Autism Mum- by Anonymous

After a longer break than I’d like, I’ve finally got back around to posting these articles and stories up.  This one is an anonymous post, it also serves as one of the pieces performed in Shattered at this years Edinburgh Fringe – Ash

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I’m a natural blonde but the fair hair never really suited me. From the age of about 14, I have been a red head: that suits me. At once I wanted to stand out as a red warning sign does but like those signs warn others not to come too close and that worked for the most part. Of course, there are people who you can’t stop yourself letting in. You fall in love.

I fell for a handsome, pert-bottomed Irish man and the next thing I knew a couple of years had gone past and my head seems to be permanently down the toilet with morning, afternoon and evening sickness. Yep. I was well and truly pregnant. That was never in the life or love plan but smelling like semi digested sprouts (my major craving) and feeling like an empty sack of spuds I was still happy and still in love. One sunny Spring afternoon I fell in love with another fella in a different way. My son was born, over nine pounds of purplish pink ridiculousness with a flat yellow nose. I laughed when I saw him and he still makes me laugh everyday though I’m happy to report his looks have improved.

My little Pwdin didn’t suckle. Didn’t for sure but what I’ll never know is if he couldn’t or wouldn’t. Pumping away to get the boy his milk gave me a job to do stopped me from thinking for the five days we spent in the hospital trying and trying again to encourage the now pudgy pink one to meet us half way and suck at least a little. It was when we brought him home it hit. I couldn’t and wouldn’t and didn’t leave his side. In my exhausted state I was afraid that if I slept too deeply I would wake up to find that my boy never would again. I would sneak out of our bed after my husband was asleep and lie on the floor so that I wouldn’t sleep soundly. Dreams were tormented with false awakenings – always the same – I’d get up to greet my ray of sunshine only to find him cold and blue and stiff.

Wakefulness wasn’t a relief. I was terrified that if I carried my precious bundle more than a few steps I would drop him. I could picture it – his perfect head the glass vase in Citizen Kane. Red rose petals of blood. If I kissed him I could “see” burning marks on his skin where bacteria were swarming. Everything had to be cleaned. Everything was dirty. I was dirty. I’d scrub my hands and wash them in sterilising fluid then douse them with alcohol gel. My skin hardened and cracked like old, old leather. Bending a finger was painful. The doctor told me I had peurperal psychosis – an extreme form of postnatal depression.

Once breast feeding was at an end – my little Pwdin decreed that by almost biting through a nipple when he was poorly with a tummy virus – I finally took the prescription my doctor gave me to the pharmacy and began treatment. I have always been prone to depression and have been on and off antidepressant medication since adolescence but now my life had changed. Anxiety has displaced the apathy towards my very being that I experienced before becoming a mother. My son is severely autistic and I still worry myself out of sleep night after night pondering what life will hold for him after we, his parents, are gone. Depressive malaise has been replaced by panic attacks, palpitations and sometimes crippling fear. In that heart-pounding panic though is something vital, something I never experienced before motherhood and though, at times in may bring me to knees, I know the long years of numbness are over.

 

Circles by Elisha K

Life is full of circles, a round thing that has different definitions in different arenas. The geometric definition is a shape where all points are an even distance from the center. It is immersed in our culture. Suns, moons, stars, pizza, historic tables. It represents something pure, something clean and easy to understand. Wheels, lazy susans, umbrellas. Practical and simple. Circles go so deep.

I’ve been obsessed with spirals ever since I can remember. My margins in school were full of them. Spiral after spiral. Big, small, joining together or standing alone. Sometimes they’d take up three or four lines, or not even a centimeter of one. Spiral after spiral after spiral. It’s a bastard form of a circle. It shares the shape relatively, but it’s broken and incomplete. Often, the most attractive spiral is jagged, wobbly and misshapen. Maybe that’s why I liked them. I’ve always had a weakness for imperfect things. Perfection makes me nervous.

But circles I cannot shake. My life is a series of them. One circle here with some foggy path leading from one circle to the next. Each a stage in my life, but they are all related. Spirals are there too, in some of the circles. Winding down and down, but always leaving a pathway back up and out.

My father is a big man. Big in body, big in voice, big in spirit, big in heart and big in mind. He is loud, he is funny and he is strange. His intelligence is staggering, made for numbers and theorums, but also for imagination and creativity. Some of his ideas I will never understand. His minds path is also just as foggy and unclear, and there is no name for it. If there was, he’d invent it, and it’d be beautiful.

