I know I only posted a few hours ago but I am still feeling the need to write. The heaviness in my chest has not lifted and I am finding it hard to breathe. I just feel this tremendous weight on me and I don’t know why. I feel like my heart is going to pieces and I have no reason for it to be. Maybe I am going crazy? I just know that I hurt and I don’t like this hurt. I think I’d rather be in horrendous physical pain than deal with this heartache. Sadly, I already am in physical pain but I seem to be getting good at tuning it out. It only hurts when I try and move my foot so I try very hard to keep it as still as possible. That has what my life has become. Staying as still as possible. And I just feel broken and lost. My niece today really touched a nerve. She was just being honest. I just feel like I should be working at a “real” job, though my therapist tells me this is my “real” job. I can’t understand how my life went so badly in such a short amount of time. Four months is not even a season. Sure you have the middle of winter and the beginning of spring but neither were full seasons when I lost my jobs. granted I quit one at the end of Jan and then I was forced to leave the other the end of April. so technically it was three months of going from two jobs to none. All because of what? That is what is killing me. The doctors still aren’t sure what is causing my pain. They thought at first it was my back but that was ruled out with MRIs. Then they did MRIs of my leg, ankle, and foot. All negative except for some swelling. I say just cut the swelling out and see how I fair. I can’t go on living like this. I just can’t. I don’t think I will see the light of day again. These black clouds keep circling around me, day in and day out. I got to sleep with emptiness so vast it can fill the Grand Canyon. I am not on an antidepressant. None of them work for me. None provide relief. Yet my therapist thinks that I should be on one. I don’t see why. I will just become sick off them and will have to discontinue them after a month or so. My psychiatrist has nothing left in her arsenal to save me. My therapist is all out of ideas to help me. Yet I continue the course, hoping that there will be a light at the endless tunnel. They (my therapist and psychiatrist) see this light but I never do. It is too far away from me. But what they don’t see is my heart that is torn to pieces. I want to end my existence because the pain is too great. Yet these two tell me I can’t. One will be hurt and the other will hospitalize me. Why can’t they see how much I am pained? Maybe if they saw it, maybe if I describe it better, they will see that the only way to fix it is with my death.
Tag: psychological pain
thoughts about death
I am in a deep dark spot and thought I would write about it. I am tired of living this way all the time. Every night around this time (between midnight and 2 am) I get what I call the midnight demons. It is the time of night where my thoughts are dark and almost sinister. All I think about is death and suicide. I don’t feel joy, even if I had a “good” day. I don’t feel much of anything except extreme sadness. People think that this is depression but it is much more than that. I know one day I will die by my own hand. I want it to be now. I have voices that watch me every second of my waking hours. I started to have chest spasms and when I told the voices, they said I could be having a heart attack. I told them I wouldn’t be so lucky. I often hope that I have appendicitis. I won’t get the operation because I want it to kill me. I can go naturally. I know it will be a painful death. No one survives an appendix rupture. I will refuse all treatment.
I wrote earlier today that I felt blank. I still do. I just have thoughts of death because I don’t feel anything. Anything is better than living like this. I can’t even sleep away my darkness that I feel inside. The only thing that I do feel is pain in my stupid ankle. It is a constant pain that has driven me to thoughts of death. Doctors have told me it is tendonitis but if that was all that it was, I should have been healed by now with rest and ice and elevation, but I am not. I don’t think doctors have a fricken clue what I go through on a daily basis. I talk with my therapist at least twice a week, for fifty minutes each day. I don’t think she gets me. She says she does but I don’t think she does. Same goes for my psychiatrist. She says that if I didn’t have pain, I would be less suicidal. On some level she gets it but I don’t think she really know just how suicidal I have become. If she only knew what was swirling in my head. I have voices that are constantly talking to me during my waking hours, I think I have said this earlier. They talk to me about anything and everything. They seemingly are my best friends, you can say, if that is possible. We have conversations that last for hours. Some times it is deep, other times not so deep. Some of the voices try to help me, others could care less and just want to make sure I am in pain. I have tried to control them with medication but still they continue despite this. I think that is why I am always in a flux of mental pain. Like I am tonight. I am numb but not numb enough. I have seen worse nights than I have tonight. But I am hoping when I go to sleep it is for the last time. That I won’t wake up in the morning. I am hoping to die in my sleep. I know that is unlikely. I do not have any health problems that would cause such a thing. Unless of course, I do have the silent heart attack and it kills me instantly.
my suicidal career (short version)
My suicidal career:
I write about this not in the sense that Ronald Maris created it as that would be a completed suicide and I am not dead. But my relationship with suicide is a long one, from the time I was eight up until now. It is a struggle I deal with on a constant basis. It along with my depression makes life very unlivable for me. I often think about death in so many ways. I plan my death in so many ways yet I am unable to act on it.
When I was younger, I had no problem acting on my impulses to kill myself. But then protective factors such as my niece and nephew entered my life and I couldn’t bring myself to go ahead and kill myself. The loss was too great for them. I couldn’t imagine what my sister would say to these young kids who adored me. They were my saving grace whenever I had a bad day and really wanted to end my life.
