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.

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.

Tiredness, the weightloss thing, and big triggery stuff @ the end.

One wonderful thing for you:

My Egyptian friend told me that his uncle in Cairo got a call from Tunisia yesterday.

The Tunisian congratulated my friend's uncle on Mubarak's departure.

My friend's uncle said something like, "Um, why, thank you, but I don't know you."

The Tunisian replied "Oh, no, I just wanted to congratulate an Egyptian, so I called a number randomly and got you."

(GO EGYPT! ) (RA! RA! RA! ;) )
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The rest of the post isn't fun or funny-in fact it's a very solemn one...keep checking back for the more upbeat ones... I imagine they will come along presently.


This tiredness worries me...Does it mean the sinus infection's returning? or just the result of a typical sleep-deprived week?

 I'm getting a bit more green stuff out.  And saving it in a jar for the county ENT doctors who think I'm making shit up.
I find this ridiculous, demeaning, makes me feel less valuable as a human being and it screws with my sense of reality.
My palate is itching...but of course they won't believe me when I tell them that.

Since they have two hospitals, both with ENT departments, I'm going to call on Monday and see what I have to do to get into the other ENT department.  Maybe the other ENT's will actually believe me when I report symptoms.
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Over the week I managed to snag four-count'em, four good pallets.   Four pallets equals two planting beds.  What I'm doing is cut a little bit out of the center of the pallets, then pick which one has the more busted up or rotted bottom, and remove those boards.  After that, I nail them together at the top corners-it's a pretty straightforward procedure when you take the back off..  Then they get lined, first with cardboard, then with mulch. The cardboard will not only help retain moisture around the sides, I think...it's definitely going to kill the grass.

I'm too tired to do this today...I really am.  Tonight's a down night also.

Oh...I should explain my wacky ways of eating, and how that came about:

You see, I am now weighing about 152-157 at 5'9".

About a year and a half ago I weighed 275.

Before that I'd eaten my way up to 320 in high school...managed to diet down to 270...got stuck there until I went "pretty-much" vegan, dropped to 190 mainly through exercise, but a little through diet, shacked up with the wife, let myself go, back to 220, then got sick and ballooned due to stress and repeat courses of prednisone.

When I hit 275, my allergist(then about as frustrated as I was at my case) asked if I would consider stomach stapling. Said it would dramatically improve my condition.

I want my life back.  Badly.  So began a year-and a half diet-a-thon.

Well...when I got to 220, I got stuck.  I was eating 1200 calories a day, was ravenous, and stuck hard.

Enter the Johnson Up Day Down Day Diet.

I started doing it.  Actually, being the perfectionist I am, I started doing an even tighter restriction than called for, but pretty much the Johnson diet.

The weight melted off me so fast that my coworkers expressed concern.
This was full of unfun...when I first started down days going up stairs made me dizzy.  Working out made my heart pound.

Now I don't seem to really even get that hungry on down days.

BUT
I want to weigh 140.
Why?
155 is too close to 164-the threshold for me being overweight.  Having yoyoed all over the place, my body can store it like nobody's business. 155 is close enough that one good case of the fuckits can propel me into the overweight range.

That's not cool.   I want to be firmly of normal weight, because I want to guarantee I will never be obese again.

Half of the reason I wanted to kill myself in high school was my binge eating disorder...
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And that brings me to the last thing:

It occurred to me last night that the entirety of my adult life...I never anticipated happening.  Which hasn't helped matters as far as doing things in a planned, coherent fashion.


(BTW...You want to click away now if you're easily upset or triggered...Don't blame me if you flip out, you've been warned.)







By ninth grade I hated myself for failure to kill myself. I didn't work in high school or take college prep classes-because I was just doing things to make the parents not yell at me and-or hit me until I worked up the nerve to kill myself.  I self-denigrated every day in an active attempt to make myself do it, convince myself to slice my wrists open.
I so wanted to die that I regularly called myself a coward and beat myself up for failure to have the courage to wipe the stain that was me from the earth.

This was all before I decanted my sexual abuse memories.   This is where the shame and the self-loathing came from...but I didn't know that then.

Some of the sexual abuse was forced on me-the oral rape at four by the neighbor and the vaginal rape by my uncle when I was six.

My Dad, though, I don't believe he had to force me, or keep doing so...because being alone with my nightmares-the terror-was worse than the physical pain of his adult penis in me combined with the comfort of being touched, of not being alone, abandoned.

And there was arousal as well. Not that I wanted that arousal, was ready for it, knew what it was.
I think I may have thought I was dying, because I always thought my father could kill me-that's what I thought when he hit me.
His physical abuse was never extreme-certainly never bad enough to leave a mark.
I'd categorize his physical abusiveness as usually mild occasionally escalating to moderate...but I was afraid he'd kill me nonetheless when he went off.
His verbal abusiveness actually probably did me as much damage-perfectionism is a 50-pound millstone around my neck, and it comes from both parents.
Anyway...
I needed something from him...well, he decided he needed something from me in return. So I paid that price at age six, seven and eight.  The memories are still very blurry, but I think several times a week he chose to have sex with me.  I remember waking up in my parents' bedroom and having no idea how I got in there the night before repeatedly, so I was dissociating a lot.
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Nowadays, we've come to an understanding.  He doesn't get around me, I don't try to kill him.

Because if I see him, a cloud of red, red rage just descends over my eyes.  I cannot see straight.  I cannot think straight.  All I see is someone who took advantage of my desperation, who was entrusted with my care, and who damaged me for life because he felt like it.

There is no one else in this world I can say I truly hate with the profound depth that I hate this man who is half my genetic makeup.

Yes, he was raped as a child.  I don't care. He's still responsible for his actions.

Yet at the same time part of me wishes...that he'd try to make amends for what he did.   There's a part of me that aches for a real father.

But he's not a real father, he's a 60-something adolescent who can't apologize for the damage he's done to everyone in his life-and I think I'm the prizewinner of that contest.
I couldn't  have a decent relationship with him even if I could get past my own fury.

I don't know how I'm going to feel when he dies. Probably both sad and relieved.

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

I think I'm going to lose my wife.   I just do.  I believe that I just can't make her happy, and I can't make myself happy...well, period.
After the yesterday of Not Talking, it's like I feel disconnected from her in some crucial way that can't really be fixed now, like... that's it, it's time to detach, time to give up.

I just ache, but I don't feel like I can trust her to be there for  me, so I'm not going to ask anymore.

Nor do I think I have the right to ask.  I have let my bitchy self say it firmly one too many times.