Category: suicide attempt

Another Day in the Life of Midnight Demon

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, suicide attempt

Another Day in the Life of Midnight Demon

I participated in the weekly BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder, chat on Twitter. This week’s topic was about social media. I gave a few thoughts and shared my friend’s blog. She has BPD and writes about the struggles quite frequently. I will also be participating tonight on the SPSM chat later this evening. I just hope that I will be up.

My boys won today, 6-1. I am very happy they did. We needed a win and now fall within 2.5 games of the Rays, who are currently in first place. I am glad it was a day game today. I don’t know if I could handle a night game and then a chat. Or chat while the game was going on. I don’t particularly like SPSM because I feel it doesn’t validate my statements most of the time and I get talked down to a lot. I know it’s probably not the case but it feels that way.

I plan on making pancakes for supper. I just don’t know what kind to make. I am leaning toward oatmeal because I do love them more than buttermilk or original. The last time I made them, they came out kind of sucky so I am going to play with the ingredients a little bit to make them better. I only once made them perfect and that was a while ago.

Sometime in the last few hours, I re-read the article I am writing a review on. I wanted to get back to it but I have been lazy today. My brain just isn’t there. I didn’t sleep too well again last night as I went to bed around 0230. It seems if I am up past 2300, I get hyper and have a hard time falling asleep. I get my second wind, so to speak.

My mother needed a box for the cleaning that she is doing. I was happy to oblige and gave her two that were in my room. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the clothes that are in its place. I am slowly making my way to the closet but I am just not there yet. It is a struggle and maybe before the chat and after I had some food, I will be able to clean a little more or at least go through some of the stuff that is there. It’s so hard for me to make decisions on what to do with the stuff that I just get overwhelmed and don’t do anything. I keep telling myself just one thing but sometimes, that one thing leads to another that leads to another that leads to another. Then you have several things and you start feeling overwhelmed by it all and just say fuck it. At this point it will become my summer project. If I can clean out that part of my room, I can then hang my jeans and clothes that can be hung and not be on the floor or on top of boxes.

I still have my menses, much to my disappointment. I thought it was going away as I had less stuff coming out of me but my last trip to the bathroom proved me wrong. I hate it so much and was so looking forward to wearing boxers. Now I just want to take a shower and do nothing. I am so disgruntled. And what kills me is that I have no one to really talk about it with. I have my therapist, but I don’t talk with her till Tuesday and by then it will most likely be gone. It just kills me that I have to put up with this every few months. I know I should be grateful it isn’t every month but I am a man and shouldn’t have to put up with it period (no pun intended). It just kills my ego and how I view myself. It’s like it takes a little part of me every time it comes around. It definitely makes the suicidal part of me grow. I really rather be dead than to deal with this shit. And the trouble is no one understands. They just think that I have to endure it because I am a “woman” and that is what women do. God, it hurts me so much. No matter how much I try to be a man, I just can never be enough of one.

I am sad to report that one of my friends just told me she tried to attempt suicide twice in as many weeks. That makes three attempts, maybe four, since I have known her. I really don’t know what to do. She is having a hard time getting services where she lives. And I just feel helpless. We used to talk every day and now it’s spotty. She feels like she is a burden to me and no matter how many times I have told her otherwise, it hasn’t clicked in her brain. It is just upsetting to me that she uses my illness as a way of not reaching out for help. I know I am just one person, and she obviously has the right not to seek my help, but to tell me she attempted after the fact just strikes me as painful. I want to help her, I really do, but I can’t if she doesn’t talk to me. I haven’t responded to her message and I don’t think I am going to, least not right away. I need to regroup and think about this and how to approach her.

hopeless yet hopeful

by Midnight Demon, posted in chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

Today is the first day of the American Association of Suicidology’s annual conference. I have been getting tweet updates all day from my fellow Twitter buddies. One of them won the writing contest that I had also entered in. I posted the blog earlier today.

I have been astounded that researchers are finally getting a clue that psychache and hopelessness goes hand in hand when dealing with suicidal thoughts. Shneidman would be proud. And they are finding this across the age groups, including youth suicide. I know from experience that was what lead me to self harm and also to think of death constantly. It wasn’t until 2007 while working on a term paper did I realize that only Shneidman had made the connection so brilliantly. Course he never did an empirical study of it. He was out there in the trenches doing the actual work to help decrease suicide. If I hadn’t come across his work and then the work of Jobes, I doubt that I would still be here.