For most of my life, I have hated him.

The first memories I have of spending time with my father are the happy memories of a child. He’d read us stories from these books that had beautiful illustrations. My older sister and I would run upstairs and wake him from his nap (he took one every day) and beg him to read Leo the Lop.

‘DaaaaaAAad, say it in the voice. The funny one.” And he would, and we’d erupt in giggles. I remember making snow men. I remember jumping on our ancient trampoline.

“Stay in the center!” He’d shout. I didn’t see it as a child, but he was a nervous man. We weren’t even allowed to go upstairs when we were alone because he was afraid that we’d fall. I was a clumsy child, so maybe that wasn’t an unfounded fear. As a child, you don’t see strange behavior because your world is so small. You have your mother, your siblings, your father. They are normal, the world is strange. They are safe and the world is new and dangerously exciting. It isn’t until your peers see into your life that you start thinking your parents are weird.  But even then, they thought he was funny. He’d sing embarrassing songs on the bus on field trips, but I somehow survived the embarrassment. I learned a lesson early: It’s only shameful if you let THEM shame you. It was an early foundation of my strength of character, and I can only give credit for that to my father.

I didn’t start hating him until I was a teenager. It wasn’t for the classic teenage reasons. I learned that my father was clinically depressed. That he was sad, he was lost and lonely. Anxious and sometimes cranky. From the ages of 12 to about 14, I forgave him. I happily blamed the disease. It was this lurking devil in the shadows that was the cause of all our families’ problems. It was the reason why he called me stupid for getting a C in math. It was the reason that he made my mother and sister cry when we fought.

It wasn’t until I was about 15 that I began to resent him. I no longer blamed the disease as this separate entity. I blamed him, because he housed it. I began to fight with him. Any conversation we had usually ended up in a bitter tone. Not always shouting, but certainly not friendly. I was becoming my own woman, going through my own trials. I was losing friends at that time and not yet making others. I was feeling abandoned by everyone. In my selfishness, I felt that my mother had to care about him too much to notice me, and my sister was getting ready to move on to the next circle of her own life.  Why blame an abstract when you can blame something whole and solid?

And I was heartbroken. I saw my parents did not love one another anymore. In a time where I held romance on the highest pedestal, this was the greatest tragedy.

I prayed. When that didn’t work, I moved to Paganism and tried rituals, spells and healing. That didn’t work. I left the church, I left my belief because I realized that if God didn’t have time to answer a girls prayers, some which went something like “Dear God, I hear my daddy talking about suicide today. Please don’t let him do that, please let him see…” then I didn’t have time for God.

It took me until I was 22 to come back around. To make the circle back to the thinking I had in my pre-teens. The disease is the enemy, not my father. I moved out in 2008 to pursue my Bachelor’s Degree. I moved two hours to the west; not that far, but just far enough. I started noticing on my trips home that the house was quiet, peaceful, the tension was gone. I asked Mom if he had gone back on medicine. At the time, he hadn’t, and it struck me: I was gone, I was the change. Instead of feeling hurt, I felt—relieved. I realized that all I ever wanted was my dad to be happy. I had been frustrated because nothing I did made that happen. Prayer, magic, resentment; all dead ends. I had taken that frustration out on him.

And then—my mind got sick. I started worrying about the most odd things. I worried about my domicile catching on fire. I had dreams about a fire we had in our backyard. Small in retrospect, but huge in the eyes of an 8 year old, watching her mother and father get so close to a dangerous thing with buckets of water. Another circle.  I began to get depressed, moody,  and reclusive. I began to have panic attacks in public as people touched me, as I felt my space invaded. It brought an understanding, and an epiphany of what my father felt. Underneath the thin layer that depression has over him, my father is a good man. Through my teenage years, my own ignorance and the conversations with a certain family member made me resent him because I thought there was no hope, that nothing would ever change. I was exhausted with all the things I tried. It took me leaping through circles of life, and traveling down spirals for me to see him as he is: a kind, funny, big man who napped on the floor and who will always defend my honor. A man who has been tried and tested and who has traveled through his own circles and spirals and a shape that only he knows the name of. I know him now as my father, and as a friend.

