I did a stupid thing

Saturday night, I overdosed.  And here it is Tuesday morning, and I’m still barely able to function.  I can’t spell basic words without a lot of thought, and I nearly pass out when I get up to go to the bathroom.

I’m not sure if I wanted to kill myself or not.  I was at least half-dissociated, so I don’t even know how many pills I took.  (Or, for that matter, which one[s] of us took them.)

I think I wanted either to die or to make someone notice that something is very very wrong.  But I ended up not accomplishing either of those things.  So I feel like a failure in every possible way.

I feel like I NEED someone to take care of me.  To hug me and tell me it’s all going to be okay, to listen when I’m freaking out, to take care of all the everyday things like bills and food that overwhelm me.  I want to go back to a residential program like Sheppard Pratt, but I can’t afford it.  I have maybe three weeks left of my lifetime inpatient days still left.  I can’t use those up now–what if I need them more later?  Besides, Sheppard Pratt always has a waiting list, and I need help now.

Everything about real life is just too overwhelming.  Most of it, at this point, comes down to money, and I feel greedy for saying that.  Money can’t buy happiness, but the lack of it sure can fuck you up.  If I had a car, my life would be so much easier.  I could get to appointments, to the grocery store.  Hell, I might even be able to have a little bit of a social life.  But even if someone gave me a car for free, I wouldn’t be able to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance.

And if I had more money, I could get more psychological support.  I wouldn’t be stuck with these useless people from DMH.  I would even be able to travel if I found one who’s good but not on public transit lines.

And I just wouldn’t have to worry all the time about everything.  Right now, all it would take for my whole life to blow up in my face is for one little thing to go wrong.  Just one thing, and I’ll be sleeping under a bridge in winter.  One little thing, and I won’t be able to pay for the meds that keep me alive.  This is the reality of my life.  More money wouldn’t cure the underlying emotional injuries, but it would make them a hell of a lot easier to deal with.

But that money, that help, that support–none of it is going to come.  How do I keep dealing with the utter hopelessness of that?  My compulsion is to berate myself, to tell myself, “You don’t need any of that.  You’re just a pathetic attention-whore who wants everybody to pay attention to her all the time.  You don’t deserve to have needs.”  And with that comes the impulse to starve myself again.  It would be so much easier, and it dulls all the feelings.  And it seems easier than staring at the black hole in the center of myself and knowing that no one will fill it.  I mean, when my own government tells me I don’t deserve enough money to be able to meet my basic needs, who am I to argue?

And on top of the money issues, there’s the chronic illness.  It’s never going to get better.  It will continue to control my life for as long as I’m alive.  I’ll have to keep taking toxic medications that make me almost as sick as the UC does, albeit in different ways.  I’ll always be in pain.  I’ll always be so weak I have to use a cane to walk and still can hardly manage even with it.  I’ll always have to control my diet so strictly I’ve given up on eating out.  I’ll never not be sick.  In fact, I’ll probably just get sicker.  There is no relief, no remission.

And this is where I’m stuck, all day, every day.  I’ve done all the things they’ve told me will make me better, and none of it is working anymore.  So I have to choose between living like this for another 60 years or killing myself.  I want to feel like there’s some reason to live, but right now the pain is so bad nothing matters except how to make it stop.

I’m SO FRUSTRATED with this new case manager, S.  She’s nice, but…completely useless.

Every time we meet, she basically tells me I’m fine.  Apparently, as long as I get out of bed, then my mental health is A-OK.  I feel like she’s basically saying, “So, like, why are you even getting services?  You don’t seem crazy to me.”

I guess some of that is her fault.  I mean, I haven’t told her I tried to kill myself a week ago.  But why would I?  I’ve only just met her.  I don’t know her yet, and I certainly don’t trust her.  She doesn’t seem to get that.  She just takes everything at a surface level, and that doesn’t make me feel like she’s someone I even could trust with below-the-surface stuff.

Never mind that I know about 500 times more about mental illness than she does.  She didn’t know what “treatment resistant” meant, for god’s sake.  I mean, doesn’t the term pretty much define itself?  She’s like, “What, you mean like you won’t take your meds?”  She didn’t know what DBT was, either.  I had to explain it to her.  How does anyone who’s worked in psych for more than 5 minutes not know what DBT is?

And clearly she hasn’t read my history at all.  I’ve told her that my diagnoses are major depression, complex PTSD, and DID, but she insists on saying my diagnosis is borderline.  Nope, lady, and it hasn’t been for at least 4 years.  She keeps asking all these questions about my family that I know for a fact are explained in the files my last program sent them.  ZERO sensitivity around the fact that my family is the source of most of my trauma–she just expects me to discuss it offhand.  Today, sitting out in public, she starts asking me what it was like to grow up with a cop for a father.

