Good?
Posted by: Laura on: November 7, 2009
It’s been a ‘good week’.
If you look at this from the outside, it has. Yes, I spent most of Wednesday in bed, but apart from that…I got everything done. I went to everything. I volunteered answers and ideas in seminars. I even managed to give a presentation. I even managed to do – badly – the work to make up for the presentation I missed the other week.
I did everything.
And most days I’ve eaten proper meals.
And I’ve been in touch with my family and my friends.
And I’ve been making plans for the next couple of weeks.
This should mean that I am okay. I should be feeling good.
But I just keep crying. I just keep thinking of all the things that are still left to do. I’m so tired, but I’m not sleeping, still. I feel nervous when I’m around people, and lonely when I’m not. I’m moving too slowly. I’m forgetting the simplest of things. And nearly all the time I have to myself, I’m curled up on my bed with the lights off, crying or trying not to cry or staring at the walls or imagining killing myself.
But I’ve been getting stuff done. So I can’t complain, really.
I worry, a little, that I’m just getting better at pretending. That I’ll be going to things and volunteering answers right up until the day I kill myself.
Maybe that’s better. Stops people worrying, I suppose.
I’m not suicidal. I mean, I keep thinking about it, but I’m not making any plans. It’s an obsession but not a reality. Just something that my mind keeps returning to.
Every measurable sign says that I’m fine. I’m doing well.
And if I don’t feel it then that’s just me being stupid.
Quiet
Posted by: Laura on: November 5, 2009
I’m finding words difficult. And everything else, really.
On the bright side, I’m calmer. I’m no longer cluttered with too many thoughts and too much movement.
But I feel like I’m made out of lead.
Stupid, isn’t it? I spend all my time complaining about one thing or another, when I should just accept that there is no middle ground.
I’m so slow. I couldn’t think properly before because all the thoughts were jostling for position…now I can’t think properly because there just aren’t enough thoughts. I think, then I pause, stuck, no words at all in my head, and I just have to wait for something else to come along.
I have to do a presentation tomorrow. I have to do so many things.
I can’t think, I can’t move.
I’m trying to be okay. I’ve been going to things. I went to a meeting with my presentation group earlier, and I managed. I felt ridiculously fake, my face stretched into a grimace, my voice too quiet, then too loud – everything was just off, but of course, people don’t notice. That’s not how it works.
I am trying. And I have to be okay. I have to be able to do things.
But I feel so slow and heavy and tired. My insomnia is still stupidly bad. It’s just me and my thoughts at night, and at the moment I don’t even have the energy to try to distract myself – and if I did I don’t think it’d work. You have to be interested in things in order to be distracted.
The other day I was talking to a girl who was really passionate about her future. She was talking about how she was nervous that it wouldn’t work out and excited that it would, and about how this is the start of her life, really – about how she could do anything.
And I didn’t understand. I would have done…years ago, I’d have understood. I’d have got it, I’d have felt the same.
I miss it.
I miss feeling like there was some future for me. I miss feeling like no problem was insurmountable. I miss that unshakeable feeling of invincibility.
I know there’s no way back. I’m not stupid.
I just don’t know how to go about moving forward, carrying on, with what I’ve got left. What I am now.
I’m just tired, I suppose, and talking crap.
Ugh.
Posted by: Laura on: November 3, 2009
Yesterday I was so incredibly on the move and twitchy and fidgety and jittery, and then I got back to my room and, for no reason I could work out, burst into tears. Just horrible, sniffling, unable to breathe properly. Just curled up in a corner muttering, “I can’t do it, I give up, it’s too much,” to myself. For…well, a couple of hours, which is embarrassing. I’d been fine all day…well, perhaps not fine but at least not unhappy.
Then I got up early this morning and went to do my volunteering and I think it went alright but I kept feeling like everyone hated me because who am I to tell them what to do?
And now, I am so. Fucking. Tired. I have so much work to do but I’m too tired, I just want to sleep but I can’t.
I’m losing it
Posted by: Laura on: November 2, 2009
Things are getting very strange, very quickly.
My thoughts and my life are like a rope, slipping through my fingers and I can’t grip it, I can’t stop it slipping away, I can’t hold it still.
Tightrope walker
Posted by: Laura on: October 30, 2009
I am holding things together. Just about.
I feel, very much, like I’m one of those people who walks on tightropes for a living. Or for fun (weirdos). You know, all I’m doing is walking in a straight line, it should be easy, but one misstep and everything is irretrievably lost. And every time I actually think about what I’m doing, I panic and start screaming (only in my head, you’ll be pleased to know), “DEATH! DEATH! DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!” Read the rest of this entry »
Things aren’t going brilliantly.
