Sundays.

Sundays are for lazy mornings l, waking up too early but just lying there in bed with the wind wafting over you through the window. It is for bacon and egg sandwiches followed by long country walks (well as much as you can get in London) in the sunshine. Looking at, being inspired by nature and the sounds it brings – birds chirping in the trees, sunshine washing over me as I strolled through the Common.

Sundays are for taking photographs and for remembering what it is like to feel alive – the wind hitting your face, squelching through mud, getting blisters ‘cos you wore the wrong shoes and avoiding puddles.

It is for idling in nature and writing your thoughts in notebooks on benches and watching the world go by.

Sundays are for making too much food in the evening and then settling down with a good murder documentary in freshly cleaned bed sheets.

And finally Sundays are for getting an early night, ready for the week tomorrow.

Am I going crazy?

Is my brain going crazy? Does anyone else ever feel like they want to get rid of their own brains, switch up and swap it for a different one? I feel recently the thing that sits on top of my head is completely and utterly failing me. I haven’t managed to stay in a therapy session this week, both mentally and physically. On Monday I couldn’t sit with the feelings and walked out and today, fuck me today was just something else.

I was doing really well in the session, dealing with feeling sad and nearly crying. I felt sad because we were talking about trust and how when I was younger, How when I felt lost scared and broken aged 14 and reached out for help from school and from my family, I didn’t receive it. I was shut down and passed onto someone else who also didn’t have time (either mentally or physically to deal with me and I’ve carried this feeling, this almost regret with me for years and years -15 to be precise. I don’t trust anyone. Not really. I let people get close but not close enough for an exchange to happen. This leads me to pushing people away, whatever anybody does is never enough. I’m sorry. I feel like that there are people I’m closer to because of time and that is great but I don’t ever feel anyone knows the true me. I’m sorry to those people.

Anyways, I digress.

I coped with those feelings or being sad but then something in me switched, What were we talking about? Endings, I think and time going to fast and being panicked and unsure about my future, Of trying to focus and deal with time flying, of the past 15 years flying past me, Of not knowing how I will cope after therapy even though I feel like I don’t use it now. Although, my therapist says I do much better now. She said at the beginning, she did far more talking and I did more listening.

But all of a sudden, my mind started tripping over itself. I got sad. I started talking about my brain in 3rd person L says. I got it, it. It’s not mine. The brain that I wish that I didn’t have. Didn’t belong to me. L told me to talk about it in 1st person, calling it my brain. But I said it doesn’t feel like me, nothing is working together. I was out of my wits, scared of my own mind. I told L that I wished I had a different brain, my hands started clenching togther. Itching the back of my head. No focus. No control. I had gone completely off the thermometer that we are meant to measure ourselves on. 10 being overwhelmed and 1 being cut off. I was gone. Absolutely gone. The voices in my head started shouting and arguing with each other, I answered few questions from L because they were telling me not to answer my therapist. They were shouting so loud, fuck off. She can’t help you. Doesn’t want to help you.

L tried to ground me but I couldn’t hear the words she was saying, I don’t think. I think she told me to look at her and put my feet on the ground. She kept saying look at me,I couldn’t. Couldn’t maintain a gaze. Felt like she was looking into my soul. I think she asked me what I was doing this weekend and what I was doing after work but I didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, couldn’t participate. The voices were talking far too loud now. I tried squishing my brain on the outside, trying to make it stop. Angry. So fucking angry, And mute, I couldn’t ground myself. I felt scared. Everything seems to becoming more extreme these days.

And then I had to leave, go back to work. My jaw jolted, movents that weren’t controlled, head jerking, arms shaking. I had to blast the music into my ears to drown out the noises, the voices so I could go back to work and be normal. Whatever normal is.

Even the meds couldn’t stop me falling apart today 😦

What do you do when you start feeling sad at the end of a therapy session?

I just don’t know. Today at the end of my group session, I felt as if I could cry, tears right in the corner of my eyes ready to come out but not quite there. It was difficult because there wasn’t enough time to talk about it. My heart was pumping fast and I felt a huge sense of panic within me. I felt as though I couldn’t breathe. I left the room in the check out, not mentally but physically. I couldn’t sit with those feelings for another few minutes. I couldn’t concentrate or find my words. I couldn’t here the questions, let alone answer them. I felt lost and scared.

But I was sad for a few reasons.

