Category: psychache

motions of living

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, psychache, suicidality

It’s after midnight. With all the meds that I have taken because of my back pain, I should be out like a light. But as usual, the darkness has taken over me and I feel the need to write. I am thinking about my suicide plan, again. I can’t seem to not think about it. I know people need me to be here. And I want to be there for them, but I am suffering to the tenth degree of hell and I don’t know how much more I can take. I am not in serious pain, though my foot is throbbing like my heart beats. I can never get away from the throbbing.

I was reading a self-help book tonight about shame and perfectionism. It got me thinking about how much I am hurting because I was abused but I never talked about the abuse. My therapist calls it “loyalty” to my parents. I won’t say that about my cousin because I have little to no contact with him. It makes me sick and triggers me every time I see him or hear his name. What is worse is that he has a brother that looks just like him. Freaks me out every time I see him. But I have to remind myself that he is not the one that hurt me. I don’t know why this stuff is coming up now. I guess it’s because it hasn’t been dealt with and keeps surfacing at inopportune times. Like do I really need to talk about this stuff? It’s not the reason why I want to kill myself. Though maybe the shame is. Shame is a big thing. But most of it has to do with the fact, I am ashamed of who I am. I am not a male like my brain thinks I am. And it hurts. Being in chronic shame hurts. I feel disgusted with myself about this. I am appalled that I have breasts and get a menstrual cycle. In a few weeks, I will have to have a pap smear. I am not sure how it will go as it is a new person. I don’t know if she will be good or bad. But I am a trusting type. I will tell her to use a small speculum and pray that I don’t feel anything because of my nerve injury. I think the stress of this has spilled over to shame. I hate my privates being looked at, even by a medical professional. It just makes me feel dirty though I know logically, there is nothing wrong with this. It is a medical examination to make sure things are “normal”. It has been ten long years since I last had an exam of this nature so I am long overdue. This person doesn’t know my history of abuse, my history of nerve damage, nothing of the nature. I just hope I don’t shock her when I tell her I can’t feel her touching me. It’s just another thing that I am embarrassed about.

Then I think, why bother with this exam when I am going to kill myself in a few weeks from the time of the exam. It makes no sense, but yet I go through the motions of living because it is expected of me. I hate this responsibility to others that is preventing me from killing myself. And why do I have it!?? My therapist says it’s because I am not an impulsive person. I used to be an impulsive person, but that was more than 20 years ago. I used to cut back then because it was my only way of coping with the pain. Now, I just think of these elaborate ways to kill myself that doesn’t involve drugs or cutting. I have moved past that and that scares me because the methods that I have chosen are more lethal. More lethal and less window of survival. I have thought it out very carefully. But again, my heart is conflicted. As much as it wants to die, it doesn’t want to cause others pain. I know that I will be dead and that it shouldn’t matter, but I am a sensitive person that thinks of these things. I wish I could be selfish, just a little bit of the time so I could try and take my life. But I am not. It was drilled into me at a young age to always put others first. And I am putting others first before taking my life. My therapist says that she will never recover from my death and I know that is true. UGH. I hate her for doing this to me! Why did she have to shed a tear when I told her years ago that I was going to take my life? It was that tear that is killing me today and part of the reason I am still here. Without her passion and love, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t mean love in a sexual sense. We are not “lovers”, just have a huge feelings toward one another. With my psychiatrist, there is a pride and joy I get from her. Her smile and comfort keeps me going. I know she will always be there for me, no matter the hour. And I do love her for that.

