It is the perfect blend of chocolate and espresso that gets me through the day. Sometimes I need two (especially if I have to be up before 9 am and work till 10pm). This is where my journaling gets done, the only “me” time that I have during the days of when the noonday demon bears its ugly head and my mood becomes a roller coaster of sorts. 
The fun part of going there is that I am a frequent flyer there so know most of the staff. This location is the friendliest one that I have been to in the Boston area. I get my mocha and find a table to sit and enjoy my mocha while writing about the events of the previous day or how I am feeling, though I never seem to go into much detail about that. Mostly the dialog is what to let my therapist know about what is transpiring. Right now I am still stumped on my “analysis of a song” paper. It started off as a fun paper but now it kind of grew serious. I still have thoughts of getting it published somewhere but not sure if it is publishable. I am still waiting for my psychiatrist to have her in put on if it is or isn’t. But none of that matters if I can’t get it finished. The conclusion of any paper is the hardest (in my opinion) but this one I just can’t seem to get going. It’s all there in my head but the damn meds won’t let it flow freely. I could stop the meds for a while and see where that takes me but the voices already cause havoc when the rectangular pill wears off late at night. I am walking a fine line of sanity each day; do I really want to risk that for a paper that probably won’t go anywhere?

Day 2
The morning struggles of the day before are again facing me today. Doesn’t matter if it is a beautiful sunny day or a dark, rainy day, my mood is always in the gloomy pit of despair. I have become so jaded that I hardly even notice that I am in it; I just know that I don’t want to be here to face the day. The start of the new day is always a strange feeling. I think I have become immune to my meds as they no longer allow me to sleep as late as I would like. I wake up before 6 am and damn the day with all my might. I will sometimes take something to allow myself to go back to sleep if I cannot do so on my own. It’s always a balancing act to juggle.

Today I wake up not as pain free as I would like. Since 2001, I suffered a nerve injury that causes my left leg to be in spasm and have horrific nerve pain that is best described as electric shocks or a hot poker being stuck in my lower leg. Or my favorite, a knife in my upper leg where I had the same nerve injury in 2006. This injury is a supposed rarity called Cauda Equina Syndrome (CES for short). It is caused by nerves in the back called the cauda equine that become injured due to disc material from the spine or from the vertebrae. Usually the main culprit is some time of trauma or just a bad movement in an already injured back. When I first joined my support group, there were only 80 members. Now almost ten years later there are over 500 members from around the world. Each person is affected differently and although our symptoms are the same, it varies in the severity. Some people do not walk again, some do but have something called foot drop. Others have bowel and bladder problems that go one for years. The most common emotional complaint is the loss of dignity and the use of the lower part of the body.

I have managed to live through this nerve injury but the pain on top of psychological pain sometimes gets to be too much. Sustained physical pain does lead to depression which then leads to a possible suicide and thanks to drug users who abuse our narcotics, we often have to fight to get our pain under control. Most docs think that this is all in our head which only helps to fuel the depression. Most of us can’t work full-time any more and can barely function. Luckily I can function; it’s because of my mental illness that I cannot. Often times I ignore the pain only to deal with it right before I go to sleep. I don’t know why people just can’t let me be and allow me to end this existence. I just want total cessation, a loss of consciousness forever, to cease to be. It’s my life and I think I can do what I want but people tell me I have some good to do in this world so I must go on, despite this pain I must live with.

So I put one baby step in front of another baby step to get through the day. Sometimes it gets better when I get out of the house and get my mocha, other times I really just want to go back and hide under the covers. But I don’t have time for that.

Day 3:

Another day has come that I don’t want to face. I wake up at 7 and have to force myself to go back to sleep. I wake up a few hours later and now have to rush to get to work. I don’t have the time to sit at my Starbucks table and write in my journal for a bit while drinking my mocha. I don’t have the time to sit and write about today and that stresses me out. I have found and research supports this, that writing is a cathartic way of expressing oneself when in the gloom of despair. I also find that if I don’t write, I get into the suicidal thinking all too quickly and it is very difficult to get out of that thinking once you are in it.

I have made it to work today but don’t have the mindset to really focus like I do when I have my “me” time. I have been out of the house since noon and just noticed it is a sunny day. How funny is that.

The voices have been quiet the last few days, which is both good and bad. I don’t have them harping on what clothes to wear, what socks to wear, what shirt. It is still a struggle to find that shirt that I need to wear other than my t-shirt. Today I pick a gray scrub top.

Nerve pain was not so bad last night. But then the temperature in Boston has not been fluctuating between hot and cold the last few days. It has stayed within 40-60 degrees, with no drastic drops or highs. It has been a steady temp that my back likes.

I still don’t know why I am still around. To think that yesterday was supposed to be the day I was to end my life and I didn’t makes me kind of sad. I am getting closer to the end. This time I gave myself the end of the week. Next time I might give myself till tomorrow. But one thing I found was that it is not easy to plan your death. There are too many variables to account for. One is obviously the when and where and how, but then the aftermath of after you are dead still strikes me. Should I leave a note of how to dispose of this body, why I did this, how I felt that no one could help me get through this. No, that is not true, there are plenty of people I can call to talk to but I chose not to because I know they do not want me to die, to end this existence, to end my life. Most likely, they will try and stop me from ending my pain and I don’t want that. But then I think of the little people in my life and realize I have to be there for them no matter what. Why I don’t know. I still would like to believe that they will be better off without me. They don’t need this depressed, psychotic being to be in their lives. The littlest one told me the other day that I have cooties. I’m glad the voices didn’t get wind of that or I might have gone through with my plan.

What is my plan, exactly? I don’t think I really know. It is as temperamental as my moods. Thoughts of hanging fly by and also of overdosing. It is a toss up of these two, a flip of a coin. I would love to entertain these thoughts but the hold it has over me when I go into this kind of thinking is none that can be described. It is like a hypnotic drug that takes possession of your soul and because you feel like crap, takes you to a place you know you are not going to get out of anytime soon. It gives you a high because you cannot go lower than what you are right now and it relieves your pain because you so want to escape this pain of living. That is all that the noonday demon really lives for, to find an escape for the emotions that hold it in great despair and anguish.