The Beast – by Sam

I spent weeks, if not months, waiting to die. There is no other way I could put it. I was positive that I was going to die of something. The fear, paranoia and depression had reached a point where I could not imagine making it through the following days. Sleeping was my favourite thing in the world. It meant I could actually rest because even though I spent most of my time in bed I was always alert, always wondering what any phantom pain was, always researching, waiting for hallucinations, voices, anything that would confirm to me that I was actually crazy.

I’d always been quite an anxious person and managed to keep it in check most of the time but I noticed it slowly escalating as my life began to change over the period of a few months last year. I hate change and I began to detach.

I ended up suffering with something called depersonlisation, a condition which makes the world around you feel dream like, I’d have conversations with people and begin to wonder whether it was actually happening and the fear that I was going insane was horrendous. I was pretty much waiting for the voices to start. Only when I put my symptoms into the internet did I actually get some relief from the hypochondriacs need to research every symptom. I wasn’t alone, at all. There was a whole community of people out there with the same feelings as me, going through the same torment and everyone was saying the same things “you are not insane” and “you are not going to die”.

Since then, my anxiety had taken on many forms, through panic attacks, severe hypochondria, agoraphobia, this beast (and I can only describe it as that) has tried to get at me from all angles. The depersonalisation is still there but every so often I get a glimpse of the real world and I can’t wait for the fog to clear completely. At the moment, I’m starting to pull through and fight back. I hate it too much to continue this way for much longer so I’m fighting.

People on the outside of this box need to remember that there is so much more to mental health issues than you are told by anyone suffering it. It’s not just a “I don’t want to go outside” or “I don’t want to eat that” and we’re not trying to be difficult. It’s terrifying, really, truly terrifying. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone and I’m so glad it’s being brought to the attention of people and not as a stigma

 

Depression is Not a Dirty Word- Zenbuffy

note: This piece also appeared on stage as part of the play Shattered!

Every day, we see things that remind us of how fragile we all are; we see roadside headstones, nursing homes, cancer treatment centres, and hospitals. When we see these things, we often think of those affected, and perhaps about how difficult it might be for them, and if there is a way we can help (dropping some money in a collection box the next time you see one, volunteering at a nursing home, etc). We are living in a time of open and honest discussion about medical affairs, where there are any number of campaigns advising people to check for lumps, bumps, and rashes, to help early diagnosis of cancers, infections, and chronic problems. Even with all this, I would rather admit to almost anything rather than tell people that I have suffered from ill health. Why? Because they are problems that you can’t see – they don’t take the form of a broken leg, a sprained wrist, or a swollen gland – even though they are every bit as debilitating.

Like so many people in Ireland, I have experienced mental health problems – namely, depression (bipolar disorder, to be exact, with a tendency toward depressive episodes). I have also become adept at hiding this fact from many of those around me because, despite living in an ostensibly modern society, I am keenly aware of the fact that “mental health” and “depression” are dirty words; we don’t speak about them, we don’t acknowledge them, and we certainly don’t tell people that we are experiencing them. Mental health is the last bastion of the taboo in Ireland – spoken about only in hushed tones, lied about to friends, family, and co-workers, and denied to the very last, even if it costs people their lives.

It is almost certain that, in your group of friends, at least one person has dealt with a mental health issue, even if you don’t know about it. That’s because mental health issues, unlike people, don’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter if you have the most loving and supportive family in the world, or if you were a lonely child; it doesn’t matter if you wanted for nothing, or scrimped and saved for everything; it doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, or how old you are.

Depression hits like a hammer. It can come on suddenly, with little or no warning, and once it has arrived, it digs in roots that make it harder to remove. Depression is more than just feeling a little sad; it’s like feeling that you’ll never be happy again, or that you’ll never feel anything but this again. It’s crippling and debilitating. It makes it difficult to perform the simplest of tasks; it’s difficult to eat, sleep, wash, or care about anything at all. More than this, it wreaks havoc on your system, causing headaches, migraine, stomach irritations, digestive problems, changes in appetite, weakness, extreme tiredness, insomnia, etc., but then, what illness doesn’t? Like any illness, you can receive treatment to make yourself better, in the form of medicine and/or therapy. Unlike any illness, however, you are unlikely to receive the support and sympathy of many of your peers. This is because depression, unlike any other illness, is somehow “your fault”.

