Friday Five: Fucked-up-ed-ness

You know your fucked up when....

1. You spend the morning sorting out your pre written suicide notes to see which one fits best this week.

2. You put 5 days worth of your pills into a pile, take a photograph and cry about having to take meds every day while simultaneously searching for your dope stash and swigging from a wine bottle.


3. You wake up in the morning and decide to take a shower. The reason this is fucked up is because you are planning to burn yourself and you know that the hot shower will sting it more, even though you know that you deserve that pain anyway.

4. You drop the kids at school early and spend the next hour pacing past the club waiting for it to open so that you can blow all your money on the pokies.

5. You cant cope with eating something that is 100 calories during the day but you get home and binge yourself stupid on ice-cream and raisin bread.

Intermission

A glance in the mirror reveals a mascara streaked, tear stained face, bright red cheeks showing through layers of caked on foundation that would be the envy of any cracked up hooker.

Hair tied back in a ponytail with a head band holding back the stray curled up fringe. Slobbery tooth brush in slobbery hand, sleeves rolled up revealing scars born from self hatred. Put my earphones back in, listening to a “mental illness happy hour” pod cast while kneeling over the toilet trying desperately to remove the litre of cookies and cream ice cream and crunchy nut corn flake ridden sins of the last hour.

It’s ok really though, because that was just a brief intermission from filling out the “legal will kit” that I finally bought so I can commit suicide with the peace of mind that comes from knowing my 6yr old daughter will legally get that necklace and my husbands accounts wont be frozen for 8mnths.

The worst part about this picture is when I look at it I am just pissed off that I cant purge properly.

I’m so fucked up.

Meds, Phone calls and other things I avoid.

I look down into my hand at the little pile of multi-coloured meds for the morning. Yes I started taking them again, only lasted a week because I am far more dependent than I realised and the withdrawals were becoming too obvious to hide.

The deep feelings of inadequacy this twice daily ritual encompasses are seemingly endless.

Today I finally googled the names of some psychologists that were recommended to me 6 months ago, unfortunately I am not the Queen and as my funeral would cost less than a visit to them that impracticality put me firmly back to square one.

 I then called the local mental health team to ask for a phone number for the psychologist that is covered by medicare. I need a referral from my GP then I can make an appointment.

GP is away until May. Might call back if I can be bothered seeing her - not much point once May hits, a little late anyway I reckon.

I have consolidated a folder containing PDF downloads and great resources for the family of suiciders … suicidees? Suicide victims, people who commit suicide… whadevva you want to call them I have a stockpile of info to validate their feelings and give them ideas of ways to cope.

I have been binging like a mother fucker and my fat is expanding daily. None of my clothes fit me and a very small part of me WANTS to go to hospital PURELY because I can't binge there.

I’m going to go smoke a joint and go back to bed now. Not just because I am depressed but also because I have a killer sinus infection and my whole face hurts.

Depression Jacket

Self-awareness, it is something that I have but often choose to ignore for whatever reason. It’s funny though, when you sit back and really think about some of the more subtle signs of where your mental health is currently sitting.

I have noticed that not only am I generally stuck to my computer, I am stuck to my computer in my bed rather than my study (thank god for the invention of the lap top). A mired of empty soft drink cans, tea cups. Ice cream tubs and chocolate wrappers litter my bedside table, remnants of the most recent self-destructive binge. My hair will be un-brushed, my nails way too long and I am always wearing a blue knitted cardigan/wrap thingy. I still have a desire to connect, just that connection is only internet deep and tends to revolve around Googling suicide.

This blue knit cardigan is hideously ugly, not something that I would ever be seen dead in outside the house, but god is it warm and comfy. It is also several sizes too big, so even though I have gained a significant amount of weight it wraps around me with ease and so doesn’t make me feel as huge.

My depression jacket makes me feel safe and secure within my own misery, like an unplanned metaphor.

I sit here at 10 am – in bed of course having consumed a large chocolate Easter bunny, two pieces of toast and 4 cups of tea. I am thinking about the vegetable garden and how it won’t weed itself. I don’t even mind weeding – I actually find it quite relaxing. I am thinking about dusting off the treadmill that was my best friend for nine months of mania. It now lies dormant in its corner of the spare room filling me with guilt every time I open the door.

