I am stuck. I am a product of the failed feminist movement. There is no equality. Women here are required/expected to work as much as men (while earning less per dollar for the same jobs), do the housework or put up with a filthy home, do the cooking or resign to eating takeout, be responsible for birth control and put up with the side effects, have sex but not enjoy it too much or be marked a slut (but have the right amount of sex with the right amount of partners or you’re a prude), possibly become pregnant and go through nine months of that/childbirth/child raising/career sacrificing. All while Mr Modern is in touch with HIS feelings and works at his office joking around and playing Farmville and then takes out the trash when he’s home and is done for the day.
My mother and many beautiful, strong, wonderful women I knew didn’t let this fly. They didn’t want to be supermoms. If they did, they didn’t need a partner then. Why bother? If you have to earn your money, take your birth control, clean, cook, keep the household together and raise children, why not do it alone? Hire a nanny and a cleaning service now and again? Get a vibrator and say to hell with it?
I’m stuck. I am all messed up. I made horrible choices and ruined my life, a life that was primed for destruction (read my bio if you care to). Abuse, neglect, rape, and beatings. Battles with addiction to pills doctors pushed on me as a child. Stuck in a terrible work from home job that destroys me and triggers my dissociation and sends me into dissociated states during which I harm myself.
All last night I looked up ways to die, which was how I found this site. I was dissociated. My partner wants to help but cannot scale back to a modest lifestyle to support me when I need it most. My partner HAS options. Free education furthering opportunities. A nice car and motorcycle and the ability to drive. Good credit. No illnesses, no chronic inflammation and pain at an early early age, no mental problems, no phobias. A well-paying job. Family and childhood friends.
Me…displaced. Alone. Isolated. Stuck. No way out. Been suicidal since childhood. Stupid failed attempts, stupid ODing which ravaged my liver and kidneys, stupid trips to the ER, stupid scars all over, stupid stupid stupid.
The voice keeps saying I’ll never be skinny. I’ll never be rich. I’ll never get ahead. I’ll never be afforded the opportunities many are. I am extremely intelligent. I am pretty, the Aryan standard of all-American blonde busty Amazonian beauty. I have done things many don’t have the balls to do. I am compassionate, multi-talented, loving, creative, resourceful.
So why do I want to die?  Why do I cry every night and day?  Why have I for over a decade? Why am I resistant to a decade of therapy and to all meds? To all CBT/DBT? Why can’t I be normal? Every day I feel closer to snapping; dissociating more and more.
No hope.
7 comments
Talk to your partner. Ask him to help you on your level.
why do you cry at night? It might because you’re so hard on yourself. You constantly tell yourself these negative things and hardly seem to compliment yourself. You have some conditions which restrict you from doing some things, but they won’t stop you from living life. Don’t stick yourself to the whole feminist idea thing; do what you can do and want to do. If you don’t want to be supermom, don’t be supermom. Be you. It also seems that you’re rejecting what therapy ‘tells’ you. There are some things in therapy you should listen to. You just have to filter what is bullshit and what is right. You have to have an open mind for this, sometimes we’re stubborn and reject absolutely everything.
Some types of depression are lifelong. We can only learn to live with them. Many give up. I haven’t yet, but do not know for how long.
Everything just sums up to if you decide to live or to die. If you decide to live, then all you can do is all you can do to live a less miserable life. Just do your best everyday, whatever your best will be at that time. It won’t be any better than that, and maybe we can have some good moments. If not, then we’ve made the best we could.
This life could be all we have and all experience we will ever have, for the good or bad.
Oh and do not focus on what others have and we don’t. That’s a sure way to make our lives miserable, very miserable. There will be always someone smarter than us, richer than us, luckier than us. We did not choose to have this illness, but we do not have to make us fell yet worse. Focus on what you have and what you are doing. (it’s not easy, but is all we can do if we were to live)
I can so relate to you. I’ve read your bio, and we have a lot in common, although a few things differ. Too have treatment resistant depression, PTSD, general anxiety disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder (in the B cluster). Years of medication, therapy, individual and group, CBT, now doing DBT.
I’ve suffered neglect and bullying, and some abuse as a child, then prolonged severe abuse in my first marriage. A lot of hardships way beyond what’s “normal” for a single mum after that. A second marriage fell apart in a very traumatic way, after he too tried to abuse me but I didn’t let him. That last breakup has basically broken me, until then I’ve always been very strong and “together”, and now I don’t have it in me anymore.
I am very close to giving up, but not quite there yet. I’ve got to sons, and the younger one is just two months away from finishing his final high school exams. I don’t want to mess that up, so I’ll wait for that long at least. And while I am waiting, it makes sense to not just wait but continue to fight. What will happen after that….
You are ahead of me regarding being beautiful (I am not), having a job (I’ve been on a disability pension for quite a while now and dirt poor) and having a partner. On the other hand I don’t have the physical pain.
But having said that, I echo Bmn’s sentiment, it’s better not to not compare with others, no matter how well off you are, there will always be someone prettier, smarter, richer, slimmer, happier. I wrote the above only to say that I am in a similar situation and can understand.
This notion of “life-long” depression is terrifying. Hm, I realise I didn’t have much comfort to offer, I wish I could.
Fuck it all, righT?