I really don’t think that if I didn’t have their belief in me when I feel so worthless and hopeless, I would still be here. Yet I still struggle to take my life. The constriction has its hold on me during these dark hours of the night. Yet they don’t show their face in the morning light. It’s terrible going through this night after night with no relief. If I could, I would end things now. But I don’t want my mother to find me. I feel that will kill her. I have to find a place to do the deed. And I have been lazy trying to find a spot. It’s not like I can google it. Why must suicide be so hard? Yet people do it every day. I envy them, I really do. No one sees this side of me. No one is there. Sure, there might be a hotline or crisis center I can call, but why bother. I am not in distress. I am not in imminent danger. I just feel like killing myself because my heart hurts. The heaviness is back and it’s hard to breathe. My left breast feels like it weighs 6,000 pounds upon my chest. Yet I often think of cutting it off with piano wire. I just am afraid of the ensuing blood coming out of me that I won’t be able to stop. I will bleed to death and that is not a good way to go. I hate myself for feeling this way. I feel evil. I feel like I have to do something to ease my ache in my chest but what? Tylenol won’t work or any other analgesic. Even my opioid pain meds won’t touch this ache. How am I to relieve this suffering? I can’t sleep. My brain won’t shut down. I am dying a slow death. I am tired of hurting this degree night after night. And it’s a lonely struggle. I smile it away so no one can see the hurt beneath the surface. It is for me to bear and me only. It’s called the motions of living and it sucks.

Writing Bug and Suicidal Risk

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, psychache, suicidality, suicide

Writing bug and Suicide Risk

I have the insatiable need to write. I thought about journaling but I don’t feel like entering my thoughts in a private journal. What I have to say is too important. It is about my suicidal feelings. I am torn, really torn, about what to do with them. I am in no danger tonight. But I picked a date and that date is slowly approaching. I have been trying not to think about it but it’s in the back of my head. I keep thinking/telling myself I don’t have to go through with this. That I can make it through. A friend of mine would be crushed without my help. And would be devastated with my loss. I can’t help but feel trapped. Like I can’t take my life because people need me to be here and I don’t want to be here any more. It’s a struggle I have been dealing with for years. I am tired of fighting this. I just want to give in to my thoughts, to not exist anymore. It’s painful to breathe. I am tired of the heaviness on my chest and the accompanying chest pains that magically appear and disappear on their own. Sometimes an Ativan is needed to get rid of these pains. I know it’s my anxiety when the pain goes away and the heaviness lessens.

Right now I feel like I am a burden to myself. I almost told my therapist today that I don’t want to meet twice a week anymore. I know she wouldn’t approve. She knows I have a date but I have not given it to her. I just can’t because I know she will try and stop me. It’s not like she is going to be okay with me dying by suicide. No therapist will. Then I have the agony of sending a copy of my book to a former therapist. If I send it now and she tries to get in touch with me after I die, I know the book was written in vain. Some writer I am. I write how much this process has helped me, how CAMS has helped me and then I kill myself? Good going. It just doesn’t make sense. I am afraid. I am afraid of getting older and I don’t want to live because I never wanted to be an adult. But my support system kept on telling me I was worth it and I believed them. So I am still here today.

I know one day I will end my life by my own hand. It is written in the statistics of suicide research. I fit every model. I am high risk because I have attempted multiple times, I have an abuse history, I am transgender, and I am hopelessly depressed. All these factors are not good in assessing suicide risk. The only thing I have not done is give away my most prized possessions. Though I really don’t have any. I have my suicide library that I value dearly but it hasn’t helped me deal with my suicide thoughts. I have not been cured of them and as one person in my life has said, I never will. I will always have these thoughts of ending my life. But do I have to act on them? Should I just let them fester until they boil over? I don’t know. Right now I am calm. I am just going through the motions of life as if I were living without thinking of taking my life. No one knows except my therapist and psychiatrist. (And now the blogosphere.) I really want to end my life yet I still want something from it. What I want, I don’t know what that is. I would love to complete my degree but I don’t have the money for it. I don’t even know if the stress of school will activate my paranoia and psychosis again. I do want to write another book. But I have no ideas. They are few and far between. Then I think I should go back to the hospital where I will be safe and possibly be able to think of something to write. But why bother with that if I just want to end my life in a month and a half or so. I am so torn. Ambivalence is such a bitch. And it’s not like you can do a pro/con thing when contemplating ending your life. Every time I do it, I seem to have more pros than cons. There are reasons why I want to end my life. I don’t want to be in chronic physical pain anymore. I don’t want to have psychache. I don’t want to live because I just can’t tolerate my self hate. I can’t tolerate being a woman when my brain keeps telling me I am a man. And the only reason I have not gone through with transition is because my mother won’t accept me as a man. So I rather die as her daughter than her son. I have nothing else to live for. I am only alive to keep my therapist and family happy. They know my suffering. I guess they rather see me suffer than to be dead. I have been fighting this depression for a really long time. I have been suicidal since I was eight. I first attempted when I was ten. That was thirty years ago. I think that is a long time to suffer from a depression that defies treatment. No pill alleviates my suffering and I have been on many. I am just a hopeless case.

