#4 A long time passed yet am back here. I wish something could help.

So, my story continues.  I’ve got spinal problems causing chronic pain which I have lived with for years, but there’s no cure.  Just strong strong painkillers.  I’ve got mental health ‘issues’, to put it nicely.  I have been diagnosed with clinical depression, to treatment-resistant depression, OCD and PTSD.  Borderline personality disorder tendancies, with obsessional-compulsive personality disorder.  My current diagnonsense is Bipolar II with complex PTSD, chronic pain and chronic suicidal ideation.

Recently though, this chronic level of suicidal thinking has escalated into something much deeper and darker.  I am back to believing that things definitively cannot get better; I cannot get better as I am so disordered.  My mood and my pain hinder me every day and that appears to not be changing.  Sure, I can be functional sometimes.  I managed to finish my degree whilst in the throes of clinical depression (see previous entries), and can even sometimes be happy (or am I mistaking hypomania for happiness?).

But having left the educational system I realise that I am as useful as a chocolate teapot in the real world.  Bills? Ignore until it becomes a serious problem.  Work? Yes, but only on the days when I am sane and relatively pain free which is a rare occurence.  The last time I wrote here was three years ago and since then nothing has changed; I still feel rubbish and I still struggle with feeling suicidal every day of my life.  I have lost over three years of my life to being ill and disordered.  I am now twenty three and haven’t lived for years.

In the last year I have been homeless.  Have finally got a flat (unfurnished) and of course, going through a depressive episode so that six months down the line to this current second, I have very little furniture and few appliances.  I have a fridge and freezer because a family friend died and we needed to empty her flat.  Otherwise, I’d still have nothing.  I have been waking up each day solely with the intention of surviving it and making it through to the night time.  Over the years, I’ve lost all my self esteem and all my self worth to depression, and have pushed away countless friends.  My family can’t cope with their own lives so I don’t even tell them about the intricacies of mine.

No one knows how suicidal I am right now.

I have ground to a halt.  I work about 4 hours a week now, and haven’t even managed to do that recently.  My pain prevents me from moving much. I feel pathetic, and feel like a failure.  Everyone I went to school with has grown up and got married, they’re having children or working in high-powered jobs in London.  I am staring into space, biting back the tears and resentfully trying to just cope on a really basic level.  I should be something wonderful: instead I am just a mess.

In 3 days, it will be the 2 year anniversary of a friend’s death.  I met her on a psychiatric ward, and I was there with a nurse when her body was found.  She hung herself.  The coroner ruled it an accidental suicide, but I know that her intention was strong and solid.  She shouldn’t have had access to the materials to kill herself, and should have been under better observation given that she was a sectioned inpatient, but she still died.  The aftermath of that was just horrendous for everyone around.  A suicidal person never knows how much pain and questions and distress they leave behind, it is always underestimated.  But all this pain, it’s permanent.  It never goes away, because she’s never coming back.

There’s a line in Girl, Interrupted that says something along the lines of “… but seeing death, really seeing it, makes dreaming about it fucking ridiculous”.  And it’s completely true.  So for that reason I have stagnated in my despair, hoping that it’s kinder to my friends and family this way.  I have survived for the sake of surviving.  But now I am beginning to question how much longer this can go on because I am miserable and don’t want to be alive.  And I feel so fucking guilty for feeling like this after seeing Rosie’s death.  There’s nothing to hold on to hope for; even if I survive another day, it will be the same as the ones preceding, and it will be yet another lonely struggle to make it to another day just to be able to do the same again.

I really need to reach out to someone, know that someone understands and that I’m not as very much alone as I feel I am.  The problem is that there is no one there, and no one in my life right now can understand.

At the moment, I am under the crisis home treatment team who are pushing for me to be hospitalised, though I am adamantly opposed.  I am not safe in my flat on my own because wanting to hurt myself has become an obsession and a need.  I’m exhausted from trying to keep myself safe.   However, to be in a psychiatric hospital 2 years after Rosie’s death is not okay, it will not make me feel better, and does not seem like a solution.  Anyways, if hospitals could help (me), I’d be cured by now.

It’s obvious to anyone now that I am disordered, destroyed, despairing.  It’s obvious that I am irreparably damaged.  I genuinely believe things will not improve.  In my mind, suicide is the only logical solution, but not through lack of trying to find other pathways.  This is my way forward, and I can’t say for sure that I’ll be alive another day, or week or month.  I’m tired, and scared, and alone.