Belief

As they announce a new Pope, I am sat wondering what it is to believe. If you believe in something, you have hopes and fears wrapped around your idea of what it is. You may make choices based upon it and it may guide decisions that could be life changing to you.

As much as a part of me really wishes I didn't, I believe in the ghosts and the monsters.  This is a belief that terrifies me and leaves me with no good options.  It is either a world taken over by monsters and given over to whatever it is they want, or to follow the path of the ghosts, knowing that may well mean dying.  Out of the two, I would obviously choose the later - why give a world for a selfish means? It is the only obvious answer.

Belief, after all, does not bring certainty. If anything, it can lead to more questions than answers and more shaky steps than solid ground and this is certainly the case for me.  I know a lot of people believe in ghosts, and claim to have seen them - the apparitions of the dead and lost love ones of the past.  Somehow these are not the same, at least not to me, not right now - and that leads me to questions and no where to look for answers.  It frustrates me to know answers I do find may not refer back to the right thing. I can barely stand to think of how little I really know and how much there is to find out, while at the same time having a looming sense of inevitability - It will happen, it does have to be stopped.  A sense of urgency in the task while flailing into a chasm of vast dark shadows.

Belief, it seems, does not equate knowledge, or security - or sanity.  It has been keeping me awake a bit lately. Mulling things over and trying to work out what it is I am meant to do with this belief. When there is a deity, the obvious choice is to pray and follow their written practises, rules and guidance.  Here, there are none. Certainly none I am aware of. No one to ask, no one to check against and no way of knowing if the choices I make are based upon the right assumptions. What if I followed a path in the belief it was the ghosts will when that would not at all stop the monsters? What then?

I don't have answers and I don't like not having answers, or a somewhere to find them. It scares me.  All of it does. 

Belief is a scary thing.

Snow flakes and a breeze

Have you ever had that feeling of fragility  like the slightest breeze could make everything tumble and topple away from you, piece by piece.  Small snowflakes in a winters breeze.  Each a tear un-falling.

I have been feeling this way more and more lately, without knowing a how or a why. Like I want to cry, but doing so would be the final straw and the damn would break, a storm of emotion flooding through.

This is why I have decided to come back here.  It has been so long and I have not written so much that could and should be said.  It is hard to know where to begin, so I will begin simply with now and hope the rest will fill itself in in my own way.

I am living very much day to day at the moment.  I wake up, go to work and have breakfast, take my meds and then try to do work - knowing that I am not doing as much as I should, or as well as I could do.  Everything I touch breaks and everything I plan changes.  I pull myself through the day, go home, and before you know it, it is time for me to take my meds and go to bed - knowing the next day will be much the same, but hoping it will somehow be better.

Nothing much does change. I am in the same place, with the same thoughts as I have been many times before. The only difference is that now I am on more meds, having broken down a few more times since I last wrote here.  Breaking down is hardly a new thing, but doing so in work, is. It was kind of my self made boundary and I broke it without really realising what I was doing.  In a way, the not realising is proof of how bad I was feeling at the time.

So I continue to see my Psych, who is helpful and is willing to try medicines with me - hence my new Anti-psychotic, Amisulpride (Solian) which I take twice a day.  Which helps a little with my anxiety and is meant to help with paranoid thoughts... not that it has done that yet, but I am only on a low dose still, so we will see.  Psychiatric stuff seems to take a long time with lots of waiting in between, when all you really want is someone to snap their fingers, or give you a hug and it to all have magically gone away.  No more negative thoughts, no more anxiety and twitchyness around other people, no more seeing ghosts and monsters that want you dead in one form or another.  It was be nice to wake up one morning and not have so many things careening around in my head that I can't remember the things I am meant to be remembering.  

My memory really is atrocious  and I guess that is part of why I am writing here again.  I want to get some of it down, before I forget.  Or I wont have it anywhere and someone will ask me - most likely in therapy of some sort, and I wont have an answer.

I guess on a more practical stand-point, I am still living in the same house with my parents.  I still don't have the financial security to move and buy my own place and more than anything, this breaks my heart.  I would love to move more than anything and really, I would give a limb for it, but a part of my mental unstableness just makes me far too prone to impulse spending and money mis-management and in the end all I can do is blame myself, and feel sorry for myself and add it to the list of things I hate about myself.

There are many things I want to change, and many things I fear never will and I watch them from a glass panned window, wafting by like snow flakes in a breeze.

