Sat on a moving train trying so hard to stop the tears behind my sunglasses isn’t how I wanted my Easter Monday to be.
I can’t quite describe the pain and upset I’ve been in for around 9 months now, only since Christmas it’s become so overwhelming I couldn’t keep it hidden anymore.
The urges to cut myself again, to burn myself and make that inward pain outwards. Became so real again that some days I couldn’t hold myself back.
It’s been 18 years since I first took a blade to my skin and watched the blood seep, 18 years since I first realised that in doing so the pain that exhausts me day in and day out would give me a brief break and bring me back to me.
I didn’t want to do it. I never wanted it to become my lifeline, but it did.
I’ve spent so long priding myself on recovery and coping with things no one should ever of been dealt but here I am.
Once again a slave to the blade.
Ever since last summer I have been struggling, I thought I had coped so well with losing Pete, a global pandemic all whilst suddenly living alone and a new life. Then last summer something changed, I don’t even really know what the catalyst was, overnight it was like I couldn’t breathe anymore. I cried, I cried more and I cried more. Having been someone who doesn’t cry, genuinely known as the Sheldon to my friends, these tears came as a shock and were a very unwelcome presence.
My eating changed. Having always been someone who comfort ate throughout life food suddenly wasn’t appealing anymore. The nandos girl in me didn’t even want a nandos? Couldn’t even finish one if I a tried. The girl who loved to cook, she disappeared. The girl I once knew so well was slowly but surely becoming a memory and that was scary.
I was stuck somewhere between knowing who I had been and lost finding who I was going to be.
I decided I wanted to meet someone new. Albeit rightly or wrongly at the time that became a focus. I met a few guys who actually made me feel so worthless i fell deeper into a hole I didn’t know my way out of, maybe I hadn’t been in the right frame of mind for this but equally those men had no reason to treat me how they did.
Eventually I went on to form a relationship with someone. Someone who I felt was right, respectful, honest, kind and loving towards me.
I didn’t doubt them, they made me feel safe and loved and I hadn’t felt those feelings for so long that I welcomed them warmly.
But then I struggled. I really struggled. The last time I accepted those feelings my heart had been ripped apart, it had been broken so much further to the core than I even knew possible and here I was about to accept it all over again. The realisation of this caused me to fall, fall from the loving heights I’d been strung to and fall deeper than I knew possible.
I fell into what I can only describe as what I imagine a black hole to be, something so deep with no sign of exit. Once your in you can only go deeper.
An my god did I go deep.
The self harm, the suicide attempts, the lack of concern for myself, the lack of thought. I was just right back there. I didn’t have any care for myself, I put myself into a position of vulnerability and danger on more than one occasion. I lacked any idea of the danger I was in at the time. It just wasn’t there. It was like being a child, you wanna jump of the top of climbing frame because you don’t see danger, it looks like fun. But your parent stops you. They see it.
People around me were seeing this, but I didn’t care. I didn’t have it in me to. I just wanted the inward pain to stop, to let me breathe again. I figured if I hurt myself that badly I would be able to find that strength to carry on. But this didn’t happen. I just kept losing more and more of who I was until I became a shell of the girl I’m known to be.
I changed medication. I figured this might be it. I changed from the highest dose of sertraline to venlafaxine. This had its own consequences. Venlafaxine had been one of the drugs Pete had taken when he died. I could cope with this I figured.
And I did. Although it’s been difficult I have coped as well as I can but I am still not okay.
I wish there was an easy answer to this. Mental health is profoundly ignorant to its inhabitant. It wears you down, it eats at you, it takes the person you know away from you. I’m writing this whilst my head is banging, my eyes sting and I don’t know if I can cope with the next minute, let alone tomorrow.
Mental health does not discriminate, it will eat you alive and it won’t care who it destroys in the process.
This is mainly for me, it’s the first time in many months I’ve felt I could write and I’ve flooded the page not only with words but tears, my head is banging and I don’t feel safe right now. But I’m written.
Please be kind x
