Progress

OK, so I’m eating yesterday’s words about my counsellor. I was being incredibly negative. I would delete that post, but I did feel that way yesterday, so it is a legitimate record of my feelings. Here’s how the session went last night, and what I have learned from it:

I was prepared to tell him about the cutting on Friday but as I went in I changed my mind and decided to keep it from him. I very carefully didn’t mention it. But then, after he asked me how I am, how it went with the psychiatrist, etc, he said he wanted to talk about the self destructive fantasies I’ve been having. I stared at the wall and knew that my face was giving me away so I came clean and told him.

He was cool and calm about it, and then we had a fantastic discussion. He helped me to realise that I have been spending so much energy in recent weeks just trying to remain in control and not let my moods spill out into my life, that I have neglected myself. I can’t let myself break down at work or in front of my friends or at church or even at home, because it is inappropriate and would worry and confuse people.

If my behaviour was always in congruence with my moods then my behaviour would be constantly in flux because my moods are constantly in flux. People wouldn’t be able to cope with that, so I have to manage my behaviour very carefully.

A few years ago, when I was depressed, I seriously thought that it was wrong to be depressed, because Christians are supposed to be joyful all the time. I no longer think that way, in fact, I think it is perfectly fine to doubt and ask hard questions, but I don’t think I have fully acknowledged my feelings of depression, I have just tried to bury them and wait for them to go away.

So it would appear that my emotions are fighting to get out of me, and if I don’t let them out then they will come out on their own, in ways I can’t control. Hence the cut on my finger and scratches on my shoulders, and the bitten nails and bloody fingertips. And random outbursts of tears and sobbing in front of people.

My counsellor asked me what the result was when I lost control of my emotions in front of people. The result was comfort, empathy and understanding. So it was good. Each and every time there has been a good outcome. So he asked me, why am I so afraid of losing control?

I’m still not entirely sure of the answer. I know that I have always been afraid of my emotions, good and bad. Or at least, afraid of how others will react to them. I can’t show strong affection too openly because it tends to freak people out. Same goes for anger, despair, guilt…

But I have gone further than just masking my emotions from other people, I have been attempting to mask them from myself. So much so that I often have difficulties articulating how I’m feeling. No wonder I have been so on edge. I hate not being able to communicate with myself, being unable to analyse and think things over in my head. Hubby often tells me that I think too much and I need to sometimes stop thinking – maybe I took his advice too much to heart! That may be good for him, but it doesn’t work for me. I always feel better when I can work things out internally and find some sort of resolution, some way of moving forward. And I haven’t done that for so long.

I also realised that this may be why I like alcohol so much. It lowers my inhibitions, so that I do behave in congruence with my moods, regardless of how I may come across to other people. Some of the most freeing times of my life have been when I was drunk. I’m not willing to give that up just yet.

Anyway, I’m rambling. The point was that if I don’t let my emotions out in a healthy way then they will let themselves out in an unhealthy way, like cutting.

Typically, just as I have been given licence to feel depressed and miserable, I am all smiles!

WTF?

Long-winded, waffling post coming up.

I have been feeling paralysed by my moods and my anxiety. I can’t write. I can’t form coherent thoughts. When I speak my thoughts I make a verbal mess. But it was recently suggested to me that my writing doesn’t have to be perfect. This gave me a bit of a shock, albeit a pleasant one. I was compared to an artist called Jackson Pollock. Being an ignoramus I had to Google this guy and found out that he was an abstract expressionist, which left me no clearer as to why I had been compared to him. So I had to confess my ignorance and ask for clarification:

Rather than forming your raw emotions into well-crafted pictures, you can just splurge them onto the surface. When we look at them, we’ll connect directly with them without having to go through the distorting process of appreciating a picture or a piece of prose. Raw emotion, passed from one person to another, without the middle guy!

Interesting. I am a perfectionist by nature. I also have a habit of comparing myself to other people and finding myself wanting. For instance, I read some outstandingly well-written blogs, which I love, but which sometimes makes me feel that I have no right to blog because I don’t have their skill with words. So here goes. I will try to write without worrying about what others may think, or how my inner prose nerd flinches.

Emotions, so many emotions. They threaten to overwhelm me. I stand in the sea and wave after wave of emotions bombard me, I fall, I can’t breathe, I struggle back up, spluttering, gasping for air, each time more unsteady. How long before I don’t get up again?

What can I do to stem the flow? I drink a glass of wine and it frees me slightly. Frees me enough to get to the computer and type. Must write. Must communicate somehow. Or I will drown.

