Right now I resent all the people out there who have support–friends, family, partners, therapists, whatever.  I know it makes me a terrible person; resenting what someone else has isn’t going to bring it into my life.  But they have people who love and care about them, who talk to them and touch them, who would notice if they were sick or sad or gone.  And I don’t, and it’s not fair.

What’s so bad about me that I don’t deserve those people?  And yes, I know that’s a logical fallacy; I know it’s not actually about deserving or not deserving.  But that just means the universe is cold and empty and doesn’t care that I can’t get my needs met.  So either way it’s ugly: either I’m too bad to deserve care or the universe doesn’t care if I exist.

I want somebody to hug me and hold me and talk to me and take care of me.  The world is too big and scary for me to deal with, but nobody notices I don’t leave my apartment or my room or my bed.  No one cares that the world is too much for me.

Since there’s no one to love me, I might as well die.  And that makes me a bad person too.

But I haven’t succeeded in killing myself yet.  Probably because I don’t really want to die–I want someone to notice and care that I hurt so much I want to die.  Because I want someone to take care of me…but eventually, I probably will kill myself because no one is going to love me.

In the meantime I’ve been purging again because words aren’t enough for how fucked up I am.

nihil

Last night I kept dreaming of being in institutions–boarding schools and psych units.  For once, the psych unit dreams weren’t bad.  It was being somewhere that people noticed I existed every day, not just once a week or when they needed something done.

In my real life, I go days without talking to anyone.  I rarely leave my bedroom, let alone my apartment.  If I disappeared, who would even notice?  It would take weeks for anyone to realize I wasn’t here anymore.  Probably not until rent or bills came due and didn’t get paid.  Then add a few days before they’d decide it wasn’t just that I was depressed and ignoring my phone.

It’s like I’m barely here.  Right now, I’m not even sure I really do exist.

So I sleep, and I dream, and in my dreams, I am real, I exist, there is a space for me where I am held.  And then I wake up and there is nothing, I am nothing.

In a dream

from the “Survival” series by Janny Holzer

If I find this bench

and go to sleep with my head on the granite

will I learn

how to survive?

I don’t even need the joy

anymore.

I have no mouth and I must scream

I want to scream HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME until someone does.

Part of me thinks no one will even hear me.

Part of me thinks that they’ll hear me, but they won’t care enough to do anything.

Part of me thinks they’ll just force me to accept more “help” that doesn’t help–hospitalize me, force me into a group home, crap like that.

Part of me thinks that even if I got all the best help, everything I think I need, it wouldn’t work.  I think I’m a black hole–I’ll swallow up everything I can reach, but I’m still empty.

But mostly the problem is that I can’t scream.  I never could.  I used to try, when I was little and my father was abusing me.  He held my head under the bathwater until I passed out.  He held pillows over my face until I thought I would die.  I stopped trying to scream, and then I stopped even knowing how.

So far past done with this

In the ongoing saga of My Case Manager Is Fucking Incompetent…

Today I was supposed to meet with her and my new case manager at 1:00.  At 12:15, while I was in the basement doing laundry, she called to see if we could move the meeting to 2:00.  I called back, but no one picks up.  No one ever picks up in that office, so I don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to do if you’re having a crisis or something.  So I left her a voicemail.

She didn’t show up at 2:00.  Or 2:15.  Or 2:30.  Or 3:00.  Finally I wrote it off and took a nap instead, because fuck that shit.

She doesn’t work on Fridays, so she won’t get my voicemail tomorrow and reschedule.  I’m not convinced the woman even knows how to check her voicemail, judging from past experience.  She’ll probably call me in another week and ask why I never called her back.  She won’t give me her cell phone number because OMG BOUNDARIES, and no one picks up at the office.  So how the fuck am I supposed to get in touch with her?

I’m so sick of this bullshit.  This is supposed to be helpful?  I was bullied/threatened into getting services from DMH–I didn’t want to deal with them after the way they’d treated me when I was trying to apply for services.  But it was get services from DMH or go to the hospital.  But this shit doesn’t even qualify as services.  I see ICM maybe twice a month.  She doesn’t check voicemails or return phone calls.  She goes on vacation without telling me.  When she does actually contact me, she constantly changes appointment times, and she almost always shows up late for appointments and then laughs it off.  She insists my diagnosis is something other than what it actually is, and she has virtually no education on my diagnosis.  I’m not convinced she has education on much of anything; she doesn’t even have an associate’s degree, and I know much more about the DSM than she does.  She has no understanding of what it’s like to live in poverty.  She has no idea what it’s like to live with a severe, disabling, chronic illness.  She isn’t interested in learning what my life is like. 

Pretty much all she does is show up sporadically to take me grocery shopping.  And while I go grocery shopping, she goes clothes shopping, and I have to sit outside with my melting groceries and wait for her to show back up.  I have no crisis support.  She’s not helping me manage any of my problems.  She’s not helping connect me with resources in the community.  She’s not doing fucking anything to help me.  She doesn’t even ask how I’m doing beyond the cursory, “Hey, how’s it going?” when I first see her.  She has no idea that my depression is getting worse because she doesn’t fucking ask, and I’m not gonna blurt it out in the middle of fucking Whole Foods.