Posted by: Laura on: October 29, 2009
Quelle surprise.
Today: stayed awake all night. Napped for an hour or so this morning. Spent most of the day in a bit of a daze, doing nothing. Then went to training for volunteering – not too bad, although I felt like a spare part all the time because I can’t make anything I say relevant, or useful or even decipherable. Feel like I’ve forgotten how to speak, I just keep stuttering and saying errrrrrm. Came home and cried for no discernable reason. Now it’s gone eleven at night and I should go to bed, I feel like a ghost, I really need to fucking sleep but as ever it doesn’t work. Eyes closed just means eyes closed, it doesn’t logically lead to sleep anymore. My eye is almost constantly twitching from tiredness, and I keep seeing strange, unexplained flashes of bright light, which make me jump like a moron.
Tomorrow, provided I don’t fuck it up: Wake up, breakfast, lots of reading, meeting, lunch, lecture, reading, meeting, dinner, reading, sleep.
Can’t do it. Can’t.
Even when I actually get motivated to read, I can’t concentrate properly, I don’t take anything in, my mind wanders.
I know from experience that if I go to my department, or email them, and explain, they’ll be sympathetic. But I don’t want their fucking sympathy. I want…a time machine, or a new brain, or a new life…none of which the average university department’s going to be able to provide. I don’t want to contact them and say, “I’m sorry, I’ve been depressed, I’m trying, I promise,” because it feels like a lie, and even if it’s not, it feels like whining and begging and pathetic excuses. I don’t want them to say “Sorry to hear that, shouldn’t you get some help?” (like they did last year, and I deliberately ignored them), I want them to say “That’s not acceptable” and shoot me in the head.
I feel like most of my brain has stopped working. I cannot concentrate, I cannot think, I can hardly even motivate myself to try. I’m alternating between feeling a) spaced out and distant, and b) horrifically miserable and weepy.
I’m not going to make it.
I can’t cope, I can’t live. I don’t deserve to get my degree; I haven’t put in enough work. I don’t deserve to get a job; I’m mind-bogglingly unreliable and terrible with people. I don’t deserve any good thing because I’m incapable of doing anything with them. Short burst of productivity serve only to inconvenience more people when I inevitably fall apart.
I’m stuck, completely trapped inside my head. Like I said above, I can’t speak properly. Not even about stupid, trivial things. The words won’t come out. I can’t communicate anymore. Probably connected to the fact I can’t think, either.
I have to be better than this, but I’m not.
Edit: I just spent five hours lying in my bed. No light, no noise, nothing. Nice temperature, comfortable bed. I didn’t sleep. Not a fucking wink. And my alarm goes off in three hours and I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep, and it’s driving me mad.
ARGH!
Posted by: Laura on: October 27, 2009
Just imagine it; me, running along. Flailing. Screaming. Forever, and ever, and ever.
Coming soon to a street near you. Read the rest of this entry »
A little better
Posted by: Laura on: October 26, 2009
Perhaps I have turned a corner.
A tiny, tentative, temporary step in the right direction.
I got a good four or five hours’ sleep this morning, which feels like a luxury. And then I spent quite some time lying around, doing nothing, being nothing.
And then a little thought skipped into my brain – and it feels so long since thoughts have skipped - and it said: Why not get out of bed today?
Well, I thought. Why not, indeed?
And I got up. And I got dressed. And I even left my room, the flat, the building. I went to my department and I bought some reading that I really should have bought a couple of weeks ago, but at least I have it now. And then, on a whim, I got on a bus and went to town.
It was, perhaps, a bit too much, a bit too soon. I felt very sick. Things were a bit blurry, and I was having a bit of trouble walking in a straight line. Actually, I came over a bit faint, a bit dizzy, in Waterstone’s (a bit more extreme than the usual Waterstone’s dizziness, the panic of I want these two books and they have ‘3 for the price of 2′ stickers on them so I need to find a third but I don’t want any of them but oh my god I HAVE to find one…etc etc etc). It was around about then that it occurred to me that it was over a day since I’d blankly, dully forced myself to eat anything, and almost as long since I’d remembered to drink. Which was, if I’m honest, a bit strange.
Well, then there was food, and drink, and since then I have felt considerably more solid, although still a little woozy occasionally, which I think is probably just the effect of so consistently not really sleeping.
Also, I got an email from my tutor, saying that because I missed a presentation I was supposed to give, I can make up for it by writing a short essay…not sure I’ll actually be able to do it, let alone do it well, but it’s nice of him to give me the chance, although at the back of my mind is a horrible, reproachful voice telling me that I don’t deserve to have a second chance, because I lied, because I wasn’t really ill, just tired, just lazy, just sad.
