Category: suicide

Lost Sleep

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

Lost Sleep

I woke up about an hour ago because I had to pee. Now I can’t go back to sleep because my ankle and toes are having a contest as to who is going to hurt me more. I got to wait for the pain meds to kick in before I hopefully pass out again. I knew I would wake up because I went to bed at 2130.

I had one of my psychologist friends on Twitter respond to a tweet I posted about the black dog and how hopeless I am feeling. She says that I have skills and support to get through this. I don’t know what skills she is talking about. It’s hard to use anything when you feel hopeless. I just think this depression is never going to end because it’s gone on for two months now. The physical symptoms are still there. I still am not sleeping the way I should but my appetite is better. I wish the psychomotor retardation was gone. I’m still having slow thoughts at times. And I am feeling like I am walking through the mud.

We did get snow. A dusting so far but it’s still early. It’s supposed to continue around noon. I think I will be able to handle going out. I just have to find my boots.

I’m still thinking about death, my death. It would be easy if I had a place I can go to actually die but I don’t. I really don’t want to try something at home. I just have no where else to go. I can’t afford a hotel room. That would be ideal. I hate this feeling of being trapped. I wish I had a hideout place or something.

This episode of depression feels like I have never been depressed before in my life. I know that isn’t true and I know that I have had worse depressions than what I am feeling now. I am just so certain that this is going to last forever, that I am not going to get any relief. I think if it was going to pass, it would have passed by now and it just seems to be getting worse. I wasn’t hopeless and now that is increasing as time goes on. My heart is also feeling really heavy and I am not sure I can carry it. It’s the worst feeling in the world being weighed down by your feelings. It makes breathing difficult. It makes everything difficult. I have no energy to get myself dressed to go out. I have trouble reading as my concentration isn’t so great. I sometimes wonder what I was thinking when I increased my reading challenge to 40 books to read this year. I read 6 so far but I haven’t touched a book all week. I just have been reading Twitter and Facebook. I tried reading Dostoevsky last night and my eyes couldn’t keep on track as I was so tired. I finally figured out how to use the highlight function as a bookmark. I have so many books to read and I just am overwhelmed. I have an interest in reading but then I don’t. And I keep buying books because I am a bibliophilic. It’s so hard to read when you have depression. Usually, I can do it. This episode, I cannot. The attention span just isn’t there and neither is the interest. I have lost pleasure in reading. Least this depression I haven’t lost my taste buds. Things have flavor. Last depression, everything tasted bland.

I wish I could sleep. I am getting sleepy as my meds are kicking in. I hope I get to sleep till at least 0900. Otherwise, this day is going to suck.

turn for the worse

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

Turn for the worse

I’m feeling extremely low right now. I just read a blog by my favorite actor, Wil Wheaton. He wrote about his depression and I feel so bad about it. It really sucks that he suffers from it like I do. I worry that some day he might take his life during one of his lows.

I am feeling hopeless. I got thoughts swirling around my brain about death and dying. I wish I never flipped through the book and found that stupid lethal dose table. I can’t get the thoughts of overdosing out of my head and now I have a handbook on exactly how much I should take based on my weight. It will take some calculations, but I can do it. I am so tired, just like Wil.

This has gone on for two months now. I don’t think I am ever going to feel any better. I know it’s too early to say whether the antidepressant is going to help me but I doubt it is going to work. I don’t know if I should bother taking it. I just feel so hopeless, like nothing is ever going to feel right again.

The heaviness is back in my chest again. It’s like this huge weight that presses upon me, making it hard to take air in and out. It lingers and stays put, never moving or altering it’s position. It’s just there. I hate it. I hate my life. I hate everything. Nothing brings me joy or pleasure. Food shopping is probably the only thing that I find fun. I order all this stuff and then go back over it when I am not hungry and take things off it. I ordered ribs at $17 a rack. But it’s been so long since I have had them, it might stay on my order.

I have such a strange relationship with food these days. I will either not eat anything or I will eat just small things all day and be bloated. I will crave a certain food but then when it’s cooked up, I can’t eat all of it. Even if it’s a sandwich, I will eat half and then be full. My therapist thinks my stomach has shrunk because I haven’t been eating regularly. But then, I need to lose weight so I don’t mind the give and take go round. I just wish it could be on a steady keel. Like eating small meals every day and not getting the hungry horrors any day. It really sucks.

