I feel shattered: a repost

Well, at least I'm not beating on myself anymore...

Sunday's spectacular flashback (whee!) reminded me I've been profoundly broken, and I shouldn't judge myself so damn hard. The not-productive part of beating myself up I knew.
Now I really understand, finally, I don't deserve it.
I'm really broken inside, I'm doing good.

It took getting out of my wife's truck, walking into the woods and breaking into pieces there to remind me...I need to be gentle with myself.
I'm a broken person, and I may be able to heal, but right now I'm broken. I have to live with that.

Right now I feel that brokenness-I've been able to shove it down, but something has shifted. Probably getting this close emotionally to my wife. I trust her enough that it tripped yet another switch I didn't know I had. Joy.

An online buddy of mine has said that it's easier for people like us to give than to receive...I am going to try on this for size. Because recieving always has made me feel nervous and guilty.
Tonight I have to stop and buy a tarp/bungee cords for the lovely new lady in the driveway: a '78 Hondamatic 400cc motorcycle...and I think I shall buy my wife something as well, something little, because due to the Hondamatic, I'm a bit broke.

I told her if she *does* get this weekend off and feels okay enough, I'd like to go to a park. Parks don't involve people. I will not freak the hell out in a park...unless the situation really warrants it, in which case there WILL be damaged assailants.
Like the Hulk, you won't like me when I'm angry. You won't like my wife either. She goes freaking ballistic too. God I love her . She is awesomeness itself.

repost: it's that time again!

Oh yeah...it's flashback-time again! whee!

:Trigger:


This crap is a trigger fest, alright? if you will freak, steer clear.







I've been grappling with my self-hatred...and there's a bunch of reasons bubbling between my ears why it's so hard for me to let go:

I'm afraid to feel good-like someone will come along and hurt me for feeling good.
I feel like I MUST punish myself...because I didn't do everything right!
I believe I'm a failure, and to say I am doing my best is to accept mediocrity.

But...I feel like I'm about to decant an abuse memory.

Considering the way it works, probably one where I was enjoying sex with my Dad.

Ultimately...I have to forgive the person who enjoyed having sex with Dad. Who went in there willingly and had sex with Dad. UCK!

It may have started off forced, although the memories are so fragmentary I can't tell. I do remember, have always remembered...standing in the hallway outside his door, crying in quiet terror, knowing that to go back to my bedroom was to be left alone...with all the terror that implied...
And to go in to him was...and memory blanks, but there are blurs, and what's in the blurs...well,now is the child's little body beneath his...and the fact that it hurt, this sort of ripping pain, and aroused me, and comforted me all at once. Oh god...

And that was the price of not sleeping terrified and alone: he got to do with me what he wanted. What I am sure I wanted eventually. Because I wasn't really touched enough anyway, because I came to be turned on also.

There's something that causes me to be revolted at myself for that. That is why I fear people now...because I needed him.

Yes, there's my trust issues...there they are:
I needed him because I was having horrible nightmares from already having been raped by my uncle and orally abused by an upstairs neighbor...I needed him to protect me from the horrors in my head.
He used my need for him...to have sex with me. He didn't need to force me. I needed him, so I paid that price. I let him have sex with me.
And having nerve endings, it felt erotically pleasurable.
I liked it. I wanted it. I was willing to have sex with him.
I find that revolting...that I was so weak.

That's why I feel this sense of helpless terror when I need anybody. I need people and I loathe that I need people...and agh. Because that weakness got used against me so horribly well.

Needing people makes me feel numb and terrified. Disgusted at myself too, for needing them, loving them, trusting them...

But...how do I forgive myself for needing? for being weak, imperfect?
If I were better, I wouldn't need people. If I were stronger, I could be all alone...then I could have pride in myself.
At least that's what part of me thinks.

I hate the part of myself that is human and vulnerable and imperfect. I do NOT want to be vulnerable, human and imperfect.
That person screwed their father out of terror at being left alone. That person was someone's thing because of need for safety, closeness and touch.
That person was weak, and I feel disgust because per is me now.

To the non-depressives: suicidality for the n00b.

Okay.  Since my depression's gotten to the point where I plunge into this level really fast, I thought I'd detail the scenery for those who haven't been.  Think of this as a guided tour of the interior hell depressives' misfiring brains create inside.
Do fasten your safety belts, please, and remain seated throughout the tour.

Suicidality is definitely a negative altered state of consciousness.   Your thoughts usually slow down, get very direct and simple.  You can't think very well at all, in fact.
Some people have numbness. They just feel like a walking zombie.  I usually have some of that, but I also have self-hatred and an emotional pain that's very intense.
The overwhelming feeling? Tiredness...so, so tired.  The kind of tired that makes you want to sleep.  Forever.