Reading these tweets always makes me feel like I am missing out. Though I know that if I was there, I wouldn’t know how to tweet during a lecture. I would be more interested in what the person was saying than trying to remember it and then post it on Twitter. I suppose I could take notes of what they were saying and then tweet. They had Marsha Linehan today and she told her story of how she was mentally ill with borderline personality disorder, was hospitalized for a good number of years and that the treatment was awful. She made a promise to God that if she got out of her hell, she would try and get others out of theirs. I hate when I am feeling like scum of the universe, feeling hopeless as anything, and then this conference happens to lighten the load so to speak. I truly was in awe that Dr. Linehan came out and was inspirational. She said that to decrease suicide, you have to decrease the pain. And also to use skills to cope. Of course she would say that. She is the founder of DBT! But I think she has softened in her rigidity of DBT as a cure all over the years. She is the one that pushed Jobes into research for CAMS and why would she do that if she thought that DBT was the answer to everything. I minimally respected her before today. But as I am getting to know her more, the more I am respecting her.

Jobes was also at the conference. No surprise there. He was on a panel of speakers but between the tweets, I couldn’t really figure out where he was coming from. The message was that even though he has trained thousands of clinicians in his modality, it didn’t change their behavior toward suicide. And that is sad. He wants the younger clinicians to step and do the research as to why that is.

Last night I was in a pretty bad state of mind. I still don’t want to live. But if Marsha Linehan can come back from mental illness, then maybe I can, too. I know the suicidal thoughts are always going to be there. It is my default coping mechanism. Over the years, I have learned what it took to distract me from going through with these thoughts. I have only come close to killing myself twice in the last two years, no matter how dark and dreary my depressions got me. But figuring this out wasn’t easy. It mostly comes through in hindsight and after the episode has passed. And then I am left feeling like, “did that really happen”? My therapist assures me that I go through these bouts frequently. Which is why she is adamant about me keeping my appointments, no matter how hopeless I get.

coming out as transgender

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicidality, suicide attempt, suicide attempt survivor, transgender

Coming out as a transgendered male (Female to Male) has not been an easy thing to do. It has been a very confusing road since kindergarten. The hardest part of the journey was puberty. I had a male best friend and I seriously thought that we were of the same genders up until I started developing. When I started developing breasts and he didn’t, I was confused so much that I wanted to die. But when you are eleven, the concept of killing yourself is not completely formulated. You knew you wanted to die, but didn’t know how. You knew that suffocation by a plastic bag would do the trick, but were too scared you would get into trouble with your parents. That fear prevented a lot of suicide attempts, especially during adolescence. The more I developed into something that conflicted with my brain, the more it hurt. But it wasn’t a physical pain like that of a broken limb. The psychological pain was so intense that suicide was all that I thought about. The higher the pain, the deeper the suicidal impulses would emerge. But I had to be a “good girl” and fight what was wrong. I suppressed the feelings of maleness but still acted like a “tomboy” in every fiber of my being. I wore baseball hats whenever I could. My father disliked it so much, he often threatened to cut up my hats when I got “caught” wearing one. To him I was a girl and I should act like one. My sisters did act like their gender roles, but that make up and hairspray were something I was not into nor had an interest in. Boys didn’t wear those things and neither would I.

When my menses started, that really started the hardest part of the conflict to deal with. I was bleeding and I didn’t understand why. I was welcomed into “womanhood” and I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t growing a penis. It was a very confusing time and month after month, I hated myself more and more. Even the use of feminine products was abhorrent to me. The more I grew into a freaking woman, the more I hated myself. I prayed for death every night. But no one knew of this struggle. Not even my best friend. With him, we were buddies. I was “Mike” and we played pretend male gendered games such as me being a mechanic or cable repairman. When T-ball season came around, I asked my father if I could play. But he stuffed my dreams of playing saying that is only for “boys” not for girls. I was beyond hurt.