The fatigue from the depression is the worse. I feel like I could sleep for days but I hardly sleep. Then I will have a day or two where all I do is sleep. I sometimes don’t sleep at night but I will sleep during the day. If I didn’t have to see my father today, I know I would have been in bed all day. I am just so exhausted and I haven’t done anything to warrant it. But then, being in chronic pain doesn’t help. It also sucks the energy right out of you.

I just don’t want to be anymore. I still wonder what it will be like to take my BP medication, all of it and see if it causes an event. I don’t know if it will kill me. Might make me sick and that is what keeps me from doing it. I have tried not to think about these things but being really depressed makes you think of these things. I just want an escape. I am feeling trapped, emotionally, like I am in a prison and there is no way I can break out. My heart hurts so bad. Yet it continues to beat like nothing is going on. My autonomic nervous system doesn’t know that I am dead inside.

I should kill myself. Maybe I should plan another date.

heart doesn’t know to stop beating

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

Visited my father. It’s been one thing after another today. He was not in a talkative mood when we came by to see him. I think it was because he was hungry. He had half of the chicken they served for lunch and then he was full. He didn’t drink too much while we were there. My sister tried to get him to drink water but nope. He needs to undergo more testing and then he might be home Monday.

I am hurting. I am starting to think that going out today was probably not a good idea. I did a lot of walking. My ankle and foot are screaming at me. I had gone to the Square to get my Starbucks. I had a soy latte and did some writing in my journal. Then went to see my father. I was falling asleep on the train. I wanted to continue the train ride to the end of the stop rather than getting off, but I had to see my father and get a better understanding of what the plan was.

I have been feeling really depressed the past few days, more so than usual. I keep thinking of the loss of my father but I really can’t imagine it happening anytime soon. I was talking to a friend and she says I got to deal with it. I can’t right now. I haven’t thought about suicide or anything. I still don’t want to be here but killing myself is too much trouble. Soon as I can make it easy I will try though. I’m starting to feel hopeless that I am going to get better. I mean, how many depressive episodes am I to endure? My psychiatrist doesn’t think it’s a disability but I can’t work, I don’t have energy for self-care. I barely shower when I have these episodes or brush my teeth. I feel like death except I am alive. My heart just doesn’t know to stop beating. I am in chronic pain all the time, which doesn’t help the depressions because they feed off each other. I don’t know how to live anymore. I don’t want to live anymore.

I don’t think I will be visiting my father tomorrow unless my sister gives me a ride in. Taking public transportation has just been too much. I am in so much pain. I am exhausted from waiting around and then dealing with the stress of my father’s temperament. You never know if he is going to explode or not. And he wants everything done quickly. I really want my depression to be gone as quickly as it came but I have a feeling it’s going to be sticking around for sometime. I am not hopeful that the sertraline is going to help. I am still at a baby dose. I don’t increase it till Monday. Waiting is something I should be used to with this thing but I am just like my father in that I want to be better now, not later. Unfortunately, that’s not how mental illness works. With my father, he isn’t going to get better. He is going to get worse and then die. I wish I had that luxury, too.

SPSM and Prezi and being a suicide attempt survivor

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

SPSM and Prezi and being a suicide attempt survivor

For the first time in a long time, I felt I was useful to the #SPSMChat that goes on every Sunday at 10 pm EST on Twitter. I learned about Prezi, which I am not sure what it is yet. I thought it was a video thingy but I couldn’t figure it out and I am much to tired to try. I did make a couple of layouts but it crashed my Chrome and internet so I think I will stick with IE.

What I was talking about with Prezi was being a suicide attempt survivor. Twenty-five years ago today marks the actual day I got help, or tried to. It was a very confusing time and my mother had a hard time accepting me as being suicidal. She was worried about me, as is understandable. But I had my own world to contend to that she didn’t know about. I will write that in another blog, but for now, just know that I was living between two worlds, one that I created internally to cope with the external world.

It wasn’t easy the first few days after my attempt, if you want to call it that. My wrist hurt from cutting and then I found out that cutting really released emotion better than talking did. So I started having my cutting kit. I had to be very secretive but then, I sort of was as I was living in two worlds. I had two facades, the one that school saw and the one my home life saw. It wasn’t much different except at home I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t talk to my sisters and my father was not there after his violent outburst the day before. A week after all this suicide talk and me not getting any better, my sisters felt that he had to know. I had a large decorative knife outside my bedroom door. I swore he was going to tell me to kill myself by stabbing myself with it. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, he told me to jump off the Tobin bridge. He was giving me permission to kill myself essentially. Nice guy, huh?

