Ouch…

Today I just feel so icky. I don’t know what to say. I just picked up the book How I Stayed Alive When My Brain was Trying to Kill Me. Because that feels like what either my brain, or the world, or both, are trying to do. I feel desolate and don’t know how to come out of despair. I have lately been terrified of my fear and terrified of my depression and terrified and ashamed of having anything like suicidal thoughts.

Like, if I express things that reveal I am maladjusted and can’t function in this world, I am afraid of being oppressed as a result of those expressions. I am afraid of saying, I have these thoughts sometimes. the author writes: “One thing I finally got after ten years of therapy was it’s okay to have suicidal thoughts, just don’t act on them. They are just thoughts. Instead of feeling isolated or ashamed for having them, I had to acknowledge my suicidal thoughts, look beneath them at the feelings, and find a healthy way to address the feelings in order to diminish the thoughts.” Is it okay? I feel like nothing I think or do is okay sometimes. I want to be completely honest with myself. I have mostly vague but in times of more pain more specific suicidal fantasies, like a form of acting out in my brain: most of the time I have no intention of acting on them but I want to ritualise or something that I am in pain and I don’t know what to do. I can’t focus on anything I love, can’t inagine a future where I don’t feel alienated, where I feel my heart again, so I start thinking along thise lines, that’s all. I am telling myself my life feels more out of control than ever and I don’t have faith that the sunshine will come out again. I have voices in my head, that now are the voices of real, actual people that believe this and have said this (or one person who I don’t even know but it does not matter what she thinks except that she traumatised me): there is something really wrong with me. I can hear her saying that, about me, when I was within earshot, knowing I was listening. Who is going to affirm that there is nothing wrong with me? Not me. I can’t do it. Alone…

I know I won’t act on them but I am so scared of the pain in my life getting so unmanageable that I might one day try to… I fear a future in which that is the only outlet I can find and I am terrified of not finding trusted friends because if I stay in isolation and can’t find mirrors in others I am so afraid that is most certainly my future and it breaks whatever is left of my heart to break.

Before I left my mothers house I don’t know if I had ever been that actively self-injurious: that is one time I actually was. I wanted to end the pain and I wanted the pain to be acknowledged with compassion and I got the furthest thing from that. Now my mother is expressing caring though I know she doesn’t know what to do to help me even if she wanted to. I feel guilty because I don’t want to hurt her but one of the biggest triggers of these suicidal fantasies is when I feel in my heart how my mother took my dog from me. I don’t want to feel that pain forever. I just needed a connection, someone to love, and even that was taken away from me after it was promised at such a sensitive time. It was so simple, I just needed a little love and nurturing, and for that to be so unseen to the extent that it has been, for me to be completely unable to say anything about this pain without my mother breaking out into some kind of irrational argument that is totally insensitive to ke and makes me feel even more unloved… I feel like I just got weaker and weaker and then I couldn’t do it anymore, my heart hurt too much, and despite mny peoplw’s adoration of canines I do not think anyone can understand how this and all that transpired around it broke me. There is a gaping chasm in my ability to say anything real to my mother and maybe it is hopeless now. Maybe I don’t deserve love. I feel like everything might have gone differently if my heart wasn’t wrenched around by my suffering over my dog. All I needed was a little connection and while I still had him he brought me joy and made my heart happy every day. What I needed to get better was so little and now it is so overwhelmingly much. I am too tired and worn out to feel my heart and maybe my ability to connect with others, even animals, now has been severed, and I will never feel anything but grief even when I am with a dog who loves me.

So suicidal ideation is an expression of my hopelessness and confusion. And it is okay to have these thoughts, this can’t be yet another part of me that I repress, but it is another thing I feel so much shame about. I feel like such a failure. I wish I could express to my mother, something is wrong, something is really wrong, I am scared, I am sorry, I love you. Maybe if Inwere dead, I guess, she might understand how much it mattered to me and how much her actions hurt but then I don’t want her to hurt, and the idea of having hurt her or seeing her hurting period is another reason for suicidal thinking.

I just want it to make sense, I want to feel better, and I feel like a failure that my response to the situation probably just traumatised me more and more and now I feel broken and I can’t say it’s not my fault. I can go back and say, if only I had been allowed space to heal with
my dog, as he was meant to be a healing presence for me, I might be okay… I would not have lost my sense of connection to others, I would have been able to mke friends again, I just can’t ezplain how much he helped me and how it makes no sense that my heart was broken so that now it just hurts too much to connect with anyone and I am afraid of always being this way. I don’t know how to blame my mother but I don’t know how to not blame her and I just want peace, not this horrid painful ambivalence.

I don’t know what to do, all I needed was a dog, and I maybe cannot even try to make sense of my feelings about it without some kind of thoughts arising that send me into some kind of panic mode where self-injurious fantasies are the only way to make sense of anything, this desire for relief from extreme pain that feels so confusing and unnecessary. I don’t know how to heal. I don’t know if I will heal.

I search my brain for someone, anyone, that I am sure cares about me, who loves me and wants the best for me though they may not like what I am doing and thinking, and nobody comes to mind, except maybe my mother, and it is sad she is the only one I can think of. More than ever right now, I just don’t know. In his introduction Bernie Siegel says that we can all be a chosen parent for those in pain; I feel like I need that right now, but I don’t know what good it does wishing for it.

I remember I tried to reach out for help, when I was terrified, when I needed safety, and the silence was… not right. Something was obviously wrong with me. Because no one even checked in with me about it. I got a sense that nobody wants to help me. So I got more and more scared of everything and it got harder and harder to trust. Then I just broke down and got angry at the whole world, wanting others to know how much pain I was in, trusting naively that someone would be there for me unconditionally. It is so hard not to believe that something is wrong with me and what is more I cannot convince myself that others I actually do care about do not want me to feel this pain. Probably some do, but my mind gets overwhelmed with it, and evidence seems to suggest a lot of people I cared about might just laugh if they heard I was gone. I needed so little; maybe it is my fault I am so messed up and never get what I need. I wish others had been there for me when they saw me suffering, reached out, checked in, let me know they cared, or something, and I do not understand. I wish I had been more sensitive to others because in my heart-torture around my dog I guess I forgot how sensitive and precious hearts are and that yes so many people suffer from depression and worthlessness and suicidal ideation and it can be easy to fall into that in this world and I regret having acted in ways that were not sensitive to other hearts. I just wish before all this transpired I had a sign that I was not alone and that someone was sensitive to mine… and I feel like a failure for even looking at books like this right now. I no longer have any inkling of anything that might make rhings okay again.

I am afraid I am always going to be this way.