To Laura

Today would have been your 31st birthday, instead it is just another day without you. Another day that I spend remembering what was, and dreaming of what could have been.

I miss you everyday, but some days you are clearer in my mind, some days you push your way to the front of my thoughts over and over again. Lately you have been at the foremost of my mind more than ever. Because while I miss your smile, your laugh and your wicked sense of humour, I miss your understanding more than anything. They way you always knew when my thoughts turned darker, how you never challenged or questioned their validity but took them as they were and held my hand through them. Admittedly sometimes the hand holding involved questionable amounts of cheap liquor, but you walked, or wobbled, down the winding path with me.

I remember one birthday celebration of yours that I didn’t want to turn up for, as I had bandages up and down both arms after a recent incident with a razor blade. You wouldn’t hear of it, you told me I was going, and who the hell cares who saw my bandages. You told me I could come in jeans and a baggy jumper if I wanted, and I did. I left early, but not after collecting a few more hours of precious memories of you. After enjoying shared laughter and a genuine smile, forgetting how I was feeling on the inside.

Laughter was the gift you gave me over and over, laughter and love through the worst times. Sitting here now, trapped in my gloomy head again, I wonder what you would think of me. What you would say. Would you be disappointed in me for not pushing through, finding the laughter, finding life in this existence. Or would you tell me you understand. That sometimes the fight burns out inside of you, and there is no life left to seize.

I miss you more than words can express, I wish with all my being that you were here to rage against the dying light with me. I wish I had known your flame was flickering out, I wish I had seen it dwindle and could have held your hand as you held mine.

I wish you could tell me everything is going to be okay, or that it’s not, but that you will love me anyway. As I still love you.

Untitled

According to my psychiatrist I am in the middle of a major depressive episode. For me, this just means that the mental torment I live with, every moment of every day, has become so intense and so overwhelming that I can no longer bear to exist with the constant pain. I say exist because for months now that is all I have done. Existed, moved through time and space without purpose or joy. I do not live, I exist. It has been this way for so long now that I no longer remember what happiness feels like, or even just contentment. It is true that I have been here before, and escaped this hole, but this time it feels different. This time feels like there is no escape, that I’m trapped here with no way out but to give in to the voices and exit stage left. It is not that I haven’t tried, believe me, I have tried. I have tried CBT, DBT, individual therapy, medication and attending day hospital. Nothing has worked, I have just slid further into the abyss. I spend my days trying frantically not to drown in it. All of my energy, what little mental tenacity I have left, is spent holding that crushing wave at bay. Any leak in the dam, just a slow trickle of those feelings is enough to send me to running to the darkest places in my mind where the escape plans lie. So I hold them back, just to survive, and in doing so I allow them to fester and swell. It is a never-ending cycle, and all the while I weaken more, care less, fight with diminished resources. I will be blunt; I no longer want to live this way. Exist this way. I have fought long and hard, I have tried over and over. I have given every bit of me to try and win this war. But I have failed, and there is no fight left in me. I am running on empty and if I am honest, I no longer care to even try. Because all my effort thus far has gotten me nowhere, nowhere but to a place darker than I have been in longer than I can remember. Every time someone tells me it will get better, it is like another weight on my back. Everyone who says they love me is just another thing trying to pull something from me, another drain on my rapidly emptying well of energy. And knowing that just adds another hurt to the pile, that I have become so lost in my darkness, I cannot even bear to be cared for. To be loved is to be needed, and I don’t want that. I want to be released. So I asked for help, I begged my mental health team to help me. I told them that I could no longer hold back the self destructive urges that plagued me. I could no longer hold myself responsible for my own well-being. I need help and I asked for it, which if you have ever suffered from depression, you will understand is no simple thing. I fought my own mind time and time again to confess my true feelings to nurses, doctors and my therapist. Every explanation took another piece of me, burnt away, never to return. Today I have been told that the promised psychiatric hospital bed was out of reach, because of a separate, but not so separate, mental health issue. That I must wait 5 weeks for assessment I can’t afford before they will consider inpatient care. That the public hospital is already at crisis point and I was not suitable for care there due to the limited resources. That I had to go home and continue to sink under the weight of my sadness for an undetermined amount of time, and just try and keep coping. Keep coping. Keep existing. I have tried, tried with everything I have to get professional help. But I have been turned away, put on hold, waiting, waiting, waiting. How long can you expect someone to wait for nothing? When will someone just hold my hand and say, ‘It’s okay, you have tried enough’ and let me stop?

Milestones

When I was in hospital several months ago I made my first long term goal. The future does not exist for me on a daily basis, I am permanently stuck in the difficulties of the moment. Long term goals are overwhelming but also incredibly important as they can provide an anchor to keep me steady when my strength waivers, but if I reach these goals they then become milestones. Days that I didn’t think I would reach when I planned them.

I achieved this first victory against my depression on the 19th of December, when I went to see my favourite band live, with tickets I had purchased 4 months previously. In that moment, listening to a sea of voices sing lyrics that have seen me through some of my darkest days, I felt something. For the briefest of moments, I felt the win. But then it was done, and I was left back in the same bleakness as before. So a new goal was needed. I had known this would happen, the crash, so my next date with life was already planned.