But the phone rings and instead of running to it to answer it I run to it and pull the plug from the wall, the last thing I want to do is talk to a person – I really hate it when the kids get to it before I can stop them and I am forced to talk to some school friends mother pretending to be all happy happy and deflecting all play dates to the other parties house because I barely have the energy for my own kids.

My husband used to complain that I spent more time on the phone than with him, once upon a time I would even jump up to grab it in the middle of sex – that always resulted in an argument (fair enough) I guess it was like an OCD thing for me. Now he is trying to convince me to call people back.  Even text messaging is a chore at least thanks to emoj’s I can fake happiness with the touch of a button.

So now I’m sitting in my bed firmly wrapped in my depression jacket writing this, Eminem blaring on the I pod and I will think again about leaving my nest in a while and make the kids some lunch, then sink back into my bed knowing I have to face the work world tomorrow and pretend everything’s ok.

Blow Up the Pokies, please?

The Whitlams haunting ballard “blow up the pokies” is playing randomly on my ipod. This song resonates with me always makes me so sad. Such a perfect description of the gambling addiction that has become too close to home.

Image from here

 

My best friend is married to my husband’s best friend – we set them up! (10yrs and 2 kids later, love it when it works!)

The funny thing about this is that her husband is a LOT like me and she is a LOT like my husband. Which is probably why we all get along the way we do. This understanding however can be slightly confronting at times. For example if my friend is upset with her hubby for something he has done/said I can frequently understand his side of the story, don’t get me wrong 99% of the time he IS in the wrong, which is hard because I also am 99% of the time in the wrong. Hearing her upset is basically knowing how my husband is feeling about my own issues- this is why I tend to be secretive.

Anyway, back to gambling. My friends other half is a gambler from way back. He does well for a while (as in keeps away, not a winning streak) and then falls off the wagon. I am also a gambler. I am however a sneaky gambler who thank god for our finances has not got a lot of time or access to venues but when the opportunity arises I lie my way into usually losing a couple of hundred bucks ( we aren’t that well off so that’s a lot of money for us). When I was home raising the kids I of course couldn’t take them to the pokies, we live out of town so we weren’t popping into town for dinner at the club. There was a period of time when I would duck to a club near the shopping centre I was working at on my lunch break, always limited by time but still able to lose my day’s pay in 30min.

Generally speaking these little splurges tended to happen when I was hypomanic and I would frequently win. For around 5yrs I was totally in control of it, I forced myself to abstain when opportunity arose. Sadly now that all the kids are in school and I have the odd day off from work during the week, I have made a habit out of going to the club after I see my mental health case worker – or any other time I go into town. This began when I was still really manic after my hospital stay and I had seen my case worker, noticed the club about 100meters away and with $20 cash in my pocket, what’s the harm? I don’t care if I lose it!

I swear you win more money when you are manic because that $20 turned into 3 hours worth of game play and I walked away (only cause I had to be somewhere mind you) with just under $300.

So of course I kept the $300 as “pokie money” and went again the next time I was in town, and the next until – I had just kept on winning so was able to hide this little habit with ease. I could have sworn I was queen of the pokies and had cracked the code.  Eventually all the money ran out and the Serequel kicked in, mania had subsided but the habit was ingrained. A bit like my issues with binging, I had a time, a place and this would happen there and then every time.

Just like I enable myself to binge, I would take cash out at the supermarket slowly over the week until I could finance my weekly gambling binge sneakily part of me is slightly glad I can’t withdraw money from an ATM in a club/pub as my husband would see it and wonder WTF and the part of me that was SO CLOSE TO A FEATURE and ran out of cash curses it.

The trouble is that it’s no longer a weekly thing it’s as often as I can get away with it thing. I’m on a committee in our village and they have monthly meetings at the local pub, which also has pokies, I tend to leave $100 there after each meeting.

I left work early saying I was feeling unwell and went to the club, I am casual so I have to factor the hourly wage into what I am losing as well.

image stolen from here

I will order fish and chips to take home from the takeaway in a nearby town that is on my way back from work and while I am waiting for it to cook I will go to the pub there and somehow when Im on  a short time limit like that all I do is lose more money more quickly. I am now in a depressive cycle and the gambling simply numbs me nicely, I don’t win, I don’t even expect to anymore, I just press the buttons – even when the music plays and the machine lights up I no longer feel that sense of excitement, I just press those buttons usually too quickly to even let the music finish. I have even taken to putting money into an account my husband doesn’t have internet access too and withdrawing from that AT the club. Deception and lies. Two things not to base a marriage on.