I thought about sending this to my therapist but I am not going to. It is written by me and not my alter, Hyde. I am very tired but I am not in pain, least not physically. My brain just wouldn’t shut off until I wrote this stuff out. Now I am feeling sleepy and I think I can call it a night. These suicidal thoughts that come out are my midnight demons. They come out after midnight and I am truly in their grip. My heart is heavy and there is nothing I can take to make it light. My world is dark and gray. It has been like this for a very long time.

Brick Walls

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, psychache, suicidality

7-Aug-14 Brick Walls

I am currently on a psychiatric unit in a hospital. I’ve been here for a week now, with no hope of getting out anytime soon. I am here because I am profoundly suicidal. All I see are brick walls surrounding me and they keep on closing in on me. It’s like a prison that only I can see. I am surrounded by these bricks and no one cares how high they get. And they certainly don’t care how they got there.

I want to take my life because I am stuck, just like these brick walls. The cement has hardened each brick into place so you cannot move it. My thoughts of suicide have also hardened to the point where they don’t budge. I feel very hopeless that this hospitalization will not help detach one of these bricks so that I make break free of the confinement I feel. If enough bricks fall, I may see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I doubt that will happen. I never see the light for long. I am always in a dark place. I am always feeling hopeless. And hopelessness and suicidal thoughts are not a good combination. They seal the cement and lock me in to this confinement that I am in.

The doctor and staff are trying their best to keep hope alive for me, but I just don’t see it. All I see is the brick wall that is impenetrable. Nothing or nobody can get through it or to me. It will take more than a jack hammer or two to get through to me right now. And it seems that no one owns one. The staff is too busy to care about the bricks. They just want the cement to fall to force me to see the light as the bricks become loose. Just so they can discharge me. They don’t care how the bricks were formed. And this hurts because no one takes the time to see how much I am hurting like they used to.

I have been trying to stay in the moment but my moments are just filled with suicidal thoughts and feelings. They are also filled with plans on how to end my life. Each thought makes the brick wall stronger so no one can breakthrough. Each brick has been mounted with feelings of inadequacy, shame, indignity, depression, hopelessness, worthlessness, and unbearable pain. Pain is the biggest brick. It lies in the center surrounded by the other bricks that I just mentioned. It exceeds all others in thickness and size. It is killing me, literally and physically, to be in unbearable pain all the time. The pain stems from just left of the sternum of the chest wall and captivates the entire left side of the chest cavity. It is a pressure felt day in and day out. In essence, it is like a ton of bricks weighing on my heart.

As the cement hardens around the brick, making it so difficult to breathe, the pressure on the chest increases. No medical tests exists to identify this weight. It’s not visibly present. That makes it difficult to explain without the feeling of sounding crazy. Who is going to believe a suicidal person that there is a weight on the chest when no one can see or feel it? It is not measured by tests or electrocardiograms. It is just a heaviness that fills your soul. And the soul cannot be seen or felt. Nor can it be measured. No one’s pain is the same. Each is unique to that individual. And my pain is what is strangling me in this moment of time.

The pain is always present in times of despair. It ruins any hope one might have and increases the weight of the bricks bearing down on you. Nothing alleviates this pain. There are no pills that can ease the pressure or painful despair. It’s ever present and deepens the despair because no one understands it. All the symptoms of depression and suicidal thinking makes it very difficult to treat. And the longer it lasts, the higher the brick wall is built. Will the doctors and social workers have what it takes to help bring down the brick and mortar? Very unlikely. They don’t have the time to really get to know me, much less help me. I have resigned myself to stay within these brick walls until they envelope me so I can no longer breathe. Each day they move closer, causing me to feel more isolated and the feeling of suffocation grows stronger. Love doesn’t have any effect on these walls that have surrounded my heart. My heart has become stone a long time ago. Only negative feelings are allowed to pass through. I have given up on positive feelings ever passing through my little barricade. It took years for the brick wall to be built. It might take years to be torn down. But the suicide demons won’t allow that. This time the brick walls will win. I no longer have the energy to chisel my way out of my own prison. But then, I am in a psych ward where chisels are not allowed. You just expected to go to groups to cope with the demons rather than allow them to fall.