I’m not sure that it’s possible to completely describe what depression feels like in words, so I’m not certain that anyone who has never suffered from it will fully appreciate how truly awful it can be. Of course, the same could be said of a broken leg – after all, those lucky enough to have never broken a bone are unlikely to know what that pain feels like, what it is like to hear and feel the snap of the bone, what it is like to struggle to do things properly until you’re recovered – but when you break your leg, people look after you. They open doors, they help you eat, dress, shower, and get around. They make accommodations for you, and help you through your recovery. They are patient and understanding when it takes you longer to perform simple tasks. And regardless of what you were doing when you broke your leg, no one ever tells you to “snap out of it”, or tells you that it’s your fault.

Mental health issues are just like any other health problem you may be having. Just like an asthmatic may take inhalers, or a diabetic may take insulin, people with a mental health problem may take medication, because each condition can be debilitating and even fatal if left untreated. Similarly, once controlled, people with asthma, diabetes, depression, or any similar illness can live full, happy, and healthy lives that are mostly unaffected by their condition.

We need to stop thinking of mental illness as separate and distinct to non-mental or physical illnesses. There is no gulf to cross, no barrier to break down – illness is illness, whether it takes the form of something physical, or something mental. To take medicine for a mental health problem is no different than taking insulin, and to need to take a day or two to recover from a depressive episode is no different than needing a day or two to recover from the ‘flu.

I am a young woman who has dealt with mental illness. I also have a successful career, a healthy social life, a number of hobbies, a BSc, and I’m studying toward a Masters degree. Mental illness is not a life sentence. It’s not something to be ashamed of. And it’s about time that we stopped treating it that way.

Parts of the whole – by Rachel

My name is Rachel. This is the story of my depression and self-harm, and the few bits about my self-harm could be triggers.

 

I first realized that something was wrong with me when I was 14. I was so sad and anxious all of the time that I was barely eating or sleeping, let alone doing my homework and just generally functioning. When I was 15, I cut myself for the first time. When someone asked me about the marks on my arm, I blamed my cat. Either I was a really good liar or they just really wanted to believe me. I stopped cutting and started scratching myself because I didn’t want to have to worry about being caught with a knife. I didn’t want to be caught, but, at the same time, I must have because I told a friend what was going on, and I also told my brother. My brother was clever and used it to blackmail me into lying when he broke a rule, and I was scared of how my parents would react so I usually went along with what he wanted. Eventually, I got tired of keeping everything together and lying to everyone, and I told him that he could tell whoever he wanted. I didn’t care anymore, and I wouldn’t stop him. He got mad at me and he told my mother (conveniently, avoiding being grounded).

 

My parents confronted me, asking if my brother had told the truth. I said that he was, and that things had been bad for months. They helpfully told me that what I was doing was stupid and that I needed to get my crap together. I was crying and yelling, and they asked if I wanted counseling. They asked in such a way that I knew my answer was supposed to be no. I said I did not want counseling. I did not get help for my depression. I somehow made it through high school a complete mess. I turned my sadness and anger and frustration inward, and my self-harm became worse than ever. I still have scars from all of the times I hurt myself to avoid yelling or upsetting anyone. I realized that I was out of control, and I did not want to go to college still harming myself. I made the conscious choice to stop harming before I went to college. I stopped cutting and scratching, for the most part. (Fun fact, I starting grinding my teeth so badly while sleeping and during stressful or triggering situations that I now need a night guard so I don’t damage my teeth anymore. More damage and I’ll need veneers or caps of some other sort.)

 

I was optimistic going into college, although I dealt with some home sickness. I got involved and started going to youth group meetings and church, hoping that making friends would keep me from having another bout. What it did was make me realize that, although I’d never thought about it, I was an atheist. I stopped going to churches, and started making friends outside of religion. I started having fun, and I spent most of the next year happy and healthy. I still did not deal with stressful situations very well, and had difficulties controlling my anger, but I was trying very hard to be happy.

 

The fall that I was 20, I started having emotional issues again. I wasn’t going to class or doing homework. Most days I didn’t leave my dorm room other than to go get food. I spent most of my time sitting on my bed crying, and wishing that I could drop out and run away from everything. With the encouragement of my boyfriend at the time, I sought counseling. While I felt that it wasn’t very helpful because I didn’t trust my counselor enough to talk about my self-harm, I did realize that my anger was a manifestation of my depression. With the encouragement from my counselor, I came out to my parents as an atheist, and let them know that I was seeking help for my depression. My mom mocked me for the counseling, my atheism, and the drop in my grades, so without the support of my family I muddled through it again. I didn’t drop out of college, or start hurting myself (besides the whole teeth grinding thing) or do anything but make it.