I hate myself for this, I also see the correlation between it and my binging – its as though the tight ship of control I had for so long with my anorexic episode when I was hypomanic got flat lined through the mania, hospital, meds and now in depression and I have given away all my control to the food and the pokies inanimate objects that won’t .

Depression Impression

I never liked the word “depression” always seemed so, I don’t know – overused? Fake perhaps?

It’s the new black. Everyone has it.

So many people I know go around saying how terribly depressed they are/were and that now they are on anti-depressants and life is a fucking fairy tale again. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the diagnostic criteria for depression is only low mood for two weeks – so I am sure that all of these people have been “depressed” but I had always personally viewed depression as something that stayed with you for months generally brought on by something bad happening.

 I on the other hand have always kept quiet and generally refused to admit to myself that these recurrent low moods I experience were ever actually as severe “depression” after all, nothing traumatic had ever happened to me. Sure I had done rather a lot of things for my age but nobody had died, I had a happy relationship, job I liked and a healthy baby – for me to feel this way, was just akin to the stupid selfish bitch I was always told I was by that inner voice that never ceased. I wanted to die so badly, in many ways with no proper “reason” it was just because I knew that my husband and child would be so much better off without a fuckwit like me around.

I couldn’t tell you how many of those little survey things the doc gives you after you have a child that I lied on – its rather obvious which boxes you are supposed to tick to say that you are happy as fucking Larry and the thought of coming across as anything but happy was not ok.

Sure I felt like killing myself, off and on since I was about 8 and more seriously starting to plan the when’s and where’s at around 14.  But everyone feels like that surely, its not like I had actually killed myself yet. I was a teenage mother and had to prove to the world I was capable.

My psychologists now ask me why didn’t I ask for help? Help for what? I didn’t have a problem, I sure as shit didn’t have a mental health problem and if I want to kill myself then that’s my body and my business. I was clued on enough to the fact that I thought a touch more intensely than the other teenagers I hung around and that telling anyone that I felt that way would have given me a one way ticket to the loony bin – a place that I was hell scared of at that time in my life.

My biggest fear about an enforced stay on the psych ward as a teenager was that it would most likely be due to the slightly psychotic anorexia I was experiencing and in vicious denial about. I knew that although to myself I felt the size of a house, that all they would do is make me fat –although I thought everyone was trying to make me fat. I honestly believed that my mum was trying to poison me by adding fats to my foods and I refused to let her prepare or even walk past any meals I was making… just in case. How I managed to avoid incarceration at that point I still don’t know.

Depression was the place I fell into with a thud time and time again, usually after an intensely chaotic part of my life had started off wonderful and then brewed and brewed until it got out of control and I burnt out into a depressive oblivion.  The job I was excelling at suddenly became an impossible task, I would want to quit before I got fired because I was so fucking hopeless and the constant suicidal ideation that had subdued for months would come back with force, a voice for every action giving an equal or greater reason why my death was a better option, for me, for my family and colleagues.

I am wallowing once again in the pit of what’s the fucking point? I’ve been back here for a while now months in fact but its hitting rock bottom again, not coping with life at all - I walked out of work on Thursday after pressing send on an e-mail that involved a multitude of swear words and a “you want to know why I didn’t do XYZ in the allotted time frame? Well frankly it’s because I am a fucking loser who sucks at her job.” Not sure quite what the repercussions of this are but it’s likely to involve a meeting on Monday. I might just quit, I can’t hack the pressure. I ran out of work a few weeks back after a panic attack of sorts and ended up sitting on a cliff edge with a bottle of pills in my hand ipod playing the current list of songs I want to go out to, just ready to lie down and go to sleep forever, knowing that once I passed out I would fall off that cliff I couldn’t jump from just to make sure.

Before I got a chance to enact my plan some random guy turned up walking towards the lookout area where I had jumped over the safety fence and I had to do a quick scarper away as being caught on a cliff edge with a bottle of pills generally results in police, a psych stay and if you are unlucky a spiel on the evening news.

