World Suicide Prevention Day 2015

World Suicide Prevention Day 2015

As many of you that read my blog every day know that I struggle with suicidality constantly when I am in the darkness of my depression. I know writing has been a source of comfort and coping in dealing with these strong feelings. I have not shared suicide numbers before because I don’t think they belong on my blog. But for those that are reading this, it may help someone to talk to or text to in a crisis situation. So please, take down these numbers. Put them in a place that is safe to you, a journal, a notebook, your contact list on your phone, anywhere you might think might be helpful in an emergency and call the number.

The first number is for US only residents 1-800-273-8255. Text support to 741741 again US residents only. It MAY take some time to get to through. I know when I texted the first time, there was a 40 minute wait. I know that might seem like an eternity to someone in crisis but please hang in there and someone will get to you. If the numbers don’t work (I am human after all), please leave a comment and I will fix it. It maybe be that it no longer is in service anymore (text number). There are other resources, if you are interested. Just do a google search to find them. Wikipedia might have some too. If I find some on Twitter, I will retweet them to my page. So far they haven’t sent any numbers or website to actually help those in need just to know the warning signs, which to me, is not too helpful for those with chronic suicidality.

Random 699: Hypos Continue

Yesterday I was borderline manic. Today I am feeling the same way because I only got around four hours of sleep. I took my meds which included my mood stabilizer for the morning dose. I am trying to get out of this hypomanic bullshit but it’s difficult. Last night I took sixteen milligrams of trilafon and was still up till 0200. I just could not calm the hell down. I tried taking a Neurontin and my pain meds but it didn’t do anything for me. I am watching my niece so I can’t take anything to make me go back to Morpheus. Nor do I want to. I really want to go out. My groceries came so I have dinner for tonight. I think I am going to make Manwich so I will have it for the week. I will save some burger for my mother so she can have a hamburger or something. She doesn’t like Manwich. No one in my house does. They don’t know what they are missing out on!!

Tomorrow is going to be tricky because my niece’s grandmother is supposed to pick her up but I have a 1030 appointment with my therapist around the time she is supposed to be here. I don’t know what I am going to do. I don’t want to miss out on our time and it’s too late to cancel the appointment. I then have to go to my father’s to do his meds.

I was able to sneak in a nap after we had lunch. My other older niece was home so I took advantage of sleeping. I feel rested and not as racy as I was. Maybe this is the end of the mania streak. I hope so because this is getting tiring. I want to have my old mood back. I mean, it’s nice feeling like you are on top of the world but you also know it’s not going to last. The crash might kill me. My little niece is sleeping now. She read her book and conked out. She must like reading this book because she hasn’t really complained when the time comes to end. She won’t read more than her allotted time but she will read and not ask is time up like her other books.

I need to try and take a shower today. I have been trying to stick with an every other day schedule. So far it is working but showering takes a lot of energy. It wears me out for some reason. By the time I start washing my hair, I am wicked tired but I haven’t washed my body. I rush through and then I hurt. My foot acts up, my back hip. It’s awful. Sometimes when I am wiping my feet, my left foot will start cramping on me. Then I can’t stand on it for a few minutes. I hate taking a shower. With my hip, I have to sit down for a few minutes before I can actually get dressed. Putting clothes on takes more spoons than you can imagine. I brought this up with my PCP yesterday but he didn’t say too much other than to lose weight as I was carrying a 50 lb stone around. Whatever that means. He explained it to me but I was so “high” yesterday things really didn’t sink in.

My therapist was glad I told my PCP that I was transgender. She wished she could have been a fly on the wall. I still can’t believe it. I can’t really say that he was supportive or not supportive because I wasn’t exactly in a right state of mind. I was extremely talkative because of the mania. Even last night I was talking to the voices about things that could have waited until morning. But there was such a pressure to get the words out that I was having full fledged conversations with them. My internet kicked out. I am glad I write this in word doc before I send it to WordPress.