 

I graduated last year. I’m currently dealing with some anger and depression surrounding issues with my job, but I think things are going to be better for me this time around. I have a boyfriend who loves me and wants me to be happy, my crafting, and my friends. I did not sink as low as I have before. They are helping me make it through, and I will.

 

I will not be defined by my depression, just as I will not be defined by my atheism. They are parts of the whole, but they do not explain my whole story. I am doing better, and that’s really all that matters right now.

 

Depersonalisation – by Samantha

I spent weeks, if not months, waiting to die. There is no other way I could put it. I was positive that I was going to die of something. The fear, paranoia and depression had reached a point where I could not imagine making it through the following days. Sleeping was my favourite thing in the world. It meant I could actually rest because even though I spent most of my time in bed I was always alert, always wondering what any phantom pain was, always researching, waiting for hallucinations, voices, anything that would confirm to me that I was actually crazy.

I’d always been quite an anxious person and managed to keep it in check most of the time but I noticed it slowly escalating as my life began to change over the period of a few months last year. I hate change and I began to detach.

I ended up suffering with something called depersonalisation, a condition which makes the world around you feel dream like, I’d have conversations with people and begin to wonder whether it was actually happening and the fear that I was going insane was horrendous. I was pretty much waiting for the voices to start. Only when I put my symptoms into the internet did I actually get some relief from the hypochondriacs need to research every symptom. I wasn’t alone, at all. There was a whole community of people out there with the same feelings as me, going through the same torment and everyone was saying the same things “you are not insane” and “you are not going to die”.

Since then, my anxiety had taken on many forms, through panic attacks, severe hypochondria, agoraphobia, this beast (and I can only describe it as that) has tried to get at me from all angles. The depersonalisation is still there but every so often I get a glimpse of the real world and I can’t wait for the fog to clear completely. At the moment, I’m starting to pull through and fight back. I hate it too much to continue this way for much longer so I’m fighting.

People on the outside of this box need to remember that there is so much more to mental health issues than you are told by anyone suffering it. It’s not just a “I don’t want to go outside” or “I don’t want to eat that” and we’re not trying to be difficult. It’s terrifying, really, truly terrifying. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone and I’m so glad it’s being brought to the attention of people and not as a stigma

My Struggle with Anxiety – by Adam

My name is Adam. I am 21 years old, and I am currently studying computer science at the University of Memphis. Honestly, I’m surprised I’ve made it this far.

Throughout my life, I have had to deal with intense anxiety especially when having to deal with people. Sometimes it gets to the point that I make up excuses to avoid certain social situations. I even have trouble eating in public and sometimes have to force myself to eat even when not in public. Sometimes, I don’t eat at all causing me to be underweight.

None of this was made better by the fact that, in middle school, I was one of the shortest people in the school and was made fun of constantly for it. I think there was maybe one person who was shorter. This made me extremely insecure about my height (or lack thereof). I felt weak and defenseless. I felt inadequate because I didn’t grow as much as other students. Thankfully, I’ve gotten more at peace with my height recently, but I still feel small when around my friends. Most of them are 6 feet or over and I’m only 5’4”.

Because of my anxiety, I always feel less than everyone else around me. I see them in groups talking and looking so happy, and I sit there was wish I could be that happy. These constant thoughts of inadequacy have led me to suicidal thoughts several times in my life. Sometimes I feel like I’m beyond help and feel that death is the only way to go. My rational side, however, is calling me an idiot for thinking something like that and so far, it’s winning the struggle.

I feel like it’s getting better, however, I still struggle with it sometimes. I almost skipped the first day of classes because I knew that at least some of the professors would make us introduce ourselves to the class, and I hate doing that. Even in the previous semester, meeting with my advisor was hard. I could barely email her to set up an appointment because I was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Even when I set it up, I nearly threw up on the day I was supposed to meet with her just thinking about it.

It doesn’t help much that I live in Mississippi. Most people around me are devoutly religious and some even believe that mental illness is a sign of demon possession. The fact that I’m an atheist probably doesn’t help them see that they’re wrong. Some likely believe that my atheism is the cause of my anxiety.

My parents haven’t been much help either. They refuse to believe that there’s a problem. Anytime I try and talk to them, they just blow it off and tell me to “snap out of it” as if I can just stop being nervous at will. Honestly, I don’t think they really listen to me.