Amazingly, I am currently going through a relatively stable period psychologically speaking.  My body, never one to be outdone has instead screwed with my blood-sugars and I have spent the past two weeks using every witch parts of my fingers to test my blood-sugars and ensure they are at a safe level.  Joy.

Despite the few weeks of calm, my current Therapist (yes, you read that right, I was told that I had to go to therapy) has declared that I need a Care Coordinator (I read this as yet another appointment to go to) as when I am not stable I am at a high level of risk..... Fair enough, no real argument there, but then, I am stable right now.  So a small part of me wonders if it is too little, too late.

I got the referral letter in the post during the week and as with all types of letters, I am currently struggling to get my head around what it says about me.  Least of all because its own lack of grammar implies I have more than one boyfriend (which I don't - I am a strong believer in monogamy).

... is experiencing problems associated with severe depression and anxiety with dissociative hallucination.  It is also possible, according to her psychiatrist, Dr X, that X is may experience co-morbid or underlying emotionally unstable personality disorder.

Sorry, but this is the first I have heard of a possible BPD diagnosis... surely they should tell me these things, before passing it on to me in a referral letter??

It is hard enough at times to grapple with severe depression, anxiety and hallucinations... It threw me through a loop when my Psych first suggested I may want to consider anti-psychotics should the hallucinations not improve (they have, btw... yay) but just as things seem to be settling down for me for once (they don't do that often) I get a letter saying I may have BPD....

Now to throw myself through the wringer in an attempt to figure out what that may mean for me going forward.

........

I will come back when my head is spinning a bit less and I can think in more straight lines.  

Dark Dreaming

I am dreaming a lot at the moment. Detailed dreams full of an intensity that is hard to shut away in the waking hours between. My thoughts are now almost constantly on forms of suicide or self harm. My respite and my historical escape of sleep has been taken over and riddled with the very thing it has nearly always previously prevented - The action of harm, carried out and watched in video graphic as a dream.

Last nights had a triangle type metal hanger with the top part threaded and secured through a break in a ceiling tile and the now visible metal joist above the ceiling tiles. The metal holding the hangers weight. A figure climbing up and putting their chin through the triangular hoop now hanging from the ceiling. Choked by the weight of their own being hanging loosely. Beneath them, a large wooden lump, a broken bed-post lays, sharp point upwards, ready for their inevitable fall. If one fails, the other won't. The rest of the room gathers dust and smoke as a fire begins to eat away at the now long discarded and irrelevant belongings. No failure here then.

Unsettling to have that as such a dream, and to have the unshakable image and a tune playing in my head in my waking hours that feels somehow linked. Maybe the person from the dream was listening to that tune play out?

Is it worth mentioning this to a therapist. To a psych. Does it make a difference that my thoughts occur in both waking and sleeping lives? That my actions turn to harm and sui on such a regular basis that I barely blink to take in how bad they may seem to others?

Maybe I have begun to let go of the idea that somehow there is a secret to be kept, that it should all be locked away as a thing of guilt and shame, that no-one else would ever listen to, or understand. Or maybe it is that this is now such a regular thing for me, and that it has been going on for so long that I have forgotten that to some people out there, it may not be considered normal.

The very idea of normal strikes me as strange, to be honest. So I guess it must be that.

I have therapy starting soon (on the 21st) I wonder what they will make of it, of me. Maybe to them, I am normal. Maybe to them, it is everyone else that is wrong. I can only wait and find out.

A week of disquiet

It is strange how often the way things begin is very often the way they continue - even if you try your hardest to make it otherwise. This week is very much a case in point. Monday was just a mess. Emotionally, physically, mentally... and the rest of the week has tumbled its way out a chaotic travesty I would not in any way be able to fully explain.

Work is busy, chaotic busy and I have flip flopped from one task to the next and back to the first in a whirlwind. Swept along in a gallivanting wave of emotions and frets and thoughts that I have barely the time to pin down and process.

I am aware that outwardly I am probably coping a lot better than I am inside. My mind has been thrown through a loop. Unsettled and up heaved and shunted in such a way that every glistening web of a lie I have told myself about coping is coming unstuck and falling to the ground in tears.

I am stopping the Mirtazapine, I haven't yet started stopping it, but it was agreed at my Psych appointment on Monday that as it has had no positive (or negative) effect on me, it is not worth taking the extra chemical. It was a low dose, so I can pick a time to stop it and stop.

