being your illness

i lost my grip about 5 years ago, i started thinking that everyone i loved hated me, that they would leave me, and so i pushed them away.

i had been through a lot of trauma with the people i loved, people we loved had killed themselves and as we always took life as it was a little harder than the rest, i thought they would understand, that they would stay by me as i had stayed by them, that they might help me out. they could not handle it and i manifested the abandonment through my paranoia and dramatic cries for help that no one understood or tried to understand, i wanted to die and then i was raped, wherein the suicidal ideation became relentless. after many failed attempts to take my life i ended up in a psych ward where i was treated like an animal, given no real assessment and thrown on drugs that made my mania and depression much worse than it had been.

after i got out of the ward i spent those 5 years doing my best to stay alive and move on, sans ******. i thought i had figured it out but what i didn’t realize was that i had only figured it out by keeping people away from my heart, no matter what i do or how i learn to love again, my illness will take everyone and everything from me, give it time.

then it happens, something upsets me, triggers the feeling that they will leave me again and i flip out and i want to die, i push them away again because i know they will leave me after they are fed up and worn out from my hysterics and panic attacks and all the awful things i say when i want to die, i have no control over my thoughts when it happens. yesterday my husband yelled at me and told me to stop thinking the thoughts, that i was hurting him and that he felt like he was an awful evil person making me feel this way – oh how i have begged him to separate himself, to not take this personally, and it all hit me, the pain and the desire to die it comes from the guilt and shame of feeling like this, how it effects everyone around you, how it hurts the people you love and that hurts you most of all, and then the unrelenting agony of watching yourself destroy everything while you plead and plead for them to understand this isn’t you, that you don’t want to think these things or say these things, that you wish you didn’t want to die, that you’d do anything to fix this, and that it’s ultimately not fixable. that ultimately it’s not you, it’s your illness, it’s a 20 lb gorilla on your back that promised you it would never leave you so you’ve learned to love it too because no one else stays until one day it becomes you and now, no one can recognize you anymore, you’re a shell for the ape and he’s eaten all your bananas.

i need help.