I just hope to keep fighting and maybe one day to get over this completely. I know I have at least some support.

Cutters… by “Tor”

I am terrified of people finding out about my mental disorder.  I have a very hard time explaining it to myself (let alone someone else) so the thought of having to tell someone *why* I do the things I do is virtually impossible.  That said, what I do is compulsively injure myself.  Some people use the word “cutter” which doesn’t really mean the right thing and is loaded with so many negative connotations.  I prefer the term “self mutilator” despite the fact that many people that I know think it sounds overly crass or vulgar, but I think it describes the trait rather accurately.  Besides, “cutter” seems unfair to all those times I’ve bashed and bruised myself, burned welts into my skin, and buried needles deep into myself.  However, I believe the technical term is compulsive NSSI (non-suicidal self injury).

 

I’ve read books on the subject and mailing lists and forums, but I’ve never felt I fit quite in with them.  When these urges first started happening I was in Junior High.  I don’t think I ever acted upon them until I was a little older (around 14 or 15) but I started noticing sharp or hot objects.  My gaze lingered on them a little too long.  I wasn’t sure why or what I was thinking until one day I was fooling around and jabbed my knee with a pin.  It was extremely dull and when it finally broke the skin the pain washed over me in a calming, almost meditative way.  As that faded I looked down and revelled in the drop of blood welling where I had pulled the point out of me.  Looking at it, I felt this great sense of power, of ownership over myself, of freedom and happiness.

 

Ever since then I’ve been hooked.  For about a year after starting, I thought I was the only one.  I had never heard of someone purposefully hurting him or herself.  Finally after a year of hiding my knives and lighters and needles terrified someone would discover my secret, I thought to search the web.

 

I’ve found groups of people that understand me partially.  Traditional cutters talk about getting an emotional release, letting out tension, or snapping back to reality.  I’ve never thought of it that way, nor have I ever experienced the sudden urgent need to hurt myself immediately that so many describe.  In the body modification community they are firm believers that you own your body and you should be able to do as you wish to it.  You can stand with your scars before them and not have to be shy.  They understand that pain is not always a bad thing.  You can talk about experiences that others would describe as agonizing and they listen, interested.  However, they seek spiritual enlightenment or aesthetic enhancement, or perhaps to reclaim their body.  Few, if any, of the people I’ve met just do it to do it.  BDSM enthusiasts are no strangers to the idea that pain can be pleasurable but in general shy away from anything that might leave serious permanent marks.  Few sexual masochists will actually leave life long scars, and the concept of hurting oneself in a nonsexual setting is foreign.

 

I still to this day have never really admitted all my secrets to anyone I know personally — even my friends who know most of what I do.  On those rare occasions that I have gotten up the guts to confide in someone they have always received it well enough, until a point.  Eventually I can see the disgust on their faces and I have to stop there, and pretend that’s the whole problem.  Even today, my lover doesn’t know the start of it.  I’m sure suspicions are raised somewhat from time to time, but no where close to the true depth of the issue.  I am terrified to leave my bedroom unattended for fear my tools or blood soaked rags will be discovered.  If it happened, how can I explain that I’m not a psycho killer?

 

I’m virtually incapable of discussing this in person due to the sheer embarrassment.  This is something I don’t think I will ever be able to shake, but the thing is it doesn’t get in the way of my life, hardly, at all apart from the shame, secrecy, and guilt.  I’m quite good at what I do, after all my practice, and I have never ended up in the emergency room, never had infections, never lost jobs, never even been caught.  And yet, I worry about having to explain myself to someone virtually every day.

 

Beyond the sheer titillating nature of my compulsion, what fuels my shame is the perception that only 15 year old girls with daddy issues and eating disorders cut themselves, and more than that, the idea that they just want attention.  I am in my mid twenties, very successful, and male.  I would wager than until this paragraph there is a good chance that even you had the image of a teenage girl in your head.  I have heard numerous people that I know joke about emo girls and “cutters” throughout my life and it is considered socially acceptable to mock this.  I have to keep my mouth shut for fear of outing myself.  This is a real problem for myself and all the other people who suffer in silence like me just because they want the right to choose who knows and when they know about their problem.

 

I don’t really know what the point I wanted to get at here was other that paint a picture of what it is to suffer from a particularity stereotyped compulsion, and maybe someone out there might read this and know they aren’t alone.  If that’s you and you’d like to chat with someone going through the same thing (I know it helped me a lot) I’d be happy to talk, just send me an email at tor2@post.com.