Self-destructive urges. Cut. Blood. Scars. Pollution. Hurt myself. Mirror on the outside what goes on inside. But I am sensible enough to not give in to these urges. Most of the time anyway. I have my vices. But most of the time I squash these dirty desires. But I can’t squash the emotions. Not for long. Where do they go?

My counselor encourages me to find a creative means to express these emotions, in a way that is healthy for me. But I can’t draw. I can’t paint. I used to paint. But I was mediocre at best. I stopped. Can I start again? Does it matter that in the eyes of the world my creativity is worthless? Can I sustain enough enthusiasm to pursue this for longer than a week? Or will I research until my brain dries up, buy the materials, sit down to paint, only to find that whatever was driving me has gone?

I have been on the verge of panic for days. Reminding myself to breathe deeply over and over again. I have made mistakes at work and have had to try and sort out the mess. But my thoughts go so rapidly. I can’t focus. Just this evening I have been up and down, up and down. Have to write, can’t write, have to sit, can’t sit, have to think, can’t think… So I drink another glass of wine and take a sleeping pill. Come back to the computer.

This thing in my mind, it stops me functioning, but nobody can see it! I have to fight and fight, but what am I fighting? Myself. I am fighting myself. Nobody can see. Nobody can understand. I can’t even understand, because my thoughts come and go so quickly that I don’t have time to assimilate them. What to do, what to do? I know, I’ll tap my foot! That will help. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Does it help? No. Oh, I know! I’ll drink another glass of wine.

Round and round and round we go. Merrily merrily merrily merrily, lightly down the stream. Is that how the rhyme goes? I’d like to be by a stream.

Am I going round the bend? Round and round? This is what the inside of my head is like all the time. Constant, no pause. No respite. How can I possibly focus on the mundane tasks of work when my brain is playing these tricks on me? Will painting help? Will writing this finally help me? Getting drunk didn’t help me, all it did was make me realise how close to the edge I am.

Mood goes up, this is good, there are benefits to this disorder. I have insights, that other people don’t have, I see what they don’t see. Quick as a flash, mood goes down, I was so arrogant, me, have insights? You have to be kidding. I can’t even remember where I put my cigarettes. I am worthless, I am nothing, I am ugly, I can’t cope at work, I can’t breathe, nobody knows, I don’t know, where are you God? On and on.

I’m going to stop now. You know, I actually enjoyed writing this, although it did make my heart pound. Writing as the thoughts come, without the hassle of trying to get them to make sense. Hope you had fun reading! Please, if you’re going to report me to the nutty people, send me an email first, so it doesn’t come as too much of a shock?

Working, Drinking and Learning

Soooo… Things have happened since my last bright and breezy post. I’ll just start at the beginning:

I got into work on Friday to find that my boss had rescued me. She realised that my anxiety was getting the better of me, and that my mood struggles are hindering me in my job. So she re-organised a whole load of my stuff, and took a load off me. My heart-rate went through the roof when I first saw that she’d been through my workload, but actually incredibly relieved when I realised what she’d done for me. So I was really honest with her, and said thank you for rescuing me because I would never have had the guts to ask for help.

Phew!

Then the weekend came. My friend was having a birthday party at her house and I was so looking forward to letting my hair down and just having fun. What actually happened was that I got very drunk very fast.

Lesson learned: alcohol + prescription drugs = unpleasant puking experience.

I realised how far gone I was, told hubby we had to go, and threw up out of the car door onto the street. Then hubby helped me back inside my friend’s house and I promptly threw up in her bathroom sink. A lot. Whilst having IBS cramps. Telling hubby over and over again, in between retches, how sorry I was. Streaking my perfectly applied eye makeup all over my face.

Lovely!

I was also hypomanic at the time. Before I was sick, I kept starting conversations with random strangers and then leaving mid-sentence to start another conversation with more random strangers. I buzzed in and out of rooms, joked, laughed, danced. I was the life and soul of the party.

And you know what I have realised? I am ill. I was calling this thing a mood disorder and the word “disorder” kept me from thinking of it as an illness. But it has come home to me that I can’t do my job properly because my memory is so crap and my moods stop me functioning. And when I’m with other people, even when I’m not drunk, I am clearly not like them. I hear people saying how funny I am, how scatty, how wired, and on edge… They like to be around me, but I am a spectacle to them.

I see my friends huddled together, worried expressions on their faces.