I drove home slowly, bumped into my parents very randomly in a supermarket nowhere near their house and arrived home that evening to find friends were visiting. I thought how different everyone’s afternoon would have been if I had been successful. I wish I could say that these thoughts deter me, that I am glad that man walked down, that I am glad my liver is apparently made of steel and no amount of drugs can kill me- but I am not.

I have never once regretted taking that overdose last year. Though I was high as a manic kite at the time and stuck rather firmly on the “flight” response, my only regrets have been that it didn’t work. While I know that the depression will eventually be replaced with a productive hypomania where I will accomplish much, solve the world’s problems and sing happily again when I’m walking around the house blissfully non suicidal. Even if that doesn’t escalate to the dizzying scary heights of Mania again where I will likely try to fly from the roof top, it will still as always be followed by a crash and continued suicidal ideation, but this time I don’t think I can handle anymore crashes.

The Purple Coffin

She was one of those people with more personality than she knew what to do with. She stood up for the world and was passionate about everything, a mother, a wife, a sister, a friend and to me she was a colleague. Her firey sense of standing up for people’s perceived rights could be downright scary at times depending on which side of the argument you were standing. I won’t forget the blaze in her eyes as she would snarl “just try it!. Her passion it seems, was born from her own inner demons, described as somewhat formidable at times, she was also a nurturer, a care giver, gardener and breeder of small dogs.

While we had talked at work often, I think I learned more about her that day in the room full of mourners, those that had loved her than I would ever have been privy to otherwise. Her bright purple coffin adorned with the most brilliant display of flowers collected from her own garden. I was somewhat saddened that we had so much more in common than I had realised and I wondered for the conversations that might have been had time permitted.

While the taste of salt trickled onto my lips, the feeling I had in my heart was not so much one of sadness but self-guilt – my outlook on what so many were calling a wasted life, is somewhat tainted by my own experience and feelings, I was glad for her that she had found the peace she needed at that time and secretly I was jealous.

Two of her children, the same age as two of mine – their faces. The way her eldest daughter spoke with guilt wishing she had said more, or less – never imagining that once her mother had been admitted to the hospital that she would not have the chance to take back any harsh words and tell her she loved her. That was hard to hear.

I took a deep breath and with a final look at that bright purple coffin I whispered goodbye. As I drove home my mood was rather surreal. The looks on those little faces, the same ones I would likely be causing on my own kids someday. It hurt so bad. For them so many more questions than answers.

The hardest part about this for me is it hasn’t changed how I feel in the way it seems it probably should. I was supposed to look at this as a realisation that I need to stay well for my kids, to TRY and want to stay well. But it didn’t work, I understand the intellectual concept and I feel as guilty as hell that i don’t FEEL it but I can’t help my own need for peace.

A few days later with these added guilty thoughts and pit of depression I had already sunk into before the funeral, I had an internal anxiety attack at work and ran out the door chased by a team leader asking what was wrong, I lied and said nothing I had to go and drove to a spot I had always regarded as a possible resting place. A beautiful waterfall that tumbles down a sheer cliff face. I cut through the bush track to avoid the safety rail look-out area and instead climbed down the rocky stream to the edge of the cliff. I sat there with a bottle of water and a bottle of pills in my hand and my legs dangling off the edge, feelings of numbness and simultaneous peace.

The sun was warm on my skin as I lay back absorbing the rays on my face for a while feeling very close to nature. My iPod on the ‘D’ playlist. I had no paper to write a note. – oh well, someone would eventually go through my computer and find my heavily passcoded ramblings.  A little voice in my mind kept saying – ‘this isn’t fair on Cara’ – Cara, my team leader who’s final words to me had been ‘are you sure there is nothing I can do?” with a look of startled concern in her eyes and a slight wobble in her voice. I had told her ‘no, but thanks..’ with a tears in my own.

Our team had already lost one of our own to suicide in the last week, and as I lay back in the sun tears stinging in the corners of my eyes I felt like I couldn’t do that to Cara- she would blame herself for not acting on her instinct, she’s only young and she doesn’t need that, it’s too selfish.

At that moment I heard voices from up the track. Shit! People were coming down to the look out. I shoved the pills back in my pocket and bolted up the flat rocks and back into the crevices of the boulders on the side. Getting caught on a cliff face with pills in your hand probably lands you locked up somewhere I don’t want to go. I got back to the car and drove the long way back to the city.