I Hate Myself… By “Craig”

I hate myself. I mean truly, genuinely hate myself. If I died in my sleep that wouldn’t be a problem, sadly I’m too much of a coward to kill myself. People say those who commit suicides are cowards. I don’t see that. In order to take your own life requires massive brass balls I just don’t have. Suicide isn’t an easy way out, it’s a dead end. Especially for an atheist like me. I don’t think there will be an afterlife. For me it would just be oblivion, and I guess to some degree that’s why I can’t do it. As much as I hate and despise myself – despite what people say I think I’m fat and ugly – I just can’t bring myself to enter oblivion. But I wouldn’t care if it happened in my sleep – I wouldn’t know after all.

But then there are those I leave behind. My mum and dad care about me, granted that’s only because animal instincts in the higher apes creates this bond between parent and offspring. If it wasn’t for that issue they wouldn’t care. I think one or two others may miss me temporarily, but not for long. My mother tried to kill herself, recently, because she wanted to be with my grandmother. Her belief in an afterlife made her consider suicide and that there would be somewhere better to go to. I wish that were true because if it was, I might be more inclined to take that blade and instead of just superficial self harming, drive it deep into my wrist. Or my throat.

See these are the thoughts I have. I hate myself. And medication isn’t helping anymore, I just want to curl up away from everything with a never ending bottle of whisky. Away from everyone and everything. I want to run away and hide from everyone and everything. If I’m just by myself I can’t hurt anyone. People would ultimately be better off without me around.

But I can’t bring myself to do any of that. I can’t run away and I can’t kill myself so I have to live with myself. And I’m struggling to do that too. My days are filled with fear and hatred of myself. I can’t bring myself to do anything at all apart from sit in front of my laptop and wander around the internet. This is how I feel. I feel empty, alone and full of self hate.

And I feel I deserve punishment. That’s why I hurt myself, because I deserve it. Because I should have that pain, those scars. Everyday that goes by is like a punishment in itself. Each day feeling like this seems a punishment. And I hate it. But not as much as I hate myself. I’m not even sure what the purpose of this is, why I’m submitting this to this blog. I guess I just needed to put this out there, to let the world know how much pain I’m in. And how there is nothing I can do to stop it.

Facing it… by “Greg”

I’ve had this document open for a while now, and not written anything on it. It’s not that I’ve nothing to say, it’s not that I don’t want to say it, it’s that I can’t face it. So the window is open, and I open other programs on the computer (a web browser, and a computer game) and just leave it in the background. But because I have trouble concentrating (I also have a book in front of me, and a book of Sudoku – I multitask a great deal!), I ‘Alt+Tab’ through the windows I have open, and keep seeing this open program.

Eventually, here I am.

In many ways it’s hard to know where to begin; what kind of thing is wanted, what kind of thing is acceptable? It’s not even conscious – I constantly second guess myself and others. I’ll be reading something, or trying to write, and thoughts will pop into my head. Critical thoughts. Censuring thoughts.

You’re not going to express yourself well enough! Compare yourself to other people: they have it far worse than you do! You don’t count! It’s not that you’re depressed, and struggle for motivation, it’s just that you’re lazy. You’re pathetic – you’re not even trying. It’s not as if what happened to you is bad, you just didn’t try hard enough.

I didn’t try hard enough. I don’t try hard enough. Damn, but compared to some people I probably did – I do – have it easy.

It’s amazing how easily the thoughts become my own. How easy it is to believe them. What isn’t amazing is how quickly all these critical thoughts can increase once you put your conscious mind to it. That’s not in the least surprising.

That’s because they’re true!

There may be some truth to them, it’s hard to say. Maybe a lot of people would have coped with the things I had to go through and which left me in the mess I’m currently trying to extricate myself from. There are certainly some things I could have done differently that would have changed my life a great deal. Yet how unfair, and absurd is it to blame a ten year old for not being able to do the best possible thing? But I’ve found it is very easy to lose objectivity and rationality when suffering from depression.

Excuses, excuses. The cold hard truth is that other people get physically abused when they are children, and seem to get through life far better than you do. All your problems were in your mind. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names can never hurt you. Remember? Clearly not. You let them hurt you.