And because no one knows the depth of my prison, I am here for a long time, in solitary confinement. The walls are dark and gray, just the way that I feel inside. I doubt I would ever get parole from this darkness that fills my soul. If I do, it is only for a short time before I am back in solitary. The light barely has a chance to touch me before everything becomes dark again. That is why I don’t trust happiness or feeling good. I much rather be content about things than feel happiness. Happiness, to me, is a fleeting emotion that is hard to hold onto. It is slippery like silk, never lasting more than a few minutes and devastating when it leaves you.

So I sit here in my room, surrounded by darkness so the sunlight won’t come in, staring at the brick wall and it staring back, trapped in my own prison.

writing and dying

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, chronic physical pain, depression, psychache

I typed up a few pages of the short story I am working on. It’s basically an autobiographical story of my struggle with psychosis. I still have two pages to type but can’t find the motivation to do it. I keep staring at the notepad but nothing is coming. I am just staring at the words, wondering if they are the right ones and am doubting myself.

My therapist had some suggestions on trying to get me back to better sleep health. Unfortunately, I didn’t do it today. I wasn’t tired come three o’clock but got really zonked around five. I still am fighting the urge to just go under the covers and take a rest. Only problem with that is that I will be seriously disrupting my sleep cycle, again.

I told her I am having trouble taking my meds. I don’t want to take them because I don’t think they are effective anymore. I am just so depressed, I just can’t see the point. I also told her I really want to be writing my suicide notes and letters. She almost started flipping out. I never heard her so restrained before. We were actually “talking” about this stuff rather than dusting it under the rug, like it didn’t exist. I really liked talking about this stuff. It gave me some perspective about the pros and cons of actually doing it. We didn’t discuss that, but I was thinking about it as I talked about the need to write. I told her I had written a goodbye letter to Jobes. It was basically saying yes your work helped me but it didn’t save me. I never sent the email/letter. I told her that I can’t be saved. It is my destiny to kill myself, I am very convinced of this. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I think about it so much that I don’t think I have any kind of future or anything. The weird part, is that I don’t feel hopeless. She did the cubic model of suicide on me. I was kind of shocked that she remembered. I am no where near suicidal range at this time. I am not actively planning my death, nor have I picked a date. I just want to self-combust so I won’t have to. But I don’t think that is likely.

I just feel really depressed. My therapist also read my blog that I wrote last night. She said that it was very coherent and eloquent. It is funny because it took me several times to get back to writing it. I would start writing and then find the need to check Twitter or Facebook. It took me almost an hour to write. And I was mostly writing how fucking sucky I was feeling, which was hard because I really couldn’t put to words what I was feeling. It was a very difficult blog to write.

Foot/ankle are behaving for now. Last night I was in misery. It literally felt like a battle between the two as to which part was going to hurt more and then my big toe settled it by buzzing up a storm. I hate when my toe buzzes. It is so unsettling. I don’t remember if I took pain meds or not. I really wanted to OD on Neurontin. It was that bad. But I didn’t take any because after an hour, my toe settled down. Foot and ankle were still at it but not in the same intensity. I have been using my pain meds sparingly. I don’t know why this is. I guess I want to feel something and my ankle/foot is giving me something to feel other than depression. Maybe it is a form of self-punishment, I don’t know. I do know that the pain is tolerable to my warped mind. It gives me something to focus on rather than my stupid, stinking depression. I spoke too soon. Just moved my ankle and it has exploded. Just like that it can become a 10, easy. Now I am really going to get sleepy with my pain meds on board. I don’t think I am going to make it to eight. I guess I will be taking my night meds early and calling it a night.

My father called saying that his meds are almost out. I told him I will come over sometime tomorrow. I don’t mind because it gets me out of the house. I rather do it tomorrow than Saturday. I like to have the weekend to do nothing. I am trying to go out during the week, like I did today, so that I can rest on the weekend. I don’t know how likely that is going to happen, but we’ll see.