It is all too hard!

I feel very strange today. It is like I am walking the fine line between sanity and madness. Ihave my down days, my very dark and twisty days, my ok days and my borderline manic days.

Yesterday was a very dark and twisty day, but today with a mammoth amount of effort on my part today has been an ok day.
It has taken every ounce of energy to distract myself. I distracted myself with TV and a movie, eating junk, drinking copious amounts of coffee and doing my art. It is amazing just how much energy it takes. But I suppose I did it and I am still here so that is all good.

My head is starting to cave in with the complexity of my illness and all it's different facets, and fighting the good fight becomes almost mission impossible. I am finding it impossible to sleep properly, and even with medication, my usual fall back plan, I am unable to sleep thanks to flashbacks and really surreal dreams (some of which feel like real life and it is often hard to distinguish what is reality and what was just a dream.

I am just not coping with the swings of extreme anguish and depression, to mania and normality (or my weird interpretation of normal.)
the good thing about it is I am creating some really good art work, and people have expressed kinterest in buying it which has to be good, but apart from that I don't see I am making anymore progress.
I still can't get myself out of the house, it is like there is a force field surrounding it and it blocks me from going out of the front door or even going out into the back garden to hang out washing. I hate this and it frustrates me because there is no rational reason for me to not go out side.

Today I think I had a fit. I blacked out, only very briefly but then it felt like my eyes were rolling and dancing and evything was flashing. It was like someone rapidly switching a light on and off. Once it was over, I had a headache. I can't wait to get it checked out to See if it is dissociation or fits.

I don't know how much longer I can maintain this effort involved in being in control, and I'm not even sure now if I am doing the distraction thing correctly or if I am simply just avoiding and wearing my mask of "I'm ok".

Some days I just long for the olden days when everything was managed by drinking a bottle of wine or 10.

waste of time.

Sometimes I wonder what the point to all of this is. Today I just want to put my hand up in the air, wave the white flag and say enough is enough. I kind of feel like my mouth is saying words, but no-one is really listening. I feel like maybe I am just a drama queen, I feel like whatever I do or say it will always be unheard, mis-interpreted and misunderstood. I want to grab someone by the neck and shout my issues at them until they get it, but it wont make a difference because I think my words are all wrong and that maybe I am just an unintentional attention seeker? I don't know anymore. Maybe I should just shut up.

I have a few things going on in my head right now. One flashback that has side-swiped me and left me feeling slightly unnerved about how not crazy it is sending me. It is affecting me though, I am having frequent panic attacks and feel like my legs are made of jelly, and my head is doing funny things.

Since my crisis about the kids and their sleep issue, when my mind can't cope with anything else, I am getting random images flashing through my mind (a bit like someone changing channels with a remote, but ultra fast) and my head feels like a strobe.

I am not feeling good, I am running on empty. I am worried about how I am going to get through the next day and a bit, because the strength to cope, Be mindful and apply my DBT/CBT skills has run out and I just feel like banging my head against a brick wall over and over again.

I am a danger to myself, and I am not safe unless Jamie is here. But for the sake of my family and friends I will find what I can to fight to keep myself safe.
It is just too bloody hard today and I am over it.
I am fine if I am mentally occupied with something that makes me focus my whole attention on it, or when listening to music so loud it perforates your eardrums, or when stuck in a traffic jam with my husband having conversations on the logistics of someone pleasuring themselves whilst driving stuck in a traffic jam (not me or him, but random drivers!!) in fact if I could just be driven around in a car all day and all night I could guarantee my safety.

That is it for today, I just feel "Meh"

Left in a Lurch.

From: "Oh the places you will go" by Dr Zeuss.

I'm sorry to say so,

but sadly, it's true

that Bang-ups 

and Hang-ups 

CAN happen to you.

You can get all hung up

in a prickly perch.

And your gang will fly on.

You'll be left in a lurch.

You'll come down from the Lurch

with an unpleasant bump.

And the chances are then,

that you'll be in a slump.

And when you're in a Slump,

you're not in for much fun.

Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.

I am stuck in a Slump and I have no idea how to get out of it. It is like a broken record playing and re-playing the same song over and over again. It is a song that completely breaks my heart and something I have lost all control over.

Every evening it is the same. The tears, the crying, the tantrums. The fighting, hitting, spitting and demands for me. Asking, begging me to give them something I just don't have the power to give them right now. 

If I give in to the demands, I end up in bed at 7 and make the cycle harder and harder to break.  I wonder how I ever made it get to this point, how is it that I have never been able to help my son settle himself or go to sleep. Every time it comes to bedtime me heart breaks just a little bit more. Right now it feels like there is nothing left to break. 