In terms of pain...if you've ever had someone close to you die? It has about the same quantitative level of emotional pain...but the feeling is different.
When someone dies there's a horrible wrenching feeling, but also...a profound gratefulness for having known them as well? There's incredible pain, but it's a clean pain, somehow?

Your heart just gushes open helplessly in agony, loss, and love.

Suicidality is different.  It's as if a thousand daggers are turned against yourself.  There's either a leaden deadness, or a loathing of oneself that passes all bounds. It hurts. It hurts.

The charge is often leveled "Suicide is selfish!" From the perspective of the suicidal person, not usually. They either feel like other people don't care about them, or that their suicide will be a good thing...the love of others around them...no longer seems real.

I used the analogy of a clear plastic hamster ball.  It's as if I'm in a person-sized version of one, and everyone else is outside the hamster ball, having fun, loving and being loved.  But I'm not able to participate, not able to penetrate the invisible, hard shell separating me from other people.  I feel dreadfully lonely, but totally unable to do anything about that...as if there is something uniquely and horribly wrong with me.
I feel like a monstrosity.
My own wrinkle-but I think it's typical-is to despise myself and think I need to be killed for the good of everyone around me. But that may or may not hold true for all the suicidally depressed.
Other people have used the analogy that it's like having an anvil drop on your head. Metaphorically, yeah.  Severe depression is...severely crippling. Thanks, Captain Obvious.

So I find it both soothing and frightening to think about ways to kill myself when in this state. Frightening, because, instinctively, I think most people fear death somewhat. Genetic programming.  Soothing, because the pain you are in is not only all you can stand and more...it feels like it goes on forever.
I also self-injure.  Some severely depressed people do that, without the intent of killing themselves.  In my case, the pain actually makes me feel soothed...I've been doing it for so long it's literally directly comforting to engage in something other people would find inexplicable and revolting.

But when suicidal...you are paddling your douche canoe on a sea of suck that you can't see coming to an end.
In fact, researchers have studied severely depressed people and found out their time sense is off.  When you're down, every minute drags by as if dragging steel chains...every....torturous...minute.

What I've learned is that for me...this passes...provided I keep doing things to shift it. I have to try and eat good food, get the correct amount of sleep, neither binge nor starve, work out, take my meds, try to be kind to my loathesome self.
If it doesn't pass I go to the doctor and get something done with my psych cocktail. Or go hop on the therapy-go-round. Or whatever.
The point is a mixture of tolerating the pain and doing something constructive about it has kept me alive...and on the majority of my days grateful to be so.

But if I were to compare this pain to a physical pain I'd have to say it hurts at about the level a fracture does.

So...if you've never been severely depressed...that's the tour. 

I hope you've kept all limbs in the car, we do so hate when we have to sew fingers back on.

repost, but added to...

I pick fights over stupid crap! Stupid, stupid crap!

Today I started an argument because my wife tried to plant a tree in a plastic pot after she pulled the tree up up like I asked...and she got all mad because I wouldn't let her use good potting soil that was bought retail to stick some random tree in-I wanted to use the bucket and soil for growing herbs.(I looked it up, the tree was a green ash) .

And I just can't seem to stop arguing with her...I'm tired, I'm angry, and any time my wife does something or fails to do something...for instance, she did laundry once this week, and by today, when I woke up and found that, again, I couldn't find any clean work pants...and my wife hasn't bothered to fold and put away the giant pile of clean, disordered clothes on the dryer, or do any loads since Tuesday... because she's busy making this lovely, artistic mandelbrot program..I got really pissy.

Y'know, I had a painting I wanted to paint last month...but I was a bit busy trying to make sure the fucking bills got paid, honey...that kind of took precedence over my desire for artistic expression, no matter how much I felt like I chopped off a bit of my soul.
She isn't chopping off bits of her soul for survival's sake...she quit a job because she got called "sir" once too often.

Yeah, I think I have a right right now to expect her to do more housework, and the house is trashed. I work 48 hours a week, drive another 12 hours to do that...and I'm busting ass because she has no job. Admittedly, she quit for a fairly valid reason, but...her choice to walk off the job. I don't feel like I was offered a choice, I just feel like I get to deal with the consequences, and I'm fucking angry.

Also, very, sad.   I love and trust this woman more than I trust anyone else on the planet, and she seems to impulsively do stuff that turns me into a nervous wreck...since this isn't the first time she's just blown off a job for whatever reason...or told off the wrong person and gotten fired...and I'm really beginning to hate the awful unpredictability this adds to my life. I can't trust her to keep a job.  I've  been with her for eight years.  This is her life's pattern.