@ kyuketsuki
Thank you for reading. I will have a long talk; it’s already in the works… bits and pieces come out but not everything… I cry at night partially because yes–I am extremely hard on myself. Growing up I was never good enough, always could do better, all my life I heard that. The other part is because my logical, literal, left-side thinking parts of my brain cannot find a responsible, realistic way out of my situation. And you’re totally right. I need to turn my bullshit radar off in therapy and start gleaning the useful bits from therapy instead of writing them off as idiots who have no way of relating to me/helping me (usually they say to ‘snap out of it’ because I “seem” together… but it’s a nice act I use to avoid going completely insane). I am working on the negative self-talk….when I dissociate the negative side takes over. I’m not a mom yet, thank goodness, I want to be one day but I feel like I won’t ever be able to. Thanks for reading, and for helping, no bullshit and straightforward…
@Bmn
Thank you. I have a close loved one who suffers from chronic low grade depression and has since…forever, basically. I suffer from it too. Mine is pretty intense though, severe depression. I’ve never remembered being happy since age five…I don’t have many memories before then–just amnesia… I know some bad things happened but I don’t know what.. It does scare me that this could be it. You’re extinguished after this. That’s the only thing that’s kept me alive some days. I’m sorry that you suffer too. It’s a shitty club to be a member of. I try to cherish the beautiful moments but they seem fewer by the day. You are right– and you NEVER know what is lurking behind that rich, beautiful, successful, lucky person’s pretty little life. They could be MISERABLE, absolutely wracked with pain inside. Plenty of celebrities suffer. I’m sure that many of the people I envy who have the rich spouse, the easy life, the effortless-seeming glamor, the fulfilling career… are deeply unhappy and battle their own demons.
@ abuse survivor
I’m really really sorry to hear you suffer so much in so many ways. It’s very painful to be labeled with a sort of ‘alphabet soup’ of diagnoses and then also be called resistant to medications and therapies. I found some help in DBT, so I really hope you get a lot out of it. I think it’s the most helpful form of therapy I’ve had. I was also married to a very abusive man, although he was very very mentally ill and resisted getting help/meds/therapy and eventually went completely crazy on me and broke all of my personal things, laptop, etc with a hammer and chased me in a psychotic episode…. so I understand.
I’m really happy to hear that you didn’t let that second man abuse you–and I am sorry you must struggle on still, and that you had extra pain and challenges as a single mother (I cannot imagine the difficulties..). Please don’t give up… you seem so smart, and you have appeared to realize and begun to break the abuse cycle–that’s huge…. my mother threatened suicide and closed the door and I cried outside it pounding on it as a small, small child and it was terrifying–please hang on, not only for yourself but your two sons. And you know, as I still love my mother despite our issues, I would as an adult in my 20s be DEVASTATED if my mother chose to end her life. So would my stepfather. I think we would both snap (we both suffer from depression and other goodies and are abuse survivors). I think it all evens out, you know? Beauty only takes you so far, and only is what you make it, and beauty in the media’s sense fades… my job I feel proud to have hung onto even though it is from home… some days I cannot do it, I have lost countless jobs, applied for disability but because I attended college and am young I have been denied over and over. Besides, the amount given isn’t enough for me to live off of.
And yes I am EXTREMELY LUCKY to have the anchor I have in my partner. I don’t know how it happened but I am thankful every day, because I KNOW if I did end it I would massively destroy him–I saw it firsthand when I attempted to OD and ruined my kidneys and liver in the process (that’s not why I’m physically sick, I also have mysterious rheumatic conditions the doctors can’t figure out without really expensive and extensive testing). He was sobbing his eyes out which he never does not even at funerals. So for now the thought that I would hurt him keeps me fighting. Some days I’m up crying on the couch–sobbing, really–in the middle of the night and he begs me to keep fighting for him. So I do. It’s a struggle by the minute. But people like us, you and me, we are used to struggling, so we can fight. You have your sons, I have my partner. They are worth surviving for.
Divorce sucks, especially when you try so hard and believe in marriage so much. I was really young, and the marriage was short-lived, and no children came of it, which I see as a great blessing. My more recent abusive relationship (three total, yuck, I broke the pattern at least)…well, I was forced to become pregnant and eventually wanted the child but was beaten and blamed for the subsequent miscarriage… that was over a year ago and hurts every day.
By the way, you HAVE comforted me. You reached out, in a similar state, and I really need that right now. Thank you. I hope you find some comfort too. Lifelong depression IS terrifying. I’m going on Wellbutrin again to try to reset my brain… so to speak. Doing yoga, Omega 3s, good sleep patterns, routine, new therapist very soon, writing my feelings out. It sucks that simple everyday tasks are near impossible for us but we are all the tougher for it.
@8532110
No. Clearly not. If I was ‘fucking it all’ I wouldn’t have written that post, I’d have said goodbye and ended my life. So, no. But that was helpful. I hope you are not feeling as terrible as your comment.
You sound like an overachiever. I think that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone.
You know that voice in your head, that’s the voice that a misogynist culture plants into the hearts and minds of women, in order to control them. And then it echoes and you mistake it for your own inner monologue but it’s not you, it’s not your voice and it’s not even true, so don’t listen to it
@survivor you are beautiful silly