Then chronic pain entered my life and made the balance of protective factors seem out of reach. I felt that I had to ignore them in order to let myself get into the suicidal mind frame to end my life. And I got there several times in the last few years. I had one friend call me every single day for a week until the storm had passed. I had therapy with my therapist several times a week. Nothing stopped the pain and the hurting that I was feeling. And when the pain got worse, so did the suicidal feelings. The feelings turned into plans that never were executed. This is the story of how it evolved and how a few suicide attempts lead to more hospitalizations than I can count.
I first thought about killing myself at the age of eight. I don’t remember the particulars but I thought it would be a grand idea not to be alive anymore. This got worse when I was nine. I really thought that ending my life was the answer to my problems. I hated myself because I felt like I was a burden to my family. I felt I had let them down somehow. I started planning my death at my birthday that year because I couldn’t stand the pain of living anymore. But for some reason, the age ten had a significance for my family and my mother was throwing a big party. I don’t know why she was throwing the party and making a big deal out of it but I figured I might as well stick around and see what I got. I was disappointed that I didn’t get a tape recorder that I wanted. I didn’t try to kill myself that year. But I did try later that year when I had an argument with my mother that now I don’t even remember what we were fighting about. I just told her I wish I was dead and went to my room to try and kill myself. I placed a pillow case over my head and prayed for death to come take me away. It didn’t work. The pillow case was too breathable. I was left crying in my room what seemed like hours. I don’t recall if my mother ever checked on me. I hated my life from then on. Suicide was always on the back burner for me.
This is a book detailing my career in suicide and the journey I went on to deal with it. There have been a couple of close calls but nothing recent, though I still feel the need to kill myself at times. But I do not act on my thoughts. I have attempted suicide many times and according to all the statistics, I should be dead. The one study that I often am in awe at is the one where they found that suicide attempt reactions often predicted future suicide deaths. I am in that category of not wanting to live yet I am still here. I am the outlier. And I hate being the outlier.
This story is my life that centers around my suicidality and the works that helped me get through it. Without finding the American Association of Suicidology, the works of Edwin Shneidman and David Jobes, I doubt I would still be around to talk about my life in this way. There are concepts of these people that I hope to explain in layman’s terms so people know about them because they have had a deep impact on trying to keep me alive.
The first is Edwin Shneidman’s conception of the word psychache. It is a word used to describe psychological pain which is defined as the combination of hopelessness, despair, loneliness, guilt, worthlessness, unbearable anguish, intolerable pain, and helplessness one feels when in deep despair. It is the pain one feels that is deep within you when contemplating your life. His other concept, the twenty frustrated needs is another brilliant sign of what constitutes suicide. They are:
ABATEMENT The need to submit passively; to belittle oneself
ACHIEVEMENT To accomplish something difficult; to overcome
AFFILIATION To adhere to a friend or group; to affiliate
AGGRESSION To overcome opposition forcefully; fight, attack
AUTONOMY To be independent and free; to shake off restraint
COUNTERACTION To make up for loss by retrieving; get even
DEFENDANCE To vindicate the self against criticism or blame
DEFERENCE To admire and support, praise emulate a superior
DOMINANCE To control, influence, and direct others; dominate
EXHIBITION To excite, fascinate, amuse, entertain others
HARMAVOIDANCE To avoid pain, injury, illness, and death
INVIOLACY To protect the self and one’s psychological space
NURTURANCE To feed, help console, protect, nurture another
ORDER To achieve organization and order among things and ideas
PLAY To act for fun; to seek pleasure for its own sake
REJECTION To exclude, banish, jilt, or expel another person
SENTIENCE To seek sensuous, creature-comfort experience
SHAME-AVOIDANCE To avoid humiliation and embarrassment
SUCCORANCE To have one’s needs gratified; to be loved
UNDERSTANDING To know answers; to know the hows and whys
When you have frustrated needs your thoughts of suicide go up. One feels the need to be loved and nurtured and when that doesn’t happen a certain loneliness occurs and it is painful. According to Shneidman, one must rank these needs so the final sum of all is 100. I have never been able to rank them but I find that these needs are important in everyday life. He got them from another psychologist, Henry Murray in his famous book explorations in personality. The theory is that frustrated needs are a causal factor in suicide. Decrease the frustration and reduce the suicide. Then you have the ten commonalities of suicide (suicidal mind):
I. The common purpose of suicide is to seek a
solution.
II. The common goal of suicide is cessation of
consciousness.
III. The common stimulus in suicide is intolerable
psychological pain.
IV. The common stressor in suicide is frustrated
psychological needs.
V. The common emotion in suicide is
hopelessness-helplessness.
VI. The common cognitive state in suicide is
ambivalence.
VII. The common perceptual state in suicide is
constriction.
VIII. The common action in suicide is egression.
IX. The common interpersonal act in suicide is
communication of intention.
X. The common consistency in suicide is with
lifelong coping patterns.