During middle school, my sisters would have boyfriends. I never had an interest in boys. I was a boy so why would I be interested in my own gender. I didn’t have feelings for girls either. For the longest time, I thought I was asexual. It wasn’t until I was in therapy after my family fell apart that my therapist asked if I was gay. I felt really uncomfortable with the question. I just was saying I hadn’t found the right “boy” for me. She didn’t have to know that I was a boy inside just waiting to come out. I had suppressed it so much that I really didn’t think about it at this time.

When I first became suicidal, it was when I was fifteen. My family had fallen apart and I fell apart with it. My father called me a liar and my world ended. I was no longer a good “girl” in his eyes so there was nothing to live for. I started self-harm by cutting, thinking it would bring me to the verge of death, but all it did was bring my internal pain to the outside. After that therapist asked the “gay” question, I started thinking about it, but it was on a subconscious level. I remember being on the train and these really good looking women were on it. And I don’t know what possessed me, but I wanted to kiss them and it didn’t phase me that it was wrong. When I got hold of my senses (I made no such act toward them for fear of being called a freak), I was shocked. I grew up as an Italian Catholic and I knew homosexuality was forbidden. I knew I couldn’t bring it up in therapy. I was too proud to do so. Yet I continued to feel like I was crazy. Then things started to make sense to me. The voices that I was hearing, all were female except for one or two of them. I have been hearing voices since I was five, but that is another issue.

When I was sixteen, a therapist that I was seeing was leaving. I was very hurt. I felt I had nothing to live for with her leaving me. So in April 1993, I overdosed. The pain of living my life as what I was, was too great to bear. Subconsciously, I always wanted to die because I was in the wrong body. And I finally made an attempt to kill myself because of it. Though when I was asked the reasons, I just said I was depressed. No one figured out why I was so depressed. People never talked about being transgendered or being gay. Yet here I was, in the mix of being a confused teenager and had no one to turn to for help. Because I had suppressed so much of myself, I couldn’t even bring it to the surface. I had other issues to contend with, such as the break up of my parents.

Then suddenly women were attractive to me, something that has not happened before and I liked it. I thought I was crazy and that no one would understand. I felt isolated and despondent. There wasn’t a gay person that I knew and this was before the age of the internet so it wasn’t like I could ask Google what to do. Instead I internalized and compartmentalized. Then one day in January when I was 17, I started cutting myself and I didn’t stop until I was satisfied. But I didn’t know I did it. I knew I did it as I was holding a razor but I didn’t cut myself. I dissociated. That landed me in the hospital. I met a homosexual male and asked him about being gay. He told me that it was natural and that I wasn’t crazy. I took a chance and told the staff I was gay. I didn’t get a lifetime commitment in the psych ward. I felt a huge burden was lifted off my chest. But my Best friend that I had known since I was in diapers, didn’t like me being gay. He felt if we had sex, that would change me. But we already tried that and every time we were intimate, things turned off. I just wasn’t attracted sexually to males.

Fast forward to now. Around the time I was thirty-three, I started realizing that I wasn’t going to magically become a male. I came out in my therapist office and started crying like a baby because it was the source of my suicidality. I had been really suicidal and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. Then when my menses came, I immediately became suicidal. Since I put two and two together, I realized that I was a male and it was time that I stop repressing myself. I wear male clothing all the time, except for that time of the month that I am forced to endure. Trying to stop the female reproductive system has been the hardest task for me to endure.

I was recently hospitalized and am just a little over a week since I have been discharged. The reason I was in the hospital was because I had overdosed on some pills. I couldn’t take the self-hate anymore about being a transgender. There were other reasons too, but being in the wrong body took precedence over the others. I hate feeling like this. I know there are treatments out there but there is a lot of stigma that prevents it from coming to people like me. I am not sure I want the sex organs either but I do know I want a double mastectomy. There are days when I am okay with having breasts and then there are other days, I can’t stand them. I hope one day I can take the next step forward. But I got to first like myself because if I don’t have that, I won’t have anything to like or live for.

how can I keep myself away from me

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, depression, suicide, suicide attempt

How can I keep myself away from me

I tried the not talking approach to my therapist today. I think it works better in person than it does on the phone. I just did not want to talk today at all. She tried to get me to engage with questions and I just shot her down. I kept telling her this is all pointless. Then she went off about how much I mean to her, and on and on with things like that. I just couldn’t hear her. I tuned her out, like I have most of my friends and family lately.