I think what really bothers me is I feel like no one there gives a fuck about me.  If I killed myself, they wouldn’t even realize for a month.  (Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself.)  No one would, really.  I don’t have friends anymore.  My roommates might notice once I started to smell, but that’s it.  There’s no one left in real life who gives a fuck about me.  That’s a really painful thing to realize.

Feeling Unwanted

FO called me last night to see if I wanted to go to the opening of the new campaign office in our end of the state.  I thought it would be good to get out, and that’s something I could do mostly sitting down, so I said yes.  He said he’d call me in the morning and come pick me up.

He didn’t.

So now I feel pretty horrible.  I feel unwanted.  I feel like everyone hates me and wishes I’d just disappear or die so they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.  I feel like cutting.  I feel like purging.  I’m not quite suicidal, but I wish I could die.

And then I feel crazy for feeling this way.  I know I’m overreacting.  Probably something came up at the last minute, so he couldn’t pick me up or go.  And even if it were true that he didn’t want me around, that can’t possibly be true of everyone.  Hell, the vast majority of people in the world don’t know me, and it’s generally pretty hard to hate someone if you’re not even aware that they exist.  I know it’s crazy to go from “One person failed to give me a ride to an event” to “Everyone hates me and wishes I were dead.”  That’s a HUGE leap.  It’s even a big leap to go from “FO didn’t come get me for the office opening” to “FO hates me and doesn’t want to deal with me.”  He’s always been nice to me.  We’re not best friends or anything, but we’ve always been friendly.  So it’s probably not even true that he doesn’t like me.

But none of those rational arguments make me feel any better.  I still feel like everyone hates me and wants me to die, and I still feel like hurting myself to dull the feelings.  I still feel like I shouldn’t exist at all.

I think I’m going to take a nap instead because otherwise I probably will end up purging or cutting.

Connecting

Lately I’ve been feeling very disconnected from…well, everything.  It’s not a fun feeling.  I feel like there’s no one to turn to, no one to talk to.  I keep thinking that if I died, it would be at least a week before anyone noticed.  (Don’t worry; I’m not suicidal.)

Nothing seems to fill the hole.

And then I realize I don’t even know what it is I’m looking for.  I desperately want someone to do or say that magical, perfect thing that will make me feel like I’m not all alone, like I matter, like my existence is worth something.  But I don’t know what that thing is.  Like smut, I know it when I see it.

I keep thinking about this one therapist I saw for two years who I felt very connected to.  I can’t pin down what it was in that relationship and that way of interacting that helped.  She was the first person ever to make me believe that I matter, but I don’t know why I believed her or the hundred other people who’ve said the same thing before and since.

It frustrates me.  I want something from people, and I don’t know what.  So what ends up happening is that people try to help, they try to give me advice, and I just shut it down.  All I can see right now is my own helplessness to change my circumstances.  I’m sure it’s frustrating to the people I interact with, too.  Who wants to talk to someone who says, “No, that won’t work” every time you try to help.  No one wants to deal with that person who’s a bottomless pit of neediness and will be hurt when you don’t give her the thing she desperately needs but can’t understand or tell.

I want.  I want, I want, I want.

But everything is empty.

What do we do?

Depression takes over

Why can’t I just ask for help?  Why can’t I tell anyone that I need a therapist?  That I’m falling apart and need far more help than I’m getting?

Things are bad.  I’ve been kind of in denial, hoping that if I didn’t name it, it would go away.  But instead of going away, it’s getting worse.  Depression.

Right now, I can’t make myself care about anything, even the things I was most passionate about.  My sister, who I love more than anything in the world, is getting married, and I don’t care.  I’m seeing my sisters for the first time in 5 years, and I don’t care.  I want to care.  I act like I care.  I go through the motions, but the truth is I don’t care.

Same with work.  I love politics.  I love feeling like I have a voice and I’m doing something that matters.  Except now I don’t care.  I don’t want to fight.  It all feels totally pointless.  I feel like I can’t really change anything, and no one cares what I have to say because I’m sick and crippled and poor and useless.  Whatever is going to happen is going to happen regardless of my involvement.  I feel like I have no power and no purpose.

There was a phone bank last night, and I slept through it.  On purpose.  I knew it was happening, but I just didn’t care.  I couldn’t force myself to cold-call 200 people who just want to get me off the phone as fast as possible.  It all felt pointless, and I couldn’t bear to pretend it meant anything.  So I ignored the calls and texts and Facebook messages.  I just laid there in bed, half asleep, sweating under my comforter.  It’s the only place I feel okay at all, curled up and covered up, wrapped up safe from the world.

It feels like the world is just too much to deal with right now.  All I want to do is hide and sleep, but since I can’t sleep, I watch trashy TV shows on Netflix for 12 hours a day.  That’s what my life is.  That’s all my life is.  I haven’t done any work.  I don’t have any friends to go out with.  Nobody checks to make sure I’m actually okay.  I haven’t looked for new roommates.  Things are falling apart, and I just can’t care because it’s all just more than I can handle.  The world outside my bedroom is more than I can handle, and no one in my life even notices anything is at all wrong with me.