And that may well end up making me ask her to leave someday. As it is, I've demanded she get into DBT or CBT as soon as she gets a job. I also want her to go see a gender therapist, because she obviously has leftovers.

I'm also just tired...depressed, lonely, frustrated, angry as hell. My moods are whipping around like crazy-up one day, down the next.

BUT ALL THAT does not excuse me being a douche. It might excuse me thinking about ending my marriage...but not being a douche.


At this point I'm making a conscious bad decision...
I'm giving myself blanket permission to SI because it's the only way I know to control the level of bad that keeps happening inside me right now. I'm going to do something I've not done before also-explicitly buy razor blades for cutting.

Because I am not going to wreck my marriage stupidly. Am not, am not, am not.

Later:  I bought a package of ten razor blades.  I took one out of the package, and did my first cutting with it.  Ohhh...it is very sharp indeed, and the feeling of using the new razor to cut is...very soothing.

She gets to walk out of a job because the customers hurt her feelings, then I get to self-injure as I see fit. Fuck it.

I'd rather bleed than cry, to be honest

A reminisce:repost, sort of...and despair

The topic of suicidality came up on another site I go to.  There was an article linked about it.
Well, ever since I got chronic sinusitis in '02, my quality of life has gone all to hell. 
I need more money, but am far too sick to go get it.  I can't afford to live without mom's help, I can't save money, I have to live out here in the country, where the loneliness eats away at me.
My life has become this very painful and sharp-edged thing.  Sometimes there's moments of soaring happiness, but my overwhelming feelings are of frustration, fear, loneliness(soul-eating loneliness!), sorrow, anger, disappointment, and resignation. And tiredness, very often tiredness...unless I take caffeine pills, in which case it's replaced by a jangly nervous energy that isn't pleasant, but is better than the bone-deep tiredness and sorrow.  I may be hooked on caffeine pills and sudafed, at least a little.

My life hurts.  A lot.  Some days more than others.

I can barely remember the time I tried to blow my brains out a few years ago.

I ripped open the padlocked plastic box the pistol was in...only to find that my wife had put the trigger-lock on, without telling me, and that I didn't have the key, because she took that too.

I took a razor and cut "people suck" into the top of the box...probably cut myself up too, because I do that, it makes me feel better to cut myself up, and went to sleep.
A year or two later I couldn't remember having done all this until my wife reminded me that I had been the one to do it-for a while I thought she had cut the "people suck" into the top of the box, and I couldn't remember how the plastic hasp had come to be ripped apart, thought maybe I had trash-picked the box like that....then the incident came back to me, although in an oddly dim and blurry fashion.

So...

And it was impulsive, yes, didn't write a note, didn't have everything organized, was just going to get in the bathtub so the mess could be cleaned up in an easier fashion, stick the barrel of my gun in my mouth, and pull the trigger.  (Gotta aim for the brainstem, use hollowpoints.)

Was just feeling totally defeated and furious with myself for screwing something or another up yet again, or maybe just failing to do any better.

  Had I chosen to go to college instead of spending a decade being depressed, then bohemian, I would even now be making okay money, not wearing trash-picked clothes and repairing my own car.
Poverty does not allow for mistakes, you see, and I made a big one: I failed to go to college early and hard.  I should have done whatever it took.

(Learn your lesson, kids, or you too will spend nights ass over teakettle in dumpsters picking the rich folk's leavings.)

When I was on Effexor this spring I was starting to try to make plans and get my affairs in order...get things set up so my wife could get the car no problem...but I was too mentally disordered to do much of anything beyond go to work and school.
I was probably going to jump off one of two bridges. Either would have sufficed, although the one had a larger breakdown lane to pull off in, and was taller by at least 100 feet, so I probably would have used that one.

( It's also a prettier bridge.  If I do kill myself in the future, I will jump off the nicer bridge...better view on the way down.)

I also thought about taking a bunch of sleeping pills and swimming out to sea-hoping my carcass wouldn't turn up.

Right now, my meds are working...and I feel like living.  Right now.  That tends to be pretty tenuous, though.

And I know nobody else reads this damned thing.
Even if they did, I'd say it: there is a high probability I will look back on my life at the end, wherever that may be, and I will think "All that suffering...and it was such a mediocre, boring little life.  No great thing was accomplished, no great purpose served by all that agony, the agony just was, pointless, like a blind, screaming, idiot lunatic ramming their head into a concrete wall over and over."

 That, oddly enough, is the saddest part of it.  There is no point to it at all.