I mean, what the hell was I gonna say?  “Well, I thought I was hot shit when he took me to school in his patrol car because it impressed all the other kids.  But then at night he’d rape me, threaten to kill me, threaten to kill my sister, make me watch him rape my sister, make me watch him shoot animals, make me participate in animal abuse, and sell me to other men for sex”?

So I just changed the subject, started talking about use of force complaints dropping drastically when one California town made all its officers wear video recorders.  It wasn’t even a skillful deflection, but she did not notice at all.  ‘Cause, you know, I’m totally fine because  I got out of bed, got dressed, and put my hair up.

So now I’m left feeling tense and raw, with memories right at the surface that I didn’t want to have to deal with.  I’ve been having nightmares since the suicide attempt, and I’ve got a feeling tonight’s are going to be even worse.

This just really sucks.

Untrusting

I just don’t even know what to do anymore.

I’m still confused as hell about my suicide attempt.  I mean, five minutes before I did it, I would’ve honestly said I was fine.  I feel fine now, but now I don’t know if I can trust it.  I don’t know if I can trust anything that goes on in my head anymore, and that’s a really shitty feeling.

S is really pressuring me to see a therapist in their clinic.  I agreed sort of half-assed.  I really doubt they have anyone who would have any clue how to help me.  I’d scare the fuck out of them.  I mean, this agency (let’s call it SN) is so bad that people who work there make fun of it and talk about how bad it is. 

S is nice enough, but she has no clue.  I mean, she’s maybe 25, probably younger, and she’s in community college.  I don’t have the right to be an educational elitist since I never managed to get a degree, but honestly it doesn’t give me much faith in her ability to be at all helpful.  I’d do just as well sitting at home watching Supernatural on Netflix.  I know way more about the DSM than she does, and she doesn’t understand dissociation AT ALL.  Today she asked me, “Well, but you’re safe now, so why do you still dissociate?”

IF I HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO YOU THEN YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO BE WORKING WITH ME.

I even had to give her the super-basic primer on dissociation: “Everyone dissociates, but it happens on a spectrum.  You ever get stuck in a boring meeting and daydream about your next vacation?  Ever arrive at work but not really remember the drive from home?  That’s dissociation.  That’s the normal, functional end of the spectrum.  I’m on the other ass-end of the spectrum.”

“But you seem fine.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the point of dissociation.  I almost always seem fine unless the shit is hitting the fan.”    I couldn’t tell her I was fine until I dumped two bottles of pills down my throat a few days ago.  I won’t tell any therapist at SN, either.  I’ve been around this block enough times to know that they’d panic and dump me in the psych unit even though I’m fine now (I think).  Literally the only lingering effect is I haven’t pooped since Thursday and hey, my gastroenterologist always said it would be good if we could find a med that made me constipated.  Maybe failed suicide attempts cure UC.

But I do wish there were someone I could trust to help me figure out what the fuck was going on in my head on Thursday.  What’s going on in my head now.  I could go back to see A, maybe, but I don’t think she has enough of a handle on DID to be able to help me either.  And since the respite situation, I stopped trusting her about hospital issues–she would’ve let them toss me in the psych unit even though she knew I have serious hospital trauma issues.  C was the one who saved me from that.  A wouldn’t have.  And if I go back and see her, we’ll have to spend weeks or months mending bridges.  I honestly don’t know if I have time for that.  I mean, how do I know I’m not going to try to kill myself again tomorrow when I wake up?  Or next week?  Or ever?

I can’t trust anyone anymore, not even myself.  Especially not myself.

What the hell am I supposed to do?  I’m really scared.

At sea.

I feel like I need to talk more about my attempt, but I’m afraid to.  Even here, I feel like it’s wrong to talk about it.  I’m worried about triggering someone else.  I’m generally not a fan of trigger warnings because I feel like they reinforce the ideas that we’re fragile and that we should avoid anything that might upset our delicate sensibilities, but…yeah, I guess I can break my own rules every once in a while.  So consider yourselves warned.  I’m not giving any how-to lessons or anything, but it could be upsetting.

I haven’t made an attempt eight and a half years.  I was 19 the last time I attempted–the previous attempts were at 10, 15, and also 19.  I’ve been close many times since then, and I nearly died a few times due to my eating disorder, but I hadn’t attempted since November 2005.