I wish I could just die.  I don’t want to kill myself; I just want to be not alive anymore.

Messy

I think part of the reason I’m feeling so crappy–a BIG part of the reason–is my relationship with B.  Or my apparent lack of a relationship.

He won’t pick up the phone.  Won’t call me back.  Won’t answer my texts.  I don’t know why.  Nothing happened, as far as I know–we didn’t fight or anything.  He’s just not talking to me.

We’re supposed to go to my sister’s wedding together.  We planned to do a big road trip.  B loves road trips, so I thought it would be fun.  Two summers ago, he and a buddy from college rented an RV and did a cross-country road trip.  He wanted me to come, but I just wasn’t in a place where I could.  So I thought a smaller road trip would be a good way to make up for it.

We need to, you know, plan this trip, seeing as how the wedding’s in less than a month.  I’ve been trying for three weeks to get him to plan this with me, but he won’t respond.  I don’t know what to do; I don’t think I can afford a plane ticket now.  I don’t want to seem pushy or bitchy or whatever, but I need to know if he’s coming or not.  I mean, what else am I supposed to do?  I guess I’ll email him and say, “Look, I don’t know what the deal is, but are we doing this trip or not?  If you want me to leave you alone, just tell me, but it’s not fair to leave me hanging.”  It sounds passive-aggressive, but I don’t know what else to do.

Since he moved to New York at the beginning of the year, he’s been more distant.  I thought it was just that we were adjusting to the long-distance relationship thing.  He never reached out–but to be fair, neither did I.  (I never do with anyone because I always feel like they don’t really want to be bothered by having to deal with me.)  I did call him when I found out my grandmother had died, and he couldn’t even be there for me.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt because it was late and he was about to have finals, but he never called back to see if I was okay or anything.  He did call on my birthday, but I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t call him back.

It really hurts, but I feel like I have no right to be hurt.  See, a few years ago, I broke up with him.  I felt like he deserved someone better, someone without all my issues, someone who could give him sex and kids and everything he wanted.  I didn’t talk to him for months.  I honestly thought it was better for him, that it would hurt him less that way.  I was really messed up then, and I was wrong.  I hurt him so badly, and I’ve never gotten over the guilt.  Part of me feels like I don’t deserve to complain about how he’s treating me because I did it to him first.

But another part of me says that doesn’t make it okay for him to hurt me back.  I would never intentionally hurt him.  I learned from my massive mistake, and it’s not one I’ll repeat.  I still deserve to have feelings, and I deserve a partner who cares about my feelings.

I don’t know.  I feel like I should just walk away, but part of me can’t.  I don’t get attached to people, not usually.  I’ve walked away from so many people in my life, whether intentionally or because I stopped tending to the relationship, and I’ve never missed anyone before.  That probably makes me sound like a cold sociopath or something, but it’s true.  I’ve never really missed anyone before, not like this.  They might pop up in my thoughts every so often, and I might wish I could see them or talk to them, but it never hurt before.  This hurts.  And I’m angry at myself for letting it go this far.  I hate myself for being so weak and stupid, for letting myself love him.  I’m just not meant for that.

God, I don’t know.  Maybe if I hadn’t been so detached for my entire life, I’d be used to this by now.  Maybe if I hadn’t been such a robot…

The more I think about it, the more messy things get in my head.  I know a lot of this is coming from other parts, but I can’t sort it all out.  I don’t want to sort it out.  I want to go back in time and never let myself have feelings for him.  I want to call him and beg him to not stop loving me.  I want to erase him from my head entirely so I don’t keep feeling like this.  I don’t want to deal with any of this.  I can’t deal with anything right now.

Blah

I feel crappy.

No particular reason.  Nothing’s really been happening, not anything new.  But depression has been creeping up on me.

I feel very alone and disconnected.  I hardly ever leave the house–I don’t really have anywhere to go.  Most days I don’t even bother putting on real clothes or brushing my hair because no one’s going to see me anyway.  I just sit at home and watch Netflix, which doesn’t really interest me but is at least something to do.

Everything just feels so flat and empty.  I have no friends.  I have no interests.  Most days I don’t even talk to anyone.  I don’t create anything; I can’t write anymore, haven’t been able to for years and years.  Something inside me is just dead.

And yet I’m here; what choice do I have?  I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live like this anymore.  But how do I get out of this place?  Meds don’t work.  Doing things doesn’t help, and even if it did, I can’t get anywhere because the bus drivers have now decided they won’t stop at my street.  (The nearest stops are each 3/4 of a mile from my street on a very busy street with no shoulder to walk on, and I’m often not physically capable of walking that far even if it weren’t life-threateningly dangerous.)  There’s nobody I can talk to about this stuff because I can’t even find a therapist who isn’t scared of me, let alone a friend.  Let that sink in: I can’t even find someone willing to listen to me for money.

I honestly don’t know what to do.  I wish I could just sleep all the time because there’s no point to being awake, but I never sleep much in the summer.  I can’t seem to see any way out of this depression and anhedonia and loneliness and nothingness.