That day is now upon us, a day I had planned to reach with my dearest friend, who has her own battle with mental illness. It was a simple plan when it was conceived, to go and see the film Wild. Wild was one of the last books I was able to read, before depression robbed me of my ability to digest words. It was a book I loved, a story I found inspiring, and seemed very fitting given the present I was in.

As time moved closer to the 16th of January the plan evolved, to include a meal and shopping and a luxury hotel stay. At the time, I genuinely made these alterations with good intentions, wanting to celebrate us both achieving a joint milestone. But looking back, I wonder if there was a hint of desperation to my planning. Over the last month, my battle with my depression and my eating disorder has become more one sided, and I am loosing ground by the hour. Seeing Wild was no longer about achievement and hope, but something I was crawling toward with broken, bloody nails and sorrow perched heavily on my back.

I am now going back into residential treatment on Monday. Six weeks to go into recovery from my eating disorder, to return to a healthy weight(ED monkey: You are a healthy weight already, they just want to make you fat again), so that my body can absorb my anti-depressants (BPD monkey: LIES! they are just trying to trick you, you’ll never win) and I can battle my depression with renewed strength. Which is all well and good, despite my fear and despondency toward treatment.

But for now, today, Wild day, I feel like I have failed.I guess that is the problem with goals, once accomplished they are wonderful, when unsuccessful they are crushing. Johnny Cash once said “You build on failure, you use it as a stepping stone.” It remains to be seen whether I can be step past today and build a different future, but for now my only goal will be to some day have the fortitude and mettle to make another goal.

Who...Are...You?

Tick, tick, tick. One week to go until my admission to the clinic, one week left with my longtime companion. My friend, my solace. Tick, don’t eat, tock, ignore the pain, tick, more coffee, tock, another cigarette.

On and on the day goes, the little monkey whispering words of encouragement in my ear: The thinner you are going in, the thinner you will be coming out. Tick, smoke, tock, coffee, tick, ignore the ache, tock, don’t be weak. His little tail is curled around my neck, soothing, reassuring.

But then I notice the little claws sinking into my shoulder, the sense of desperation in that sharp grip. My desperation. My clawing hold, clinging to my eating disorder.

What am I without it? Nothing. A waste of time, space and flesh. I know this is the other monkey on my shoulder, my irrational, emotional mind. But now this is the only other voice in my head. I have disappears into the chasm of my illnesses. I am not here anymore. I am lost, where is the white rabbit to guide me back to myself?

Chapter 1129

And so it begins, yet another chapter in my battle with mental illness. Another battle in a war that seems without end, with no white flag in sight. Next Monday I will finally face my eating disorder, while being admitted to a specialist facility. My family and friends have expressed great relief at my impending incarceration, for them this is the light they were waiting for, having stared down the tunnel of my illness for so long without respite. Help is at hand, the end is nigh, hope flickers on the horizon. And I can see why they feel that way, the basic fact is that my problems with food and body image now consume my world and they feed into my other mental health problems. They fertilise the darkness inside me, help the inky tendrils grow further and faster, sharp thorns sprouting and piercing my thoughts with greater frequency.

Most people can’t possibly understand the uncertainty I feel; the anxiety; the overwhelming, crushing fear. They can’t understand how I became so overwrought in the week leading up to my assessment that I made suicide attempt number 74 (came so close this time, I could taste the success!). Surely I should be jumping at the chance to rid myself of this monkey on my shoulder? But after 7 years, my eating disorder is so much a part of my life that it feels like a friend. It is always there for me, offers words of encouragement when I do well, sticks by me through difficulties and after a life of mediocrity I have finally found something I’m good at. And now I have to let it go, fear number one, who am I without it and how will I get through the hard times without it?

Fear two, what if I give recovery my all, kick ED ass, and then my depression doesn’t magically lift like the doctors say it will? What if I give up the one thing I have that’s mine and I’m left with the rest of my broken brain, the part that I have no control over?

Fear three is an obvious one – gaining weight. ED therapists talk a lot about the bodies comfortable ‘resting weight’. That is, the weight/size you would be if you ate normal healthy meals and exercised regularly. I know that the weight I am now is nowhere near my resting weight, I am built to be curvy, with wide shoulders, hips and some junk in my trunk. But that’s not what I want, I want to defy biology and fix my shape from the bones out. But recovery means gaining weight, numbers creeping up, the most terrifying thought there is for me. More terrifying than dying. Which is ridiculous, completely and utterly ridiculous. But knowing it is ridiculous makes no difference. I can see the rational thoughts, I can say them aloud, I can acknowledge the facts: my body and brain are exhausted and my immune system is shattered, I have no hope of fighting my depression if I stay as I am.

But knowing what is right and believing it are two different things, so for the next 7 days I will fight to remember the facts, to focus on the logical, to not let my fear overwhelm me. To not think about the fourth fear, failure.