She wanted me to list the reasons why I want to kill myself. I thought about sending her the blog I wrote the other day but I can’t remember which blog it was. Once I write something, I forget it. It’s like mental eraser once I put it in a blog or on paper. So I will make a new list and please don’t think this is a whine list. I am already close to the edge and it won’t take much to push me off.

I don’t want to live anymore because I am not a full human, I am not a man. I will never be accepted by the society I live in, even if I were to get hormones. The people close to me, my family, will never call me a him or he. I will never be an Uncle, though I can’t imagine after almost 21 years, I can be called that. I have gotten so used to “aunty” that it just suits me, even though it isn’t the right gender preference.

I want to end my life because CES sucks. I am tired of being in pain every single day of my life, in some way, shape, or form. I can’t even have a bowel movement without pain, even if the shit is soft, I hurt. It’s all nerve pain so I doubt anything can be done about it. Luckily it goes away but I suffer for at least 15 minutes to a half hour after every movement. I never thought my life would come to this. And peeing myself every day is no help. I thought that shaving my pubic hairs would help but it doesn’t. I still smell if I don’t shower every other day. The worse part is that I don’t even know I am wet. I don’t have normal sensation down there since my second CES diagnosis. I know people can laugh it off but it really sucks for me because unless I use a pad (which is difficult with boxers), I leak. I just don’t realize I am full until afterwards. My urge to go is not that strong.

Dealing with depression and all that comes with it. The mental pain of living every day when you hurt physically and mentally yet you can’t take a narcotic pain med to ease that ache. I have tried. I once took a handful to ease the mental pain and it did nothing, NOTHING, for me. How can you continue to see a psychiatrist or a therapist knowing they cannot ease your pain. I have tried, desperately and in vain, to find something, anything, to ease this psychache. But all I get is talk therapy to address it. I am tired of talking about it. Nothing helps. Writing used to but now I just think I am a whine bag, going on and on about my little complaints on why I want to take my life.

I never will go back to school again. I will never embrace the academia again and that hurts me more than I say. I will never earn enough or save enough to go back to school, unless I hit the lottery but you have to play to win. I don’t even have the extra buck to play. I never will get my degree that I long for. And I feel like I have let my family down because of this. If I never got sick with mental illness, things would have been different. But this damn illness always gets the best of me. I have to go into the hospital at least once a year, sometimes twice because I just can’t handle “life” and need a “vacation”. If I didn’t have yet another breakdown in 2008, I probably would have got my degree by now and I wouldn’t be fucked with my loans. I don’t blame anyone for this. I blame myself for being sick. Living on SSD is not always as it is cracked up to be.

Then we have the employment issue. Will I ever be able to hold a job again? The past two months I have been plagued with hypomanias and psychosis which if I was working, would have been worse and I would be in the hospital again. And this is without a job! How am I supposed to handle work responsibilities when I can’t even handle no responsibilities? With the Long Term Disability still hanging over me, I still cannot get a job even if I wanted to. I really would like to go back to my old job part time. I just want to feel useful again. I don’t feel like I deserve to live because I feel so worthless. And being an author didn’t exactly give me the fame I thought it would. I still fight for every sale, every month. But self-promoting is hard work, harder than I thought it would be. I thought that when my book went on Amazon, it would fly off the shelves, so to speak. Hardly that. I never thought it would reach a best 100 status, that would be impossible and an unreachable goal. But to be in the millionth rank, well, that was not what I was expecting. And then you had to create an author page. I hate the way I look so I neglected for almost a year to put a pic up. I still don’t know what to say in bio so left that blank. All these things you need to do and yet no one tells you. You just learn as you go.

I hate my body image. I hate the way I look. I always have. I really don’t think that is ever going to change. I avoid mirrors like the plague. And no matter what pic or selfie I take, I always look like a moron. I am just not photogenic, but that isn’t what drives me to kill myself. I just hate me, everything about me sucks.

I think I have listed enough reasons why I want to take my life. These are the top ones.