God, I am so fucking tired. The extra sleep of this morning didn’t do me much good. To be honest, I feel like I’d need to sleep for a good four or five weeks in order to feel like I’d had enough sleep.
But I feel a bit more human. A bit more capable. And I suppose that’s what I need to hang on to.
Bad
Posted by: Laura on: October 25, 2009
I haven’t felt this bad for a long time. Possibly ever.
I mean, I’ve felt hideous, on and off, for months. Years. I’ve wanted to die more times than I can remember.
But it’s been a long time since I’ve cried so much. And I am thinking, a bit obsessively…there is a bridge. Nobody is ever there. I could jump, and drown. Even if anybody did see, from the road in one direction or the buildings in the other, it would be too late. I would be dead. I could die.
It hurts. I feel all twisted up inside, like I am made of knotted ropes, twisted and gnarled and frayed.
And I would ask for help. I would. It’s what takes up most of my inner monologue. Silent, desperate, please help me, please take it away, I can’t do this. But I know from experience that if you put me in a room with anyone and ask me to talk about it then I go very quiet, very calm, very controlled, and understate everything, and probably throw in a couple of jokes and a wry smile and I leave them thinking that I’m just a bit stressed, and wondering why I asked for help anyway.
And even if I could do it, even if I could explain, it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t help, and for the millions of reasons that run around in my head, it would just make things worse.
And I can’t let anyone know. It’s why my absence forms are filled with vague comments about having a cold, or a headache. I’m hanging on to the shredded remains of my pride because at least pride doesn’t hurt, and I can’t face people knowing – how long it is since I raised the energy to shower. How little I’m eating, partly due to the fact I don’t have the energy to cook or shop, partly because these crying fits are so violent that sooner or later I’m dry-heaving over the toilet, lights flashing in my eyes. How I can’t stop crying long enough for my face to stop being red and swollen. How every time there’s a knock on the door of the flat, I pretty much stop breathing until I’m sure it’s not someone for me, parents or friends or anyone paying a surprise visit, because I can’t face them and they would see it straight away. They’d see it in the untidy room, unlit, closed curtains all day. They’d see it in the way that I don’t know any of my flatmates, can hardly remember their names. And they’d see it in me: the big red face, the all-day pyjamas, the frightened, crying, hopeless demeanour.
And really, I don’t want help. Partly because it goes against my nature and once again I wouldn’t be able to do it properly, partly because of the shame I feel for needing help with anything. Partly because I’m scared of the consequences with my family. Partly because I’m not convinced it would help – and because I’m almost certain it would make things worse. But really, underneath it all…I don’t think I want to be helped. Because what being helped really means is getting a little bit of encouragement and then being expected to sort the rest out for myself. Getting help means, over and over again, putting myself through the ritual humiliation of listing the horrifying details of how little I can cope, and it means probably not being believed, and it means always being forgotten, and it means feeling like a burden all of the time, and worst of all, it means carrying on. Staying alive. Trying to live, trying to cope.
I do not have the strength to do that. I can’t do it. I wish that I could, but I think that if I could then I wouldn’t need help. Because that’s really what the problem is, isn’t it? That I can’t live properly. And getting help just means trying harder to live properly, with added embarrassment.
I have so much to do. I keep getting emails, being told things I have to do. I have to start going to things again, I have to do work, do reading, understand. They want me to give presentations. And I know I should be able to do it, but I can’t, and I’m so ashamed. I am supposed to be happy. Being here is supposed to make me happy, and the fact that it doesn’t is my fault, and I hate it so much.
I can’t sleep. What little rest I get is snatched in brief moments of peace and only leaves me feeling more exhausted. I lie down and close my eyes and try to breathe deeply and suddenly I’m struck by some horrible thought or regretful memory or horrific imagining and then I’m crouched in a corner, wide awake and crying again.
I don’t know what to do. I’m supposed to be the good one. I’m supposed to be the happy, smiley one who never has any problems and never causes any trouble, but I feel like I am dying and I don’t want dying, I want dead, because dying hurts too much, there is too much feeling in it.
I can’t live. I can’t. I can’t keep putting myself through this.
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
Posted by: Laura on: October 25, 2009
I can’t stop thinking about the person I used to be.
I know it’s stupid, and not particularly helpful. Maybe if I could forget what it was like to be happy then I could learn to accept that this is all there is now. But I hold on, so desperately, to these memories, because they are all I have left of my life. Read the rest of this entry »
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