Is it all my fault for trying so hard to do the right thing when he was a baby. My failure to recognise I had PND? have I just made it 100 times worse for being admitted to a psychiatric hospital not once, but twice. 

I know my kids pick up on my emotions and that it affects them so deeply, I try not to show them how I am feeling, but it just makes it worse. I am an unfit mum. I am a failure.

The pressure this has all put on my marriage is huge. We argue over every little thing at the moment because the house is just a boiling point of anger and frustration. Jamie is amazing and wonderful and I love him, but whenever we are together it is so stressful it is impossible to relax and be comfortable in each others company. Or either he or me falls asleep trying to calm Cameron down, that we barely see each other throughout the day. If and when the battle is won, we are both so exhausted from it all there is  just nothing left to say or do.

I am fighting this beast, this toxicity inside me to try and make everything alright again, I did CBT I am doing DBT, I see my psychiatrist, I tend to avoid my one-on-one sessions with my DBT therapist because I don't want to hear how crap I am or how much of a failure I am.  

How the hell do I get out of this fucking great big mess I have created? How do I fix it? How can I change it? Can somebody come forward and tell me, because right now I don't know what is right, what is wrong, what is up or what is down?

As Madonna says in one of her songs:

"why do all the things I say, sound like the stupid things I have said before?"

The biggest problem I have with my mental illness is the extremes of high to low and how frequently the change is from good to bad.

Somebody somewhere please help me, because I feel like I am drowning.

Negative to positive...maybe physics doesn't suck as much as I thought!

Today I had one foot in the black hole, waiting and wanting it to swallow me whole.

I was triggered, after being in a triggered state already. Someone unknowingly described so  beautifully something to me. It was like offering me a glass of wine and a box of chocolates. It gave me the taste, the need, the want.
It came on so strongly and so quickly it took me by surprise. I wanted it soooooo badly that I just had to run and try to get the feeling.
I was lucky that I went to a place where 2 very good friends were there to bring me down, to ground me and help me. To stop me from acting on my urge. They kept me safe, and I thank them dearly for it. Thank them for the hugs, the hand holding, the mindless conversations.

Thank you to Heidi for a well timed lovely text message too, which made me feel important and human.

They pointed out to me that I have come a very long way since January, as previously I would have acted without a thought, ending up in a mess on the floor where I used to think I belonged.
Without really knowing it I identified my urge before it became a need and therefore in of my control. I stopped. I stop-think-goed without realising it. I have made such a huge progress and I deserve to feel proud about it, I kind of want to jump up and down and shout it from the roof.

I have Jamie at home with me making sure I stay safe, I have a huge supply of chocolate which always makes me feel better after a panic attack. I am watching Peep show which is so bloody hilarious, doesn't seem to matter how many times you watch it.

To the person that unknowingly triggered me, I would like to thank you and give you a huge hug, because you have made me realise just how far I have come.

Once again I am out of the black hole and heading back to my milky way.

Positive always attracts negatives. Physics sucks.

I was having such a good day today. I finished a couple more pieces of art and felt pretty damned chuffed with myself.
I took the dog for a walk. There was no big bad wolf, no black ninja's hiding in the woods ready to leap out and attack me, no ghosts, ghouls or bogeymen. Just me, my dog and a few hundred lorakeets or whatever they are called. Yay more positives, this DBT really is the good shit I can see a very small pin prick of light down the end of the very long tunnel.
I was feeling Happy and Joy, I was Proud, I was Elated.

Then.

I discover I am very scared of talking to my old friends, I find it hard to find common ground and I feel like I have got "Nutter" tattoo'd on my forehead. I hear words coming out of my mouth but they don't sound right, I feel like I am talking gibberish and I can not relax. In my mind I see them sitting in judgement on me and I hear them think "oh my god, she is so mad, crazy and effed up in the head" then I go into a whirlwind of panic.
This is the beginning of the withdrawal stage once more. Keep my self safe by being on my own.

And Then....

I ended up putting myself back at high school/ university/ any other miscellaneous real life places yesterday. I knew as soon as I started speaking it was wrong, that i was talking out of turn. It wasn't my business and in the little decision box they teach us in DBT it was not important to me, and it was out of my control. DBT says....let it go. Oh how I wish I had remembered that. But it is too late, and words can not be retracted and I feel like shit.
There is a part of me that has always been there. I want to fix people, make people happy/ better/ take away their suffering. I put an enormous amount of effort into it but I really don't think I have ever miraculously fixed anyone.
In being like this I suffer quite frequently with 'foot in mouth' disease, fail to engage brain before speaking and then pour out words with verbal diahorroea. My head screams out "stop" but I can't until "mission save the world" is complete.
I know as soon as I have done it I shouldn't have,  that it is not my battle to fight, or my war to win but I entangle myself regardless.