I wish most things in life were that simple: it is not productive, so lets stop it. Boom. Stopped. Sadly, everything else, my mind, my body and my soul are far from simple and far from easily untangled.

My Psych now wants me to spend the time between Monday's appointment and the next (whenever that turns out to be, probably in December/January now) deciding two things:
1) If I want to try to reduce the dose of the Venlafaxine and in doing so, potentially risk unsettling my emotional/mental well-being (her words, not mine).
and
2) If I want to try an anti-psychotic.

I think the second of those two may well be the thing that threw me through a loop. Not at all discounting the fact that every Psych appointment I ever go on throws me through a loop anyway. Monday's session ended with my normal dissociation, finding myself randomly in town with no recollection of going there and wandering in a half daze for a while. There are bits and pieces and fragments but I really think I go into some kind of mind-hibernation whenever I have an MHU appointment. Bleh. Is probably the main reason I don't ever push for them to be more frequent.

Then, we get around to the Psychosis part. I mostly find this unsettling. I guess everyone finds psychosis unsettling, whether they have it, or hear or read about it (and if you hear about it as a part of the psychosis itself then you really have a double edged sword). For the most part, I can brush it under the rug where it belongs, pretend it is not happening and get myself to almost believe the facade of calm I attempt to put on on the outside. These are the times when it is mild and merely disconcerting:

The sound of sirens regardless of where I am (I have been on a train in the middle of a field before now.... )
The smell of burning and of rotting
The tactile sensation like ants crawling over my skin
The flicker of ghosts and monsters or the lingering doubt around people and crowds

Then there are the times when things begin to creep past my ability to ignore:
The monsters
The ghosts becoming more frequent
The disturbed thoughts and the increase in my belief in them

Then the distinction moments when I no longer know which stage is the better one to have and the utter panic and disillusion that comes with wondering if it is you who is wrong, or everyone else.

Put down on paper like this, I can see why the psych is suggesting I consider an anti-psychotic. The problem is, I am not sure I have ever considered myself ill enough to take them. It scares me to think that the level of ability to cope I have feigned myself into believing I have may well be paper thin and merely an illusion. It scares me to think that any of these things are the psychosis and that it is not just a stage.

I have been told in the past that my psychosis symptoms are linked to my depression being bad. That the worst my depression is, the more likely it is that they will be triggered and I have the wonder of how much the psychosis plays of my social anxiety and how much of my social anxiety has been born as a response to the psychosis.

Everything in its duplicity plays off everything else and I find it hard to sit and work out what causes what and when and why and if I consider it enough to potentially try yet another line of treatment.

I have four months to mull it over.... I think I just needed to put some of my initial thoughts here to pin down some of the disquiet of the last few days. Somewhere.

Storm breaks

Today I am having one of those almost inexplicable moments of down. That deep endless, sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. The knowledge that all you can be is disappointment and failure and the echo of all your emotions in the heavy rain, lightning and storm outside.

Yes - I am typing this with a thunder storm raging outside my window and slick salt tears stinging in my eyes. Chaos abounds in a wash of inertia and the knowledge that it makes more sense to wait it out than to try and fight it.

In some ways, this is an inevitable. As there will always be a storm after warm hot humidity, so there will be tears and a grip of doubt after any drifting hopes. All dreams unravel and sift apart in the end - Crumbling down to the sharp thump of reality. Nothing but ash and darkened hazy clouds. The roll of thunder and the pattering of rain of window, brushed by winds on the way down. No path is ever direct. No smiles cure this frown.

I am due to see my psych tomorrow. I am, as ever, unclear what I want to say. I am not going to pretend I am better because I am not. Yet, I am failing to see the point of the large dose of chemicals I take every day - They have made me put on a lot of weight, and that is all I can really say for them. Maybe if I stopped I would be a lot worse, but I do not feel better enough to see the balance. Is putting on all that weight worth the narrow margin in my moods? I am not sure.

Uncertainty rolls around in my thoughts like the clouds across the grey, marl sky. My head is noisy and it makes it hard to focus, hard to distract. Too distracted for distraction. Too hurt and stuck in the same problems to be able to choose objectively what may be best. I may rest, instead. Sleep through the fret and threat. The cool damp distinguished wreck.

Ooops

Well... that never happened...