  1. I’m far too hard on myself and quite often do not see the magnificent progress I have made, particularly in therapy. This ties in with never being enough. I will never be enough for me.
  2. Time is moving incredibly fast and tied in with me not being able to see my own progress of therapy, I also am worried about the fact that I only have 5 months left. 5 months to sort my shit out. I’m scared that I will end the programme, worse off then I started. I’m scared of leaving therapy, that I haven’t quite grasped the skills needed to continue in life and persevere without an outlet twice a week. I am scared that I will be in a constant state of relapse with no one to help me pick up the pieces ove the treatment programme is finished. This scares me the absolute most. Not knowing where I’m going to live. Worried about not earning enough money to go private.
  3. I am stuck in this constant battle in my mind of being in the comfortable, unstable and ill side of me and the uncomfortable, scared, well part of me. The comfotable side has had me stuck for 15 years now, over half my life and I hate, hate, hate it. I hate that this is where I constantly go back too cos the future scares the shit out of me.

The therapists, the other service users don’t have to sit with these feelings for the rest of the week. No wait, I had to go back to work feeling vulnerable and fragile and had to turn my mind into that of being “okay”. That was the hardest thing.

After work had finished, I forced myself out on a run, trying to get that pent up energy out of me so I can begin to find my feet this week before therapy on Friday, Before I can talk again about that which occurred today, before I can try and sit with feeling scared and sad and panicky and overwhelmed. I had to get that energy out so that I don’t relapse within myself. And the run, it made me feel better, it was hard against the wind, but i managed 45 minutes of constant running, with a dodgy knee and a sprint down the hill. I had to get it out of me so I can feel something different, so that I can sleep and focus on the things that really matter instead of these heightened emotions.

Peppermint tea and bed for me.

Hasta manana kiddos.

Late night musings.

Trying to sleep but tossing and turning. My thoughts are so loud at this time of night. Speaking to me loudly and contemplatively.

I guess, well I know that part of the problem with me is that I think I don’t have an impact on people so it doesn’t matter what I do or what I say. I think I don’t have an impact on friends or family, acquaintances or even strangers. I think that many people are not impacted by my own doings. And it’s quite a struggle to realise that in fact people are affected by me whether they tell me or not. I can’t jump off the edge of the world and leave no trace. That, put simply is not feasible. People care, people worry, people listen, people love me. I give them a little bit of extra oomph. I give them colour in this black and white world. I give them laughter. I give them hope.

I give people a hell of a lot more than I give myself credit for and I need to start realising that, in good or bad ways but I do need to realise it and sooner would be preferable.

Medication

This medication makes me feel weird. It makes me feel spacey and distant when I take it in the morning with food but in the evening when I am meant to sleep it makes me feel alert and have great concentration for the smallest of tasks.

On Friday, when I took it before travelling up to London for therapy, I felt like a zombie. The whole train journey zonked out and numb. Flat and despite being conscious, feeling unconscious and not with it. When I arrived at therapy, the meds were still in full force. Talking but not knowing it was my voice, feeling like I was 10 thousand miles away, stumbling and stuttering over words. Jumbled sentences and bouncing from one topic to the next, never quite connecting the dots. I am unable to remember what was talked about, was it a hard topic? Did I make any connections? My eyes felt unfocosed – darting around the room. Feeling strange. I remember saying that. Feeling as though I coukd fall asleep at any moment, but knowing my voice just wanted to carry on. I didn’t wanna waste another session, another 30 squid, on saying nothing. Nothing meaningful.

And then after, a meds review. But first, a weird kind of handover between my therapist and the consultant psychiatrist. Hearing her speak to him, but not remembering or feeling what she said. Knowing that she was speaking words about the therapy session just past but not knowing where to look. Whether to look at my therapist or look at the consultant. Slouched in a chair. Eyes diverted. Words speaking slow. Questions being repeated not once but twice, thrice, four, Instructions to take a smaller amount, told to me SIX times to make sure I get it. The first 5 times felt like muffled speeches, never quite making it into my ears and to my ear drums. Telling the consultant that since I upped the dose like the other consultant told me too from 25mg to 300mg in 4 days that I have been suffering. My arms and legs currently shake, I have weakness in my legs, my joints ache. I find it hard to grasp objects and my breathing is shallow and non existant. I can’t remember and I am absent most of the time. I do not feel, yet I know I am alive. I am sleeping 9, 10 , 11 hours but I am exhausted when I awake. And then I am told,

” You need to cut your dose down to 200mg, you have been over medicated.We are sorry for this. You may need to have an ECG and blood tests done. You may have to stop this medication if the benefits do not begin to outweigh the side effects. We need you to feel.”

I am surviving this, just. And I can’t be of the medication again. I don’t want to break down and time is running out for me to speak about this stuff. I am scared. So very fucking scare of being left alone with my own brain and my own soul. And if the side effects are as bad as they are now, I would still take that any day over a day with my brain and my mind on full kilt.

