I keep writing things and erasing them again and again and again.
That’s because my mind is this whirlpool of things I’ve never achieved, the things that I wished for, and now I don’t know how I feel nor do I know what to write to describe my feelings.
See? Dumb. That’s how I see myself as.
I just want to cut again and settle my mind, yet I don’t know where to cut.
My once-mutilated wrist has just recovered. I don’t have the gut to cut there again.
My thigh is a good place too, except for the fact that I like to wear short clothes.
Again, dumb. And a coward, too.
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Can you help me? Save me, please.
2 comments
I don’t know if what I have to offer will help, but I’ll offer it:
Depression makes us doubt ourselves. It’s a liar, it can make ice cream taste like dirt.
The chances are (probability wise) you’re no less intelligent than anyone else. I talk to normal people sometimes and they imply that they are as absent minded as depressed people. They just shrug and keep going.
Cutting sucks in terms of return. The pain while nice isn’t worth it. I personally prefer exercise for pain, lifting weights. That way I’m burning calories while hurting myself. Walking helps me think, so does riding the bike. The best is when it’s a horrible temperature outside so I’m alone AND in some meaningful pain….
Hunger is also meaningful pain, but they keep telling me that I shouldn’t skip meals.
I was initially excited about something called Metacognitive therapy (MCT), then I went off it for a while, partly because of the aggressive way I felt it was being marketed, but I’m sort of coming back around to it again.
MCT basically says it’s not what you think, but how you think, that’s the problem. People with so-called mental disorders tend to have an uncontrolled, brooding, ruminative, repetetive style of thinking where they go over and recycle the same negative thoughts again and again.
MCT teaches people to change this habit by changing their metacognitions – their thoughts about thinking.
Basically, it is usually possible to identify certain triggering thoughts that set off a long chain of negative thinking. Once you’ve done that, you can learn to acknowledge the triggering thought, and leave it alone, breaking the chain.
Over time, the claim is that you will simply start worrying and ruminating less, which will free up valuable mental resources and actually make you more functional.
But it’s a really hard paradigm shift to wrap your head around, I think. Because many of us are pretty convinced that the only way to possibly regain our sanity is to think, think, think.
If you’re interested, I recommend Adrian Wells’ book Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression.