Thursday, April 21, 2005
Facing the Demons
I have put this post off way too long now. Not just this post, really, but the truth of the matter.
The truth of the matter that I am sick. That I need help. That if I don't get it, and don't get it soon, I will snap, and when that happens, there is no one I am more afraid of than myself.
Is it too personal to post here? You bet. But I made the decision to still do it, because typing it and sharing it forces me to face it. It makes it impossible to run away from it anymore, or to hide it away somewhere inside of me, where no one can see it, or know that it even exists, and where it has been cooking in its own steam ever since... well, I think ever since I can remember.
But it is out now, and it took more than it ever should have taken to come to the surface. The sacrifice is too big, I almost lost the man I love more than anything in this world over it.
Well, he didn't go, but he is not making it easy for me, either. Which he has the right to. And at the same time, I need to do something about it, whether it makes me feel comfortable or not. Whether I can handle it or not. Because it is safe to say that if I don't do it now, there might not be a later for me.
Big, scary secret? Oh, Internet, I bet you can't wait to hear it, and then laugh at me and call me a drama queen, and tell me how much I am exaggerating, and how many people in this world have it worse than me. Just suck it up and move on, you would say, and barking dogs don't bite. And really, I could almost say you would be justified with this, for I am pathetic.
Let's give a name to the monster, shall we.
Yeah, let's. Let's see how it looks like out of my mind, and put into words, words that anybody can read.
I am suicidal.
There. Spelled out it looks much funnier and much more harmless than it probably really is. It almost makes me laugh at myself.
Ha ha ha.
The thought that the world would be better off without me has manifested itself inside my brain a long time ago, a very long time ago, and has never really left me since. Sometimes it was stronger, sometimes it was more like a tolerable light pulsating in a sore tooth, but it has been there. It is there. It is always with me. Feelings of worthlessness, ugliness, and vague sensation that I should have never been born, that I shouldn't have the right to live at all. That nobody should have to put up with me, and should have to look at me. I have been rejected and ridiculed by people ever since I can remember. For all my life. I was always the one being laughed at, being made fun of, being excluded from every social activity, unless it involved the other outcasts as well.
I had little chants involving my name and several creative insults been made up in my honor.
They still haunt me today, 20 fucking years later.
I was shunned, laughed at, talked about behind my back just so that I would be aware of it, pushed around. I had many a finger pointed at me, laughter following me. In my volleyball team I had balls smashed at me with the sole intention to hurt me.
I was always too ugly, too poor, too tall, too shy, too pimply, too uncool for almost everybody, and everything.
Every teenager has her cross to bear, you might say. It's in the past, you might say. Don't let the past affect you, and enjoy who and what you are today, you might even say. You would sound like The Fiance, and you would even be right.
Only what I am today is a result of all of that, and it is not an ounce better than it was. Only now I am an adult, able to play it cool, able to let it bounce off of me, able to swallow it down, ignore it. I can sufficiently hide the fact that I am completely socially dysfunctional. I can play it over with superficial relationships, and pretending. I am able to paint a colorful picture of myself that is acceptable to people, that allows people around me accept what they see, but which has nothing to do with what is inside of me. What people see when I am performing on stage, what people see when I am laughing and joking, what people see when it looks like I am having fun, all that is a fassade. It's controlled facial musculature, and I am very skilled at using it.
What I really am is lonely. It's me, myself, and I in the company of my own mind. Untrusting. Building walls between me and people, even those people who I love most. Being scared to death of rejection, yet causing it with well calculated attitude and harshness that keeps people at least an arm's length away from me. Starving for love and attention, yet rejecting it and stomping it into the ground when I receive it. Hurting others with all my might, before anyone gets a chance at hurting me. Wanting nothing more than to love unconditionally, yet finding a lot more comfort in hurting people. Their hurt feeds me, sustains me, makes me feel better about myself. Makes me feel superior in a world where I am inferior or non-existant to everybody. It's my power fix, it's what is so much easier for me than to love.
It causes me to lose people. It causes people to draw away from me. It causes people to get angry with me.
Which in turn makes me lonlier and lonlier. It bottles up, it becomes unbearable. It is slowly killing me inside.
Which brings me back to the problem. I have no outlet, I have nobody to lean on, even though someone so willing to help and make it better is offering himself for just that, right in front of me. He's there, arms wide open, begging me to open up to him, yet the more he does it, the more I push him away. I trust him with my life, yet I don't trust him with my emotions. I don't trust him to be able to hold the weight that's inside of me. I'm slipping away from him the more he wants to help me, and it took for him to almost leave me for me to finally crumble in his presence. The words that came out of me when I could finally speak again, between hysterical sobs and violent banging of my head against the wall, which he had to interject with his hand for me not to really injure myself were "I need help. I need someone to help me."
It was the most desperate thing I ever heard coming out of my own mouth.
And it's true. I am scared of myself. There is not one day that passes without me imagining myself in various positions of self-inflicted death, people finding me. Dangling off my bathing-robe belt. With slit open wrists in a sea of blood on the bathroom floor. In bed, as if I were just asleep, the leftover pills scattered all around me. I fantasize about running the car into the oncoming traffic when I am driving. Whenever I am driving. I think about crossing streets at red lights. I think about accidentally falling off a bridge with a brick tied to my ankles. I fantasize about how it would be like to drown, to suffocate, to freeze to death. I contemplate which would be the easiest and most painless way to go.
Every.fucking.day.of.my.life.
I don't even remember it having been any other way anymore. I don't remember when it was the last time that I pictured myself alive and happy. I dream about death. I dream about being executed by a court of law. I dream about killing people. That's almost all I ever dream about.
And I cut my arms with scissors, when the pain inside gets too much.
Yet I have not ever seriously attempted anything. What's holding me back is my immense fear of pain. That, and the thought of how it would inconvenience others to find me dead, and how much I would hurt my family. It's a guilt trip that I am afraid would follow me into death and beyond. This guilt trip is what keeps me sane enough to not go any further than to make myself bleed with scissors.
But I feel it is getting worse. During last night's argument I came up with about 20 different creative ways of putting and end to all this. And it scared the living hell out of me. I don't want to be like this anymore. I don't want to think about death anymore, I don't want to drag people down anymore. I want to be a happy normal person who can look at herself in the mirror without feeling disgust and pain, and who can be easy around people, and loving to the one person she loves more than anything in this world. I want the darkness to leave my head - because frankly: I have no reason in my life and the way it is right now to feel this way in the first place.
But that's the thing with logic vs. emotion... your head my know, but your heart refuses to believe.
I need help, because I am scared that maybe one day I won't care about making other people feel bad anymore, and that maybe one day pain won't phase me anymore either. When that happens, I will be my biggest enemy, and I am very scared of myself, and the deep dark clefts that are in my mind, and what's in there. Right now I am occasionally finding a valve, and when I open it it's like I unleash God's seven plagues onto one single person - the one person I love most - and when that happens, I can't find the off-button anymore. I hurt and I hurt and I hurt, I lash out, stoop on a level that under normal circumstances I wouldn't even think exists in my mind, and I will only stop when I see him completely smashed and shattered on the floor, ready to leave me. That's when the pressure in my head finally becomes bearable again, and I can return to function halfway normally, until that pressure is there again someday in the future, and I do it all over again.
Only - I don't know if the next time this happens he will be there to listen to it anymore. And that's what scares me almost more than the pain, and what I could do to myself.
And there is no way I can control this... if I could, I wouldn't have done it for a second time , and most certainly not for the third last night. I need help not to let the pressure build up like that in the first place, because once it releases, there is no way for me to stop it. I violently knock out that little pleading voice inside of me that tells me to stop, and to let go, and that I am making things a lot worse. That little voice that tells me that I am hurting the person I love most more than anyone ever could... because one thing I have to give to myself: my mouth is my biggest weapon. Once unleashed, I know exactly where to stab and turn the dagger around and around, I know where it hurts the most, and I am very skilled at hitting these spots over and over and over again.
I am tired of it. I am tired of myself. I am tired of wanting to be invisible, wanting to be gone. I am tired of watching the scratch marks heal on my arms. I am tired of waking up every morning, cursing god for not stopping my heart beat during the night, as I pray for night after night after night. I am not religious, I don't even believe in god - but this is what I still pray for.
There is "crisis counseling" availabe at the Health Center on campus. As far as I know it's a free service to enrolled students. The Fiancé has made it quite clear to me that he wants me to see a therapist now, or else. I understand. I should see one. But the thought of that just makes me feel even more of a failure, and I am very embarrassed by the mere imagination of telling my problems to a complete strangers whose interest in me doesn't go beyond the paycheck he or she will receive at the end of the month. But I do need help. And I need it NOW. Admitting is the first step on the road to recovery. I want to be able to see myself as an old and happy person again in my mind. I want that possibility to be open in my mind again. And most of all I want to stop hurting - myself, and the person I love more in this world than anybody else...
I am not sure how frequently I will post here or on my other blog anymore in the near future. There are many things that I need to sort out, and many things that I need to start to repair. Thank you for sticking with me, those of you who care.
The truth of the matter that I am sick. That I need help. That if I don't get it, and don't get it soon, I will snap, and when that happens, there is no one I am more afraid of than myself.
Is it too personal to post here? You bet. But I made the decision to still do it, because typing it and sharing it forces me to face it. It makes it impossible to run away from it anymore, or to hide it away somewhere inside of me, where no one can see it, or know that it even exists, and where it has been cooking in its own steam ever since... well, I think ever since I can remember.
But it is out now, and it took more than it ever should have taken to come to the surface. The sacrifice is too big, I almost lost the man I love more than anything in this world over it.
Well, he didn't go, but he is not making it easy for me, either. Which he has the right to. And at the same time, I need to do something about it, whether it makes me feel comfortable or not. Whether I can handle it or not. Because it is safe to say that if I don't do it now, there might not be a later for me.
Big, scary secret? Oh, Internet, I bet you can't wait to hear it, and then laugh at me and call me a drama queen, and tell me how much I am exaggerating, and how many people in this world have it worse than me. Just suck it up and move on, you would say, and barking dogs don't bite. And really, I could almost say you would be justified with this, for I am pathetic.
Let's give a name to the monster, shall we.
Yeah, let's. Let's see how it looks like out of my mind, and put into words, words that anybody can read.
I am suicidal.
There. Spelled out it looks much funnier and much more harmless than it probably really is. It almost makes me laugh at myself.
Ha ha ha.
The thought that the world would be better off without me has manifested itself inside my brain a long time ago, a very long time ago, and has never really left me since. Sometimes it was stronger, sometimes it was more like a tolerable light pulsating in a sore tooth, but it has been there. It is there. It is always with me. Feelings of worthlessness, ugliness, and vague sensation that I should have never been born, that I shouldn't have the right to live at all. That nobody should have to put up with me, and should have to look at me. I have been rejected and ridiculed by people ever since I can remember. For all my life. I was always the one being laughed at, being made fun of, being excluded from every social activity, unless it involved the other outcasts as well.
I had little chants involving my name and several creative insults been made up in my honor.
They still haunt me today, 20 fucking years later.
I was shunned, laughed at, talked about behind my back just so that I would be aware of it, pushed around. I had many a finger pointed at me, laughter following me. In my volleyball team I had balls smashed at me with the sole intention to hurt me.
I was always too ugly, too poor, too tall, too shy, too pimply, too uncool for almost everybody, and everything.
Every teenager has her cross to bear, you might say. It's in the past, you might say. Don't let the past affect you, and enjoy who and what you are today, you might even say. You would sound like The Fiance, and you would even be right.
Only what I am today is a result of all of that, and it is not an ounce better than it was. Only now I am an adult, able to play it cool, able to let it bounce off of me, able to swallow it down, ignore it. I can sufficiently hide the fact that I am completely socially dysfunctional. I can play it over with superficial relationships, and pretending. I am able to paint a colorful picture of myself that is acceptable to people, that allows people around me accept what they see, but which has nothing to do with what is inside of me. What people see when I am performing on stage, what people see when I am laughing and joking, what people see when it looks like I am having fun, all that is a fassade. It's controlled facial musculature, and I am very skilled at using it.
What I really am is lonely. It's me, myself, and I in the company of my own mind. Untrusting. Building walls between me and people, even those people who I love most. Being scared to death of rejection, yet causing it with well calculated attitude and harshness that keeps people at least an arm's length away from me. Starving for love and attention, yet rejecting it and stomping it into the ground when I receive it. Hurting others with all my might, before anyone gets a chance at hurting me. Wanting nothing more than to love unconditionally, yet finding a lot more comfort in hurting people. Their hurt feeds me, sustains me, makes me feel better about myself. Makes me feel superior in a world where I am inferior or non-existant to everybody. It's my power fix, it's what is so much easier for me than to love.
It causes me to lose people. It causes people to draw away from me. It causes people to get angry with me.
Which in turn makes me lonlier and lonlier. It bottles up, it becomes unbearable. It is slowly killing me inside.
Which brings me back to the problem. I have no outlet, I have nobody to lean on, even though someone so willing to help and make it better is offering himself for just that, right in front of me. He's there, arms wide open, begging me to open up to him, yet the more he does it, the more I push him away. I trust him with my life, yet I don't trust him with my emotions. I don't trust him to be able to hold the weight that's inside of me. I'm slipping away from him the more he wants to help me, and it took for him to almost leave me for me to finally crumble in his presence. The words that came out of me when I could finally speak again, between hysterical sobs and violent banging of my head against the wall, which he had to interject with his hand for me not to really injure myself were "I need help. I need someone to help me."
It was the most desperate thing I ever heard coming out of my own mouth.
And it's true. I am scared of myself. There is not one day that passes without me imagining myself in various positions of self-inflicted death, people finding me. Dangling off my bathing-robe belt. With slit open wrists in a sea of blood on the bathroom floor. In bed, as if I were just asleep, the leftover pills scattered all around me. I fantasize about running the car into the oncoming traffic when I am driving. Whenever I am driving. I think about crossing streets at red lights. I think about accidentally falling off a bridge with a brick tied to my ankles. I fantasize about how it would be like to drown, to suffocate, to freeze to death. I contemplate which would be the easiest and most painless way to go.
Every.fucking.day.of.my.life.
I don't even remember it having been any other way anymore. I don't remember when it was the last time that I pictured myself alive and happy. I dream about death. I dream about being executed by a court of law. I dream about killing people. That's almost all I ever dream about.
And I cut my arms with scissors, when the pain inside gets too much.
Yet I have not ever seriously attempted anything. What's holding me back is my immense fear of pain. That, and the thought of how it would inconvenience others to find me dead, and how much I would hurt my family. It's a guilt trip that I am afraid would follow me into death and beyond. This guilt trip is what keeps me sane enough to not go any further than to make myself bleed with scissors.
But I feel it is getting worse. During last night's argument I came up with about 20 different creative ways of putting and end to all this. And it scared the living hell out of me. I don't want to be like this anymore. I don't want to think about death anymore, I don't want to drag people down anymore. I want to be a happy normal person who can look at herself in the mirror without feeling disgust and pain, and who can be easy around people, and loving to the one person she loves more than anything in this world. I want the darkness to leave my head - because frankly: I have no reason in my life and the way it is right now to feel this way in the first place.
But that's the thing with logic vs. emotion... your head my know, but your heart refuses to believe.
I need help, because I am scared that maybe one day I won't care about making other people feel bad anymore, and that maybe one day pain won't phase me anymore either. When that happens, I will be my biggest enemy, and I am very scared of myself, and the deep dark clefts that are in my mind, and what's in there. Right now I am occasionally finding a valve, and when I open it it's like I unleash God's seven plagues onto one single person - the one person I love most - and when that happens, I can't find the off-button anymore. I hurt and I hurt and I hurt, I lash out, stoop on a level that under normal circumstances I wouldn't even think exists in my mind, and I will only stop when I see him completely smashed and shattered on the floor, ready to leave me. That's when the pressure in my head finally becomes bearable again, and I can return to function halfway normally, until that pressure is there again someday in the future, and I do it all over again.
Only - I don't know if the next time this happens he will be there to listen to it anymore. And that's what scares me almost more than the pain, and what I could do to myself.
And there is no way I can control this... if I could, I wouldn't have done it for a second time , and most certainly not for the third last night. I need help not to let the pressure build up like that in the first place, because once it releases, there is no way for me to stop it. I violently knock out that little pleading voice inside of me that tells me to stop, and to let go, and that I am making things a lot worse. That little voice that tells me that I am hurting the person I love most more than anyone ever could... because one thing I have to give to myself: my mouth is my biggest weapon. Once unleashed, I know exactly where to stab and turn the dagger around and around, I know where it hurts the most, and I am very skilled at hitting these spots over and over and over again.
I am tired of it. I am tired of myself. I am tired of wanting to be invisible, wanting to be gone. I am tired of watching the scratch marks heal on my arms. I am tired of waking up every morning, cursing god for not stopping my heart beat during the night, as I pray for night after night after night. I am not religious, I don't even believe in god - but this is what I still pray for.
There is "crisis counseling" availabe at the Health Center on campus. As far as I know it's a free service to enrolled students. The Fiancé has made it quite clear to me that he wants me to see a therapist now, or else. I understand. I should see one. But the thought of that just makes me feel even more of a failure, and I am very embarrassed by the mere imagination of telling my problems to a complete strangers whose interest in me doesn't go beyond the paycheck he or she will receive at the end of the month. But I do need help. And I need it NOW. Admitting is the first step on the road to recovery. I want to be able to see myself as an old and happy person again in my mind. I want that possibility to be open in my mind again. And most of all I want to stop hurting - myself, and the person I love more in this world than anybody else...
I am not sure how frequently I will post here or on my other blog anymore in the near future. There are many things that I need to sort out, and many things that I need to start to repair. Thank you for sticking with me, those of you who care.
