I can’t keep in, I can’t let it out

We don’t know each other, but I know that at least most of you are familiar with the thought and the desire to end one’s life. I am posting these words here, to you, as I cannot share them with anyone.

I have tried so hard. I’ve been hospitalized four times and I’ve managed to avoid that in the last 6 years. I got a job and I hold on to it as if the routine and my financial independence could save me. A friend (one of the two that survived to long periods of time in which I feel unable to talk to someone) asked me to try a dance class (more than 3 years ago). And I did. There I found, slowly, a little bit of joy – a joy that I had never experienced before. And I hold it tightly to my heart, wishing to keep it forever that way. I’ve made new friends and almost a year later (2 and a half years ago from now), they helped me to realize that my almost 6 year old relationship with my previous therapist wasn’t working as we were reenacting the old patterns I lived with since I was a kid (without being able to work them and solve them). I decided to end it. Taking and honoring that decision was a living hell, but somehow I knew that I had to do so. She was and is a wonderful person, but we weren’t being able to manage some of my innermost difficulties.

She (my therapist) meant the world to me (emotional dependence is one of my major problems). For some months, when I started recovering from the grief I felt, I found some peace. For the first time in almost 7 years, I found peace. I started smiling. Can you imagine being unable to feel a single drop of happiness for almost 7 years? Can you imagine how that amplified my notion of that happiness and my gratitude for it? I felt like a bird to which god had given his wings back. But after those months, everything started slowly to be just like it used to. I started noticing that I seemed to be getting, once more, incapable of experiencing pleasure with any kind of activity. Getting out from my bed started, once more, to sound like a task worthy of Hercules.

I kept working and trying to hold on. I stopped smiling. I stopped being able to look people in the eye. I started having an increasing difficulty with physical contact. I had to stop dancing. There was no joy in it anymore. Some of the exercises left me face to face with a pain, despair and anxiety that I could not contain or suppress. Once again, I pushed away the friends I had (but I am so grateful for the few that I know that are still there, although I don’t feel able to talk to them). And 7 months ago, I finally acknowledge that I needed some help and I decided to visit a therapist (with a more holistic approach, with less focus on traditional psychotherapy) that someone told me about. I spent all my money in the wish of getting better, providing me with the nurturance and tools I need in order to be happy and healthier: psychotherapy, meditation, learning the piano (a dream I had since I was a child), self-help books, dancing and sporadic experiences (*the list goes on*). I got terribly attached to this new therapist, and the ending of our sessions always brings me the familiar feeling of despair and excruciating pain that come from separation. There’s nothing new in this, for me. Nor in the pain I am feeling now. Nor in the fear that comes with the possibility that says that I might stay like this for a very long time (last time, I stayed like this for almost 7 years. 7 years is a very long time, at least in my opinion).

I work from 9 a.m. to 7p.m. like many young adults and I am seeing my youth going by. Whenever there’s a close interaction between me and my parents, my mother humiliates me and my father takes her side (it’s been like that since I was a child). I don’t eat with them anymore because of that. We’re strangers living in the same house. But whenever I’m out, she opens my things and looks for anything private in them. When I feel comfortable writing and drawing, I must hide those things in my workplace, so that she cannot find them. I know I should have got out of this house a long time ago, but I chose to give priority to my therapy and to all the things I’ve been trying in order to get better. I don’t earn much and renting a room near the place where I live will take almost half of my salary. The thing is: I haven’t done it because I know that my parents are not the root of my suffering (and I held on to the hope of getting better with the activities I’ve been trying to do, and try to change my life from that point. First in the inside, and then on the outside – house/job -). They make me feel miserable, but I feel miserable without them. I know that they are not the problem. The problem is inside me. They’re just a mirror to that. The good thing about living in my parent’s house is their dog (I am crazy about him).

I’ve told you the biggest part of my story. The thing is, I can’t take this anymore. The “suicide thought” won’t stop now. Do you know when it becomes so big that you cannot thing about anything else and everything around you seems to embody/point you a way for you to commit it? You see a large building, you think about jumping from it. You see a train, you think about getting under one. You see the sea, you think about drowning. You see your wardrobe, you think about hangging yourself inside it. I feel totally helpless. No matter what I do, I feel this. I haven’t told it to anyone and this page is the only place where I’ll mention it. I can’ take it anymore. It has become so overwhelming that I slipped into one of my old habits (self-harm). I was able to control it for more than a year (I wasn’t really controlling anything. As I wasn’t in this kind of pain, I felt able to deal with my suffering in other ways). Right now I feel that it is the only thing that keeps me alive. It’s a paradox, but doing it seems to be the only thing able to bring some relief to my pain, at least in a self-sufficient way. In the last session with my therapist, I broke down in front of her and in despair asked for her hand, in silence. I never thought she would do it (my other therapist avoided any kind of contact), but she gave me her hand and placed her other hand in my head, gently. My pain just went away and I slept quietly that night (every night, in the last 3 months, I wake up in a strange anguish and sometimes I cannot go back to sleep). I knew that such “quietness” wouldn’t last forever, but feeling the way I felt before, and feeling the way I feel now, I knew that those moments were true gifts. I look at them with such gratitude and tenderness. But our happiness cannot lie outside ourselves, you know? And I can’t create inside by myself and the pain is too big. Bigger than everything. I can’t keep it in, I can’t let it out.

I don’t know who I am. I feel lost in a fog that does not vanish. I feel that I am not truly alive, anyway. Life isn’t this. I did everything I could to create it, grasp it, feel it – but I can’t do it. The only thing that plagues me about death is what I once read about having to come back to repeat this all over again. I don’t want to go through it another day, so I surely do not want to go through it another life. But I can’t be here anymore.

Thank you with all my heart for reading me.