I got my stupid menses today. It should be really bumming me out but because of the hypomania, it’s not. I have been eating a lot today. I had cereal and ordered a pizza for my niece. She had one slice, I had three. I know she is going to be hungry when she wakes from her nap. I don’t know if she will want pizza or some other thing. I am not hungry so whatever I make, it will be for her. I don’t think I will make Manwich tonight.

Mine Would Be You

Mine Would Be You

Listening to this song and thought it would be the title of this blog, for no reason other than Blake Shelton sings it.

I did my errands today and had therapy. We discussed the article that pissed me off last night (see previous blog for rant). She couldn’t believe the terms they had come with. She is anxious to read the paper on it. So I either will have to write it this weekend or sometime next week. Next week will be kind of difficult as I have appointments the beginning of the week. I would like to get it done tomorrow and then type it up at my leisure.

During therapy, I got the serious need for a nap. I could barely stay awake. After therapy, I lasted about an hour and then succumbed to a little rest period for about an hour. I wanted to sleep but I just couldn’t. Thoughts of what we talked about were swirling around my head. I told her about the mini flashback I had yesterday afternoon after I had written my blog for the day. Just writing about my experience cause some PTSD to happen. It wasn’t pleasant. But luckily my niece wanted to watch TV with me so it provided the distraction I needed. I told her that writing about my experiences when younger was going to be problematic and now she understood. I hope she doesn’t want me to pursue that line of writing again.

We talked about my upcoming birthday and how I am dreading it very much. I honestly don’t want to live to be that age. She doesn’t want me to kill myself like I would like to. I just feel like a loser because I thought I would have a career by now that I would enjoy. I thought I would also have my degree in something and I would be satisfied with that, even if that meant working in the lab the rest of my life. Nope, I had a breakdown in 2008 and have been scared to go back to college. I am scared because I really don’t want a psychotic break like I had. I ignored the psychosis so I could get things done for almost nine months. By the time the fall semester rolled around, I was in some deep psychosis that 4 mg of trilafon couldn’t handle. I forget what I was taking at the time or if it was the third hospitalization that abilify was introduced to combat the delusions and voices I was experiencing. I just know that what I was taking was not working and I was close to being put on clozapine to handle the psychosis. Stress at work and school were just too much. 2008 was a big year in my life. It was the first time that I had presented a poster at the American Association of Suicidology. I went to Barcelona, Spain with my research work group for a few days. It was so great to get that opportunity. So I couldn’t be taking drugs that affected my cognition. It was a surreal year. Unfortunately, it caused me considerable distress. It took a very long time, almost a year to get stabilized. Now I can’t go without those meds at all. I have tried to get off them but soon as I am off for a few weeks, the delusion and paranoia start up again.

Thank goodness my therapist didn’t want me to write to her while she was away this time. She said that she will be reading the material I sent her while she is gone. I was hoping she would have read the letter I sent her last week but she didn’t. I have a feeling the questions I asked her in that letter are going to remain unanswered.

“Haylor”

“Haylor”

I have been trying to write for most of the day but I have been coming up empty. It all started while reading my blogs a few weeks ago and came across a blog entry about a psychotic episode. It happened the beginning of November 2012. I don’t remember it at all but I wrote about it, briefly. Like a few sentences each blog entry. I even tried to see if I wrote about it in my journal and came up with the same thing, nothing. Voldemort was my “best friend” and all conversation ended there. So I have been trying to fill in the blanks but I am not a bullshit artist. I wrote a few sentences more to make the paper 300 words. That was all that this episode amounted to. I really would love to expand this but I have nothing to go on. I even tried writing to my therapist about my difficulties hoping it would spark something and I would get something on paper, but alas, nothing. I just wrote the difficulty of writing and that was all. What I did learn through looking at my old journal was what set off the psychosis, which is interesting. I apparently misplaced my 8GB thumb drive and it was causing me considerable panic. In normal people, they would have a panic attack and that would be it. Not me. I became psychotic and apparently it took the form of Voldemort’s tweets to set me off. I wasn’t taking my anti-psychotic medicine at the time so I was more vulnerable. Losing this thumb drive was my life. Every suicide research article I ever read was on this drive as well as my papers on the subject. It would have been a huge loss and I was just sick with worry. But I did find the stupid thing. It was hidden under some papers and my “life” was saved. I made a few copies of it just so in case I misplaced it again, I would have it.

