Still falling

Recovery. I guess we all have to choose it at some point. But what happens when our brains just wont let us. When everyday is a constant struggle to get out of bed or get yourself in the shower. What happens when you cant focus on work or classes because all you’re thinking about is trying to keep yourself alive.

 

I guess that means recovery is something we have to choose everyday. It really sucks. I wish we could just be recovered and thats it. We dont have to fight anymore, its just easier after we decide to recover.

 

I feel like I’m fading. I am lost in this world and I don’t know why I’m here. Do we need to have a meaning for this life? I dont want to die without achieving something. Maybe the thing that I have achieved is surviving this long. I can feel myself grow colder.

Its time for a poem… (tw)

I’ve come to realize this worlds full of sin, there’s nothing for me here i’m just a waste of space, I’ve got no reason to stay here with this awful race. Its a disgrace, I was misplaced born in the wrong time and in the wrong place. Its okay though cause I’ll see you soon, you’ll know when your time has come just look at the moon. As it shines bright throughout the night and remember everyone’s facing their own fight, but I cant deal with this pain cause I’m not a fighter, you’ll make it through the night just hold your pillow tighter. So let the world know that I died in vain cause the world around me is the one to blame.

How grief has changed me.

The way I viewed the world around me was filtered by the rose tinted glasses that I wore. For most of my life I didn’t know what true loss was. When I turned seventeen the world that I had created for myself slowly began to crack. I lost my two best friends in the space of six months. My father died first, suicide. My mother not long after, a heart attack snatching her away.

If we talk in clinical terms, there are five stages of grief. The first stage is denial. When you’re faced with a fact that is so horribly unbelievable your brain will do anything to protect itself. Denying the loss of someone so close to you is the brains way of trying to cope. If you don’t believe it, then surely it couldn’t have happened. Denial is also I very hard stage to move forward from. I also find that it is closely related to the second stage of grief, anger.  tbc

Happiness damn near destroys you.

                                                                          I’m lost.

I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m struggling so much to see a future for myself. Everything just looks…empty.

I don’t feel like the author of this chapter anymore and the only thing I can do, is live this out and hope that there is a happy ending.

                                                                           Who am I?

 

I don’t know how to find out.

 

Disappear with the night

Sadness. It creeps up and sneaks into my head when I least expect it. It sets up camp and refuses to leave no matter how many mantras I whisper to myself. Sadness makes its way through my body and into my heart. Sadness is an awful guest.

Give your tears to the tide.

It’s hard to know who you are without mental illness clouding your persona. My illness appeared when I was young which made it difficult for me to really know who I was without it. Time after time I would tell my therapist that, “This really is me, its who I am, I don’t know who I would be without this illness.”

Every day that I wake up I need to remind myself that I am human. I am not a shell that leaks depression, I am not a waste of space who should vanish with the wind. I am a sister, a daughter, a friend, a person who deserves this life.

Dancing with the devil

The hardest thing about recovery has been trying to normalise my feelings. If something is to go wrong I automatically catastrophize what has happened. I automatically feel like everything I have worked for has fallen apart and all this effort was a huge waste of time. I’m not sure if anyone else does this or not but my therapist has to remind me every session to normalise my feelings. Just because I am having a bad day today doesn’t mean tomorrow will be the same. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to fall back into an eating disorder or depression or self harm. All it means is that I am human. I am allowed to hurt and breakdown and be sad. That is what makes us human.

You can go your own way.

I hate feeling lonely. You know that feeling of utter hollowness in your chest. Usually I would try anything to numb this pain but I know that if I do that it will only undo all the hard work I have put in after coming out of inpatient. I feel like there is something missing, part of me thinks I’m missing my anorexia. I miss having something that is mine. However, I am far enough along in recovery to know that this feeling is only anorexia trying to pull my back into that hell. So I am doing my absolute best to ignore this back and forth battle that is currently going on in my head right now. Sometimes sleeping makes things better so I think I’m going to sleep early tonight. And hopefully things will be better in the morning, right?

You gotta laugh when you’re the joke.

The fog in my head has shifted and my brain has moved back into DRIVE. I’m actually really glad that I am no longer on anti-depressants. The first pills that they gave me were green and white and I got told that they would make the thoughts in my head disappear. I remember taking them each night and praying that they would finally make the abundance of nightmares in my head stop. Unfortunately for me, they just got worse. One night after I had took my green pills in one hand and a bottle of vodka in another I ended up in the Emergency Room. I found it hard to explain to the doctors that I wasn’t really trying to kill myself, no. I just wanted to go to sleep for a long time. I really wanted to go to sleep and wake up when this was all better. After a long night of waiting around I was allowed to go home. Did I regret what I had done? No. Yes. Honestly, I really did regret what I had done. I didn’t care so much that I was alive. I regretted the fact that I was hurting my family and I didn’t know how to stop. After I had done the silly thing that we don’t talk about anymore my medication was changed. Goodbye Prozac. (The only sad part about coming off Prozac was the fact that it was an appetite suppressant. My anorexia loved that, you see. I could make it through the day abusing fluoxetine with coffee and I was like a small child with a sugar rush.) Hello Mirtazapine. These pills were different. They were smaller and they were also classed as a sedative. Boy did I soon find that out. Mirtazapine and alcohol are definitely not friends. I am aware that drinking while depressed and taking medication is not a smart thing to do. One night I didn’t realise how much I had drank until it was too late. To cut a long story short I ended up back in the Emergency Room. Silly/Stupid/Silly.

Again, I was released on the account of being extremely sorry for wasting everyone’s time and promising that I wasn’t going to hurt myself again. I didn’t want to hurt myself again, my brain just seems to have this way of turning me against, well, me. Throw in a few therapist/nurse/psychiatrist/doctor appointments and we find ourselves on June 5th 2014. My appointment to meet with my team was in the morning although I cant quite remember what time. I had been referred to this response team because of my actions the day before.(Turning up at my psychiatrist appointment extremely upset with the intention to take my life.) After a ten minute conversation with a nurse and a doctor it was decided that I would be moved to the ward. This of course sent me further into a nervous breakdown. I was going to be in a psychiatric unit. Me? In a hospital. All because my brain wasn’t playing ball with me. Despite my hesitation they coxed me down into the ward told me to take care of myself and disappeared. The nurses took great care of me as soon as I walked through the door. The NHS might get a horrendous reputation for itself sometimes but in my personal experiences I cannot fault them one bit. I was shown around and to my room. The part that I was the most afraid of was telling my family. I still live at home so if I wasn’t to come home that night my carers would be worried. So as most young people do, I copped out doing the only thing I could think of doing. I sent a text, continued:

Life’s too short to even care at all

As I am writing this I still have the faint smell of hospital lingering around me. I was, for use of a better word, “released” from the psychiatric ward on Monday the 11th of august 2014. I remember not long after my parents died I would continuously tell my best friend that I never want to end up in a psychiatric hospital. It was my worst fear. I guess we all do eventually have to face our fears. Unfortunately this was my second admission of the year. 2014 was not going the way I had planned it. I was depressed, no ,sad, no, in need of tough love, no, in need of attention no,
missingmyparents. Eventually the official diagnosis was adjustment disorder with PTSD. My second stay in the hospital was much longer than the first and with that it was also much more traumatic. I was the youngest patient. Crying myself to sleep at night became a regular occurrence. However, the difference between this hospital stay and the first one was one thing. I realised there was something wrong. Not only did I realise something was wrong I realised that I needed to start changing things or I wouldn’t live to see my twenty fifth birthday. So that’s what I decided to do. Change things. Learn from the past and change the future. I will not let myself become a statistic.