I don’t even know what possessed me to do it this time.  Things weren’t any worse than they have been for the last several months.  I woke up to the situation with the power bill, and I just…I don’t know.  I’d say I snapped, but it didn’t even feel like snapping.  There’s a violence to that, and I didn’t feel violent, even toward myself.  I remember thinking, “Okay.  I’m going to do this now.”  I wrote the note.  I did cry writing it because I knew I’d be causing pain to people I loved, but that didn’t sway me.

I looked up the lethal dose of the meds I was taking.  I wasn’t sure I had enough, but that didn’t really bother me.  Either I’d die or I wouldn’t.  No big deal.  I set an empty tupperware container beside the bed in case I threw up, so people wouldn’t have to deal with my vomit everywhere.  I texted someone from the campaign to let him know I couldn’t be at the signature drive that night.  That way I wouldn’t have any plans, decreasing the chance that I’d be found and resuscitated.  I took the pills.  I curled up in bed with my stuffed hippo and pulled the blankets up around me.

I wasn’t all that upset when I finally did wake up on Saturday.  Vaguely disappointed: “Oh.  I still have to deal with life.”  Before, I’d always been angry at my body’s survival.  After my first attempt, at 10, I started self-harming to get out the rage at still being alive.  At 15, I was starving myself to get rid of all the feelings.  The last two times, the really serious attempts, I was enraged when I didn’t die.  I remember fighting the doctors and nurses in the ER while they were trying to pump my stomach.  Luckily, those memories are fragmented, and I remember them as an observer, not as the subject.

This time there was no anger.  Just exhaustion.  Sadness.  I just wanted it to be easy, for once.  I just wanted to sleep for as long as I needed.  Which is the same as forever when the world hurts too much.

I still don’t understand why I did it, which bothers me.  It should bother me because I don’t want to end up dead, but that’s not the reason.  It bothers me on principle: I don’t like doing things without understanding why.  The feelings that preceded this attempt were no more intense than they have been recently.  There was no trigger.  I just woke up and then tried to kill myself.  And I don’t know why.

I guess the real reason it bothers me is it makes me feel out of control.  I don’t think it was an alter who did it–I have a clear memory of the whole event, and it felt like it was me doing it.  But I’ve often thought I was doing things and found out later I was being passively influenced to do them by others inside.  The lack of any depth of feelings when I was carrying out the attempt make me think there was some level of dissociation going on–I mean, people don’t tend to attempt suicide when they’re just feeling vaguely crappy.

I don’t know.  I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know how to figure it out.  There’s no one in real life I can turn to, and there’s not much internal communication happening.  It works fine with the ones I’m closest to, but as for the rest of the system, I have no idea.  (And honestly, I don’t really want to.  Why the ambivalence?)  If I tried to talk to S about it, she’d toss me right in the hospital, no questions asked.  C would probably let her.  I could tell them I feel safe and don’t feel any impulses to make another attempt, but that’s what I would’ve told them up until half an hour before I actually attempted.

I should probably go back to Sheppard Pratt.  They did help before, and they’d know how to deal with something like this.  But the timing just sucks.  They always have at least a 4-week waiting list; I think I was on the waiting list 8 or 9 weeks last year.  So that would put me there at the end of May, at the earliest. 

But then I’d miss the convention.  I know how stupid and shallow and petty that sounds.  You’re willing to risk your life for a party where you get to yell out a few people’s names to make yourself feel important?  Yes, yes I am.  Because it is the only goddamn thing in my life that makes me feel important.  What’s the point of saving my life if there’s nothing left in it that feels important?  Oh, but there will be other opportunities.  Not like this.  Once you flake out for a political campaign, people remember that.  They won’t want you as a delegate again.  You won’t get ranking positions on campaigns.  No one will rely on you.  You won’t really matter anymore.

If they would let me do a planned admission, that would be good.  I’d go right after the convention.  Hell, I’d get on a train straight to Baltimore as soon as the convention ended, without even going home.  Then I’d have a solid 6 weeks before I’d need to leave to go to my sister’s wedding.  But Sheppard Pratt doesn’t do it that way.  They have a waiting list, and they call you when your name comes up.  You get there in two days or you say no thanks.  If you say no and then decide you actually should’ve gone, you have to start all over from the bottom of the list.

So I’m left with no one to talk to, no one to help me figure this out and process it.  Even if I found a new therapist, it’s not like I could flop down on the couch and say, “I’m totally fine now, but last week I tried to off myself.  I have no idea why, and I don’t even think I’m the one who did it.”  Even if they had a ton of experience with DID patients, I think that one might throw them for a loop.  It throws me for a loop, and I’m the one living it.