I did considerable research into trying to find out what the episode was about and if I wrote more about it. I still came up empty. Apparently Voldemort wrote a thing about Taylor Swift, calling her Haylor as she was dating a Harry at the time of the tweet. I have no idea what the last name of the Harry was. I am sure a Google search will probably yield it but I really don’t care. I tried looking back to his tweets from 2012 but they just went as far back as Jan 2013 and stopped there. I was so close to getting what I needed. He was active on his account but slowly tampered off. No wonder I was becoming so paranoid and thinking he was “tweeting me personally”. He would tweet several times a day. And now it’s every few days. Reading over the tweets weren’t triggering for me because I had no recollection of the psychotic episode. The only proof that I have of its existence is my blog and what little I wrote in my journal, which was only three sentences. For the days that I was psychotic, I didn’t write or blog. I probably was too incapacitated. If the psychosis had commanding voices/tones, I probably was too paranoid to put pen to paper for fear of being persecuted. And the last thing you want to do is piss off is a dark wizard. He might have been make believe to everyone, but for a few days, he was real to me.

The reason I was interested in finding the tweet about Taylor was because he “made me” listen to her songs after the tweet. It usually doesn’t take much for me to listen to Taylor because she is my favorite artist, but the thought that someone on Twitter made me listen was curious. Apparently he had tweeted something from her video “Story of Us”. The only thing I remember was Snape telling the students to turn to page 394, like it did in the Harry Potter book. Whether that was where “Haylor” came from (Harry + Taylor=Haylor), I am at a loss. I couldn’t find the tweet and I didn’t write more about it, which further piques my curiosity about this episode. I had written that my therapist was concerned about my losing reality so this was serious. Of course, any time I become psychotic my therapist panics. I have no idea if my pdoc was concerned because I didn’t write about that. I didn’t go into the hospital so I am guessing the medication helped and I didn’t need further assistance. I think finding the drive relieved some of the anxiety to help the medication work. And once it did, the delusions, paranoia, and voices were gone. He also was “talking to me”, though it was all mumbled according to what I wrote it. Usually voices are mumbled but I can “sense” what they mean.

The reason this is all fascinating to me is because I am such a Harry Potter fan. I have read each book at least three times and am currently read each on another time. I have seen all the movies, which were a little disappointment as they cut things from the book or added things that didn’t occur in the book. I also follow the Dark Lord on Twitter as well as Snape. Snape’s account is wicked funny. But for whatever reason, didn’t have the same psychotic hold on me as the Dark Lord’s. I think because Voldemort’s tweets were really commanding tweets than funny in nature. I am sure the tweets were meant in jest, but for whatever reason, I took them seriously, at the time. There was also a tweet saying to rob houses of Twilight freaks that saw the movie when it came out back then. I had written that I wanted to steal my sister’s sweets and Halloween candy as I knew she would be at the movie. That is probably funny now but it wasn’t then. In seriousness, I was in deep turmoil of acting on a tweet because I was “commanded” to. It was troubling me. I honestly have no clue why I wasn’t in the hospital. All the previous times that I ever had commanding voices, I was inpatient. I must have seriously have had the confidence of my psychiatrist that I wasn’t a harm to myself or others. But then, it was just a few short days and like I said, medication helped tremendously that I have no recollection of these events as they played out. I usually do remember my delusions because they last so long or I am really convinced things are happening as my mind is playing them out. Maybe because I didn’t land in the hospital I don’t remember these delusions and commanding voices/tweets. I wrote that Voldemort was “personally talking to me”, which I can only mean that his tweets were personal. But that is probably because I had his tweets sent to my mobile phone so it acted as a text message to me. In my delusional mind, it was meant for me, and me only.