Never enough

Do you ever feel not enough? Not enough for friends or for family, always feeling slightly out of place and that people can be better, live better without you?

Not even in a ” I want to kill myself” detrimental kind of way but in a I do not make my friends and families lives better by being in it kind of way. I do not add colour and beauty but in fact take it away.

That’s how I am feeling right now. Don’t get me wrong, I know the thoughts and feelings won’t last but at the moment, in this moment, I feel like a failure, never quite having done enough in terms of actions or feelings or behaviour. I feel like I am not supporting my friends enough in what they are going through. Not being happy and cheerful enough.

I’m absolutely terrified that they will leave me, and then I’ll be left feeling genuinely alone because that’s what I deserve. I feel that I don’t deserve their love or care or support. I think, well rather I hope that I’m just tired and worried about therapy tomorrow.

I feel like time is running out for me, the days feel like they fly by, as if I’m in some kind of vortex that sucks time away from me. I feel like I can’t slow time down, I don’t know how to stop it. It is already the end of half term, meaning back to school on Monday.

Before I know it, 5 months is going to be gone and I’m going to have finished therapy and moving to fuck knows where. 2 and a half years of therapy gone, just like that. I had a review on Monday because I’m not using group therapy enough, not making the most out of it. I’m being a passenger on a ship that is trying to stay afloat. And inside of me I feel horrendous that I can’t use it – that I’m taking someone else’s place and not using it. I am genuinely really worried about the 5 months of therapy I have left, I am worried that I will end the process worse off than I started. I am worried that I will have opened a golden syrup jar and I can’t quite put the lid back on because all the gooey oozy liquid just keeps on coming out. Sometimes I feel like I was never meant to recover, I’m in and out of relapse and find it hard to focus on the things that I would like to change. 50 minutes of Psychotherapy is never enough for me to say all the things that have made my emotions heightened in the week that has passed. I can’t remember all the things that have made me feel. The comments that make me flip, the tiredness which controls how I deal with people and their emotions.

The fears, sadness, anger, grief are all finally coming out but they are coming out like a sloth climbing a tree or a snail trying to find a home. They are coming out in drips and drabs, not in one continuous log flume. They are short and stuttered and out of control.

I need the feelings to come out faster, I need to cry. Fuck me, I need to cry.

I need to try to get past this grieving stage of lost childhoods, lost love, lost care and try to find the light at the end of the tunnel. 15 years and counting of mental illness, of feeling these emotions, of dealings with these actions. I need to try to work through it.

But when I feel as I do now, I find it hard to even put the lid back on, I find it extremely hard to control those emotions and those thoughts. I find it tricky to keep the emotions under observance and control how they come out.

Please can someone give me some tips on how to trust, how to accept love and care and how to grieve all that I have lost throughout the years. That would very much make me feel human and alive again.

Suicide

So I’m gonna try to attempt to talk about this subject for 2 reasons:

  1. It is something that needs to be talked and talked and talked about.
  2. It is a subject close to my heart.
  3. Oppps 3, it is something that is currently being talked about in the media.

And that is something which has really annoyed me over the last few days. Yes people are becoming more open and talking about their feels, but that my friends is such a small percentage of people. What about those who are living / have lived with suicidal ideation and the catastrophic act of trying but failing to commit suicide? Those that live day in and day out, fighting to hold on to what little hope they have. Those that see no light at the end of the tunnel, who are deemed selfish by their friends and family. The people who are close to those with suicidal thoughts that watch programmes about mental illness and suicide and instabilities, who feel sad for the celebrities and those on the TV but when push comes to shove tell us that they are selfish and horrid. That they should be doing better, fighting harder, forgetting the past and moving on. For me, the little comments are worse than the big digs, at least I would know where I stand. But the little digs confuse and irritate me because you haven;t stood where I am, feeling appauled and lost and disgusted in myself that I can’t control my emotions or my mind. I already feel like a failure and those comments make me feel so much worse. They make me feel more self hatred and the suicidal thoughts get worse.

Yet those same people, those friends and family do not know he chronic despair of not wanting to live. Of feeling so flat and hopeless that nothing or anyone would help to soothe their fragile minds and their broken hearts.

Those same people who could never open up to ask for help because they know that actually in England today there are no resources, that you have to have attempted suicide to get help from the NHS, that you have to be the worst of the worst to get any kind of care that one needs and deserves or you have to have enough money to go private, Those people who just need to step off the ride just for a little bit, to stop think and breathe, to regain some kind of control over their viscious thoughts of self destruction.