So this situation which has happened a few times recently, I regress into a headmucked teenager (that's incase my parents are reading!!) and it puts me right slam bang into punishment mode and i punish myself. I feel like banging my head repeatedly against my craft table in the hope I will bang all of this out but it is never going to happen. Pain is the only answer.

And so for the rest of the day and the week I will have my toxic waste telling me that I am an interfering so and so, I have no right to voice my opinion, I only end up hurting the people more than I help them.

I am hanging on for dear life to my avoidance and mindfulness right now so I don't lose control completely. Life would be so much easier right now if I could down 10 bottles of wine and erase the thoughts, vomit them down the toilet, numb them out of my head.

Why am I such a fuck up?

Feeling kinda good right now!

On thursday I will have completed my first module in DBT. The past 6 weeks have been challenging, triggery and overwhelming.

At the beginning of the module (Emotional reasoning) I had no concept of it, I had mastered the art of pushing my emotions down and away before I had a chance to do anything with them. Emotions were scary and numbness easier to live with than the harsh reality that is feeling.

The first few handouts I got I had written things like "my brain won't let me feel happiness", "I will never be able to sit with my emotions because I will never get in touch with them" "Validating feelings and emotions is mission impossible".

At the beginning I was numb and empty (still empty) and instead of sitting with my emotions and accepting them for what they were, they would turn into anger and punishment which I turned in towards myself and would take appropriate action against myself.

Now I am able to identify quite a few things, I can manage my anger a bit better, and I have even welcomed the emotions "JOY and HAPPINESS" into my life. It is a shock to the system to realise this and my brain still fights it, but the seeds have been planted and fertilised and will hopefully grow and squash out all the bad stuff.

The only thing that is bugging me right now is my UFO. My unidentifiable feeling that is following me around like a bad smell. I don't know what it is and can not identify or label it. I just know it is bad.
I have been dissociating a lot too, which for those that don't know is kind of like a very complicated and hard to explain  out-of-body experience.
I just hope it isn't my body fighting all that i have achieved, and I hope it isn't something disturbing from my past waiting for the right time to leap out and slap me in the face.

Anyway, in summary I have an enormous sense of well-being and achievement and it is amazing how different a person I am from the beginning of the year. I like to thank my DBT group for helping me get there, and all my friends for supporting me....I still have a looooong way to go though, but hopefully it is onwards and upwards from here!

If you could live your life again, would you do it all the same?

As the title says: If you could live your life again, would you do it all the same...or would you do it differently?

I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had had the courage to do what I wanted to do, and be who I wanted to be, but I was one of those people that did as was expected of them and I never gave myself the opportunity to be who I wanted to be.
Now this is not a dig at my family (just incase you are wondering) it is something a song lead me to think.

If you could go back in time to a point where you made a particular life choice that ended up in wrongsville, would you take the other path and hope that going in the other direction would lead to happiness and joy, instead of crazy mental illness.

I wonder what life would have been like if I had chosen not to go to my friend Katie's wedding. I would not have met Jamie and I certainly would not end up with my bundles of Joy and mayhem Cameron and Amelia. And the noise and craziness that is Jamie.

I wonder what life would have been like if I had had children 10 years earlier, If I chose to stay in England. Where would my career have taken me? it would have been a very different path from the one it took. What if I went to a different university? well, I wouldn't have been bullied the way I was.

I wish that when I was younger that me and my sister got on as well as we do now instead of hating each other. I wish I had not chosen some of the partners I did, and wished I had taken other opportunities with other people.

I wonder if I had made different choices along the way where I ended up making mistakes, if I could jump back in time just before going down the wrong path and stop myself, would I have ended up with a mental illness.

I am glad I moved to Australia and had children when I did, because in that time I have made a very interesting and diverse collection of friends, friends that actually  care for me and my well being. I am also glad in a weird way that I ended up in Belmont because I have met an even more diverse and different group of friends that understand what life is like, but accept me as a friend regardless.

This is a bit of a pointless blog really, because I can't even answer my own question...I am just in a very philosophical headspace.

I would also like to thank Laura for the wonderfully motivating and uplifting post she wrote just for me and another friend, I needed that today and you are wonderful xxxxx