And I don’t care, because I am having a good time. Who cares that I’m ill, when life is so much fun?

But then hubby has to constantly remind me of small things that I have forgotten, and my boss has to relieve me of responsibility and increase her own workload, because I’m too busy having a mental breakdown to realise that my desk is piling up with work that hasn’t been done properly in months.

Hmmm. Interesting conclusions to come to. I have my first counseling session tonight – I wonder what the counselor will make of me?

Oh dear

I’m drunk – again.

Had a good time though.

May have been a little more forthcoming that I would usually have been.

Will most like regret this tomorrow. I can already tell that this new drug does not react well with alcohol. 

:/

Alive

I’m quite drunk. And have realised that it’s 11:50 and I haven’t written today’s blog post! So here we are. I’ve had a good night. Been round Mini Razzler’s house, chatting, playing with The Little One, dancing to good music. I feel alive, which is a good feeling. I haven’t felt this way in a while. I know I’ll most likely regret this in the morning, as these bloody tablets will give me the hangover from hell; however, at the moment (barring the trouble it’s taking me to write this without typos) I feel good. Yes, when I shut my eyes the world spins, but I feel.

Trying to fight back

I’m just going to waffle for a while. Talk amongst yourselves.

What I want right now is to go out and get smashed. I get this urge every now and then. Usually when I’m feeling down. I think, “Ooh, I know what will make me feel better and really cheer me up – lots and lots of alcohol!” It never works out that way though. Even if I do get really really drunk, all that usually happens is I feel even more miserable. And anyway, my sensible side kicks in a bit too much these days. A little voice in my head reminds me how terrified I am of throwing up (a few years back this was the main thing that prevented me from leaping headlong into bulimia), how this will make my IBS flare up again, how nobody likes me anyway when all my inhibitions are lowered and I become loud and highly opinionated, etc.

When I say I want to go out and get smashed what I mean is I vacillate between wanting that and just wanting to do nothing. Because I feel so lethargic right now that I just want to stay inside and put old episodes of Star Trek on. Seriously. That’s all I want to do. I would be happy as a clam if I could just stay there. Maybe read a few blogs every now and then to stop things getting too monotonous, and then back to Star Trek.

But would that be a good thing? Is giving in to the lethargy going to help me to throw it off? When I start thinking along those lines that’s when I want to go out and drink. But you see, I did that last weekend. Met up with a couple of friends, went to our favourite cocktail bar and started the drinking. And we did have fun. I started to feel more lighthearted. But before I could go down the drinking-too-much route, one of my friends had a meltdown and it was up to me to mop up. Always the responsible one. Always the one who helps. Always the one who looks after others when really I would like it if they would look after me for a change.

When I suffered from depression a couple of years ago I noticed that I developed self-destructive tendencies. That’s when I started smoking. Although, when I say tendencies, what I really mean is desires. I wanted to cut myself, drink myself into a stupor… just so that i would be able to feel something. Because the world had gone numb. I also worried endlessly about what others thought of me. I desperately sought people’s approval and affection, but was so introverted that I never spoke and therefore not many people knew how I felt. So I retreated to my imaginary world and created conversations in my head where I told someone how I felt inside and they totally understood and hugged me and I felt immediately better and the world became bright and rosy again. Of course, it didn’t work out that way, because I just stayed inside my head and pretended to the world that everything was fine.

Now, I’m not saying that that is how I feel now. I remember what it felt like to be depressed. Although many of the details are vague, the memories of how I felt are very strong. I am determined never to go back there again. Right now I am still capable of having a laugh and enjoying myself. However, I recognise certain thought processes. I recognise the dwelling on negative scenarios in my head, I recognise the stifled imagination, the inability to force myself to think clearly about things. I recognise the disproportionate anger and intolerance. And it worries me.

Therefore, I want to go out and get shit-faced. To dance to loud music and to not have to worry about anyone else, just for a few hours. To make myself feel something other than lethargy, worry and anger. But I won’t, people. Good little Razzler is far too sensible to do anything like that. Good little Razzler knows that God loves her and that the best way to get through this is to rest on His mercy and grace. Even if she’s not entirely sure how to do that. So maybe good little Razzler will do her job, be compassionate and kind towards other people, eat her dinner and watch some Star Trek.

Please don’t feel you have to comment on this one. I was going to close comments, but then I thought what if I’m stifling someone who really wants to comment? Anyway, you don’t have to comment. I just have to try to get this stuff out of my system. I’ll think really hard and post something light and bouncy soon, I promise.