Pumpkin Hour

The last several days have been low ones, yesterday the worst ending in an ugly state of mixed irritated shaky suicidal depression.

I finally broke down in front of the better half. It was awful, letting him see me like that.

The hardest thing was the absolute support he gave me, his desperation to understand the way I was feeling and his obvious need to fix it. But sometimes we are so broken that we can’t be fixed, or at least that is how it feels. I just wanted him to run, save himself from me, a burden that will last a life time, the good times no longer worth the bad.

The best description of my emotional self I could offer him at that moment was to imagine someone had just given you a million dollars cash and was throwing it over your head like a TV game show when they suddenly pulled out a gun and shot your child in front of you. Some bitter and twisted combination of restless nervous excitement so blatantly destroyed by sheer terror and helplessness.

I have a lot of trouble being in that place, I can reason intellectually with myself that it will pass as it always has - and thankfully it usually does within a few hours – but emotionally I don’t feel it. In those moments I just need to die, I need to end the extreme intensity.

He held me close in his arms for a long, long time until I eventually drifted off to sleep, the firm hug felt… safe.

When I woke up this morning the need to die immediately had passed but the restless irritation had not. I was so damn shaky, like a junkie needing a fix. I couldn’t concentrate and I was still very depressed. I managed to load the kids into the car and take them to the school bus, they were all missing hats and I think one of them had yesterday’s shirt on, but they got there.

I knew at that point I probably wasn’t in the best state to go to work, but I didn’t know what else to do. I thought pretty hard about swallowing my pill collection and tried to figure out the best place to do it. I had heavy traffic into town and on auto pilot I ended up at work anyway.

 It’s all a bit hazy from there – I felt a bit like I was drifting in and out of a dream, I went in and started my work, I was feeling really dizzy at this point and kept losing touch with what I had thought about doing and what I had actually done. I was wondering if it was just because my blood sugar was low, I hadn’t really eaten much over the last few days. It dawned on me that being there was pointless and couldn’t remember if I had already asked to go home or not, I realised I was still sitting at my desk so I couldn’t have asked, this kept happening until I forced myself up to the team leaders and simply stated that I had to go home as I wasn’t feeling too well. The boss said I looked awful and to go, I must have looked pretty bad as I stumbled out of the office towards the car I was met with a lot of worried faces and ‘are you okay?’s.

I sat in the car for a bit trying to get my bearings and then started driving. I wasn’t sure where to go, I still desperately wanted to die but was too vague to properly act on it. I thought about driving to the beach, the coastline is only about 2 1/2 hours away, I could lie on the sand listen to the waves crash on the shore and take my final medicine. Lost in this thought, I nearly ran up the back of a cement mixer stopped at a red light and decided I probably shouldn’t drive very far as I could end up hurting someone else, so I decided to ring my BF, if she was home I could just go there and… I don’t know what… I didn’t really expect her to pick up the phone, but she did.

So I made it to her place, and we talked for a few hours until her other half got home, it helped immensely, we made plans for her to come to my place on Sunday and I was to go to the shops and buy food for a BBQ on my way home – she’s good like that. I was still quite shaky but not feeling feint anymore when I got to the shop. I decided to get a haircut on a whim in the hope that it would make me feel better (I was due for one anyway) and then I also bought a bag and some other crap I didn’t need. Nothing like spending a few hundred dollars you don’t have spare…

I headed home, arrived still shaky but a ton better than when I had left, the evening progressed and I started feeling quite ok again, not happy but not really depressed anymore, I hesitate to use the word “normal?”. I even ate some dinner and TBH and I watched some ‘once upon a time’ episodes. I snapped out of my funk suddenly and felt good, actually happy. I went and binged on chocolate mousse, that particular guilt hasn’t hit me yet and TBH fell asleep.

So it’s nearly midnight and here I type, pumpkin hour approaching, wide awake, quickening thoughts and slightly shaky again. Fuzz dog keeps jumping on my lap mashing the keyboard with his little paws and I wonder if sleep will come tonight.

I wish I knew what tomorrow would bring, I am so sick of this rapid roller coaster. I just need to get off somewhere, don’t particularly care if it’s at the top or the bottom, but at this moment I just want a month- hell, even a week -of some kind of stability.