Without going into great detail about it, my father suffered a breakdown when I was about five (cue light bulbs over psychiatrists’ heads: it runs in the family!) – he was a teacher. He also wasn’t the only teacher in that school to suffer that fate: the headmistress was a real piece of work apparently, eventually someone took her to court I believe. I don’t know anything about her – but I like to think of her as being like Ms Trunchbull from Roald Dahl’s Matilda. (I like to think that afore mentioned light bulbs now dim somewhat with the knowledge that many people suffered the same as my father, yet in my experience, it doesn’t.) That breakdown caused us to move country a couple of years later. I had just turned 7. For the next decade or so, I was bullied. It started off because of my nationality, and once they saw it hurt, other things joined it.

Whine, whine, whine. “Ooh, I got bullied.” Well newsflash, every child does. Only the truly pathetic ones get bullied for ten years. The ones that deserve it. The ones that are weak.

Hey, but at least as I’m a white male, I don’t know what it’s like to be subjected to abuse just because of who I intrinsically am, right? (And if you think that sounds a bit bitter, well, yes, I guess it probably is. I try to let comments like that wash over me, but when your emotions are raw, bubbling, and close to the surface it’s hard. It’s easy to resent people who behave as though they have it far harder than you do when they seem to have essentially a normal life, and you struggle to even face being in a social situation for ten minutes. You know perfectly well you’d switch situations with them in an instant, and yet you also know there are people who’d say they’d switch with you in an instant too. And always – always – those negative, censuring thoughts are never far away.)

They’re your thoughts. Who else is having them? Look at you, too scared of criticism, you have to treat your own thoughts as if someone else is having them.

Anyway, in this new country I didn’t have friends really. There were a couple of people who I was briefly friendly with – bizarrely enough (considering my current religious views) they were all in different fringe (crazy) religious sects. The kind who don’t usually socialise with people who aren’t also in their sects. Also, the kind that hardly even existed in the country I was living. An oddity that I attracted them really!

These brief friendships generally ended with me feeling I’d been stabbed in the back and scared to try to make another. Home life was difficult, to put it mildly, considering my dad’s condition and numerous other issues.  Let’s just leave it as: it was difficult. I learnt to shut myself away, putting up a facade whenever I had to meet people and avoiding it completely where possible. I didn’t want to burden my parents with my problems , because of the problems at home, and I didn’t want to seek help in general because of the stigma about mental health.

You should have been able to deal with it on your own. If you weren’t a failure you could have.

And I guess that is why I’m writing this. If that stigma about mental health wasn’t there, I might have asked for help. If we – and here I’m talking especially about boys and men – weren’t bombarded with the belief that having emotions and being upset  meant you were a failure, then maybe I, and others would have felt able to ask for help. If my posting here and admitting to my state can in any way help destigmatise it, then that’s what I’m going to do. At the very least I can feel like I’m sticking a metaphorical finger or two up at some of the people whose attitude was: ‘for heaven’s sake, just pull it together’.

Could never say it to these people, could you? It’s not as if doing this is going to make one iota of difference in reality, is it?

Granted, the fact I can’t face putting my surname to it might lessen the impact of it somewhat. But I truly can’t face it. My depression is a dirty little secret I try to keep away from everyone. The worse it gets, the more impossible it is to keep it but it doesn’t stop me trying. When I withdrew from University, and finally started getting some treatment, I had to force myself to write to friends in University explaining why. The first real friends of my own gender I’d ever had – I’ve two female friends I met in school but didn’t see that often, but before then, no male friends worth the name. In the end, I wrote an email, and sent it to two of them, asking them to explain to everyone else.

And you cried like a baby. Pathetic.

I’ve only even slightly corresponded with one of them in the six or so years since, apart from a very brief conversation following the suicide of one of them.

Call yourself a friend? Hah!

Why? Because I’m ashamed of my depression.

And isn’t that one of the biggest problems mental health – and particularly depression – has to deal with?

So often destigmatising something involves coming out, not admitting to something, but instead proudly proclaiming it. I’m sure that any of us who are atheists, and have been at all involved in the online community, have lost count of the amount of posts, or youtube videos  we’ve seen, exhorting us to come out to friends and family as atheists, and let them know that we exist and are just normal people like everyone else. I’m not ashamed of my atheism – if anyone asks, I’ll tell them without hesitation.

My depression on the other hand? That’s going to take some work before I can feel remotely comfortable even admitting it, let alone proclaiming it. But I’ll try.

And fail.

We’ll see.