I was a straight A student at school. I also had perfect attendance until that night. I think I had to skip school one day to meet with a counselor so that ended my perfect attendance record for the year. It didn’t matter, I lost interest in school. Nothing mattered to me except for dying. I was 15 years old. The school nurse helped me a lot for the rest of my years in high school. I don’t think I would have graduated if it wasn’t for her. She gave me hope every time I saw her and I knew that I couldn’t let her down by being depressed. She wanted me better so I saw the school counselor instead of going to a private therapist. Unfortunately, when the school year ended, so did therapy. I was deeply depressed, more so than I already was. The nurse got me in touch with a social worker at the community school. I saw her for about ten months before she got married and left. I had a breakdown. I skipped school for a week and then in April of 1992, I tried to kill myself again. I threw up the pills and thus saved my life. I lost all hope that I ever was going to die. I felt like more of a failure than I ever was. That summer, I had my first hospitalization and thus started the cycle. I was hospitalized every three months because my suicidality reached its peak and I couldn’t cope with life anymore. The third time I went into the hospital, I came out as being gay. I had dissociated while cutting because I felt an attraction toward a woman on the T (public transportation). I thought I was going nuts until I met someone in the hospital who was also gay. I came out with my treatment team and felt a huge burden off my shoulders. It wasn’t until two decades later I would come out as being transgender.

My teenage years were filled with hospitalizations and cutting. It was a vicious cycle that continued into my twenties. After graduation from high school, I had my longest hospitalization because I overdosed again on the antidepressant I was taking at the time. I was determined to die and no one was going to stop me. Except, a Jewish doctor that felt I had some hope. She told me the only way out of the hospital was if I were to see her. The outside therapist I saw didn’t want to see me anymore. She couldn’t handle my suicidality. So I started seeing her but my suicidality increased. I was in and out of the hospital from August of 1994 to Jan 1995. I felt like no one could love me. Until I met a boy from Nebraska. He was gay and he loved me unconditionally. He didn’t care about my past. He wanted to help me. And he did. I felt that if I had him, I could heal. It took a while to trust him and I did. We had long conversations about school and life and being gay. We joined BAGLY and met others like ourselves. I still felt like an outsider because I really felt like I was a man. I was too scared to tell anyone this. So I was called a lesbian or gay woman instead. My self hatred rose to new levels. But I always held it in check.

Amazingly, I graduated a two year school for medical assisting. I was still cutting. I changed therapists, again. This time I was seeing a male therapist. It wasn’t too long before I fired him. I had obtained the medication to overdose again and when I told him, he asked if I was suicidal. It was the most stupidest question I was ever asked. Do people obtain large quantities of medication just for the hell of it? Granted I didn’t tell him I was suicidal, but getting asked point blank was kind of silly.

After this therapist, I really didn’t want to see anyone else again. It was really tough because either they left me or I fired them. Most of them couldn’t deal with my suicidality as an outpatient. They just thought the hospital was the way to go. By the time I was 25, I had about as many hospitalizations in ten years time. I just figured that was the way life was going to be. I was going to be in and out of hospitals for the rest of my life and I didn’t like that option.

It took years for suffering till I was an undergraduate at a university where I was taking psychology classes. My cutting had stopped, least for now. I had met my current therapist and she wanted to help me. I was taking a class for psychometrics testing. I researched stuff about suicide and couldn’t find a damn one that dealt with pain. There was an overview of assessments, twenty-five in all, and not a single one dealt with psychological pain. Then I came across the works of Dr. Edwin Shneidman. He lead me to David Jobes and the world of suicidology was open before me. I still felt like a hypocrite when I became a member in 2007 but I learned so much. My hospitalization started to decrease. I was using Jobes’ work in my therapy. I was also using Holden’s work as well. My pain finally had a name, psychache. And with it I could finally stop the bleeding. I couldn’t control the bleeding because I still bleed to this day, but it’s much less now that it’s acknowledge and talked about.

I still don’t have supportive parents. My sisters try to be supportive around my transgender issues but I can tell they would just like me to be my birth name and gender. They don’t know how much my suicidality surrounds me not being in the correct body. I hope in time they will.