Within suicide you have a vocabulary of suicidal terms. The list is exhaustive but I have a few favorites:
Hopelessness, psychache, lethality, perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, press, perturbation, fearlessness and competence.
Perceived burdensomeness, fearlessness, competence, and thwarted belongingness are not Shneidman’s term but of another suicidologist Tom Joiner. I read his book why people die by suicide and found it fascinating. It really is a good read and helped me to understand my suicidality a little better.
Hopelessness, the feeling of being lost in hope, that nothing is ever going to change, that things will always be the same no matter what.
Psychache is defined as despair, intolerable anguish, hopelessness, guilt, worthlessness, and unbearable psychological pain one feels. It is like pain in the heart that no one else can feel. Your heart feels heavy and you feel like a burden because of it. Nothing soothes this pain. No medication can touch it. And suicide seems like the only answer for this type of pain and anguish.
Lethality, the degree to which someone is at risk for suicide. Whether it be a loaded gun or a few bottle of pills or some cuts on the wrist. This is what determines how suicidal a person is and how they are going to act. If the risk is high and eminent, involuntary hospitalization is called for. If the risk is low, then more contact is need and assessment at every visit.
Perceived burdensomeness, the idea that you are a burden to those around you but in reality you are not,
Thwarted belongingness, the idea that you don’t belong anywhere and feel the need to belong somewhere. It is a very awkward and lonely place that hurts very badly. Everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere or to something and when that need is not met, they feel detached and alone.
Press, similar to stress. It is as if the building of the press is similar to the pressure of a volcano ready to explode. It can lead to further perturbation and make things worse.
Perturbation, the need to feel or do something to ease the pressure and anguish and despair they are feeling and to feel better. It can lead to want to do something but the idea is that you need to do something to relieve the pressure of the feelings on your chest.
Fearlessness, the absence of fear. In this regard, it means that people may be fearless when trying to take their life, like a type of Russian roulette.
Competence, the meaning is the level of competence to carry out the means for their suicidal plan. Examples include rope for hanging, gun handling and shooting, knowledge of drugs, etc. High competency is a high risk factor.
all i feel is down
I can’t stand people this morning. Last night I wrote my FB status that I was depressed. Instead of getting supportive responses, I basically got the cheer up kind, like I had nothing to be sad about bullshit. This morning I got another bought of “stop thinking” that way. Like I have a fucking choice. I feel wicked depressed and I don’t know why. People that don’t have depression have no clue what it is like. You try and make it through the day without trying to kill yourself. But it’s hard to do when you feel you are dead yourself. I feel like there is an envelope enveloping me and I can’t breathe.
I need to take a shower today but I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything. I just want to stay in bed all day. I do want coffee so I haven’t worked out the logistics to get that. If my sister is home and I take a shower I might get her car and go to Starbucks. If not, I guess I will just have coffee from the Keurig. I finally got the half and half to have coffee at home.
I don’t know why I am so depressed. I know part of it is because my laptop is broken and I am worried that it might not be able to get fixed and I will lose what is on there. Another part is that it is the end of summer where I usually get depressed anyways, though it usually isn’t until the middle of October. It’s the cycle for me. I get this low level depression and then it creeps into a major depression. It’s always the case this time of year. I didn’t ask for it to come around. I just feel so blue.
I am supposed to meet up with my friend today. I told him I would call him after 2 as I know he goes to the gym and is done sometime after that. I really don’t want to see a movie. I just want to get some coffee and talk. I am not a movie goer. I will go if there is something that I want to see but for the most part, I just don’t like going to the movies. I don’t know if it is because of the price or because of the loudness of the theater, but I just don’t like movies. I rather read the book.
Star Trek is coming out soon so I might watch it on my cable. That is something that I do want to see. But it’s nice to watch something at home versus going out. I know it’s not the same but at least I am not paying fifteen dollars for a ticket!
I just woke up and other than getting together with my friend, I have no other plans for the day. I don’t even plan on writing anything for my book because my psychiatrist wants me to take a break and that is what I am doing. I need to clear my head a little bit before I can continue. I hate doing it because it is taking away my goal but my health is more important. Won’t do me any good if I end up in the hospital.
I haven’t had any urges to self-harm in almost 24 hours. I am hoping they stay away but they could come back if I am triggered again. I had thoughts of what I wanted to write but they have left me now. I should have jotted them down when I had a chance.
I am re-reading Darkness Visible by William Styron. It’s a really good book. I started quoting some of his stuff on twitter that I thought was good. I will place some of the quote on my quotes page. Here is a guy that was on the brink of suicide and yet got help. I give him credit for doing it. Not many men will admit they have a problem and get the help they need. That is why stigma is so dangerous. It can kill someone because they don’t want to get help for fear of being downcast. Just like my friends, who are trying to be helpful, are just making me feel like I am a loser or I should be better than that. But I can’t help the way I feel. And right now all I feel is down.
And what is truly depressing is I have used my last k-cup of tribute blend 😦
midnightdemons7 
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