Soooo many people have lived in silence waiting for someone, anyone, to come and sit with them and listen. Myself included. I have waited and waited and waited for people to ask me if I am okay and look me dead in the eyes and see that, despite everything I am saying, that I am not okay, that I am suffering. That I need a little bit of extra help and support but I don’t know how to get it.

The media circus at the moment is assuming that everyone who is feeling suicidal has the mental capacity and capability to ask for help. Trust me, when you are in that zone, that frame of mind, nothing helps ease the dis-ease. So these helplines and memes and photos and quotes are terribly important, don’t get me wong, they are. BUT they do not tell the whole story and they are not easy to access.
One has to be ready, ready to fight or ask for help. One needs resources and kindness and knowing, just knowing that when they build up that courage and ask for help that they will receive it. That they won’t be turned away because they aren’t bad enough, not ill enough for help.

During my breakdown in late October, early November I did in fact attempt to kill myself but I am a lucky one. I have a mental health team who at that point genuinely did help me. and genuinely seemed like they cared. They listened and listened and then when I finally engaged with them, they sent me to A+E and then to an assessment suite for 48 hours. I needed that time to get off the ride. To breathe and focus and sleep. Oh my, the sleep alone. Chronic imsomnia sends you doolally. No I did not not feel suicidal, even when I left that assessment suite. I was still feeling and hearing the suicidal thoughts, the voices that told me that i wasn’t enough. That I should kill myself. I still felt it but it wasn’t as intense and that period of 48 hours was critical. Even if only to stop me trying to act on my thoughts and stop me trying to kill myself.

Like I said I was one of the lucky ones.

Months later, I begin to fall again and I’m trying so hard to not let myself get to that point again. I need to work hard in therapy, to really use therapy to sort out my thoughts cos I can’t keep going round and round in circles with these thoughts and actions.

Time to start working, trusting and rebuilding myself.

Sorry I’ve been absent but

my mind has been more than a little chaotic for the last week and a half. Tied in with that, birthday apprehension and then the birthday blues.

I’ve also been put on some medication Quietiapine to help stablise my moods and my impulsivity. I started on 25mg last Wednesday and now I am up to 300mg daily (150mg in the morning and 150mg at night). My mind feels all over the place, my arms, legs and body shake and I’m exhausted even after 9, 10, 11 hours of sleep. I cannot seem to grip on to things at the moment and my legs are weak and jittery. I am still vulnerable to heightened emotions and short fuses which I am trying to quell. I am in some sort of alien mode, whereby my brain is thinking faster and more randomly than I can speak. I am on hyper and hyper alert. I can’t wait for all this to mellow out.

My birthday falls on Valentine’s day which is both a blessing and a curse. I hate hate hate my birthday, only because I’m a massive introvert, dislike being the centre of attention and I also find it very tricky to deal with the expectations of being happy on my birthday. It has been a beautiful, amazing, heart breaking 5 days of birthday celebrations. I always expect more of certain people than I should. This year I tried to take it for what it was – fun, spontaneous and wonderful. Too many drinks, too much food, too much love and care from those whom I didn’t expect it from. I have felt loved and card for this year and I very much appreciate all of those who have put the effort in to make me feel special at this time of year. I have done everything I wanted and needed too.

Hopefully I can continue to blog but to also not uphold those expectations.

Next up on my blog, suicide as it’s so big in the media at the moment and possible Trigger Warning.

My anxious mind

As soon as I leave the house my brain seems to like to remind me of all the possible things I’ve left on or broken.

“Left the oven on, left the gas on- the house is gonna burn down. Didn’t shut the fridge, didn’t close your window. Didn’t shut the front door properly and you forgot your keys”.

Why, does my brain have to think of all the possible things that I haven’t done. I mean I know I’ve done them but there is this kind of repetitive role play in my head of all the things I supposedly didn’t do. It makes me feel paranoid and anxious and my brain does it when I can’t do anything about it! It tells me and tells me until I have to force it to stop.

I have to constantly tell myself that I haven’t done those things. I haven’t left the oven and hob on. I am not going to kill everyone. This is just not true.

And then I have to focus on something else to make sure that I am rational and busy and not misunderstood

Flowers

Even flowers grow in the dark. They find their own way into the world, into to the light. The flowers find their time to grow and fight. Even in the cracks of pavements or in the nooks of trees, flowers grow.

But not every flower grows and develops at the same speed. And I guess that is something that I could try to take forward with me. I am not necessarily going to grasp recovery at the same time as the people in group or others that suffer with mental illness.

Our live is our life and it shouldn’t be measured on where everyone else is at that moment in their lives. Not everyone is as honest as me to show their vulnerabilities so openly.

Let me keep pressing on, pushing forward to be the best version of me.

Feeling fragile and sensitive today but trying to work though it

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