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(I hope it's okay to post about stuff that isn't TG-story related.)
CONTENT WARNING: LONG MORBID DEPRESSIVE RAMBLING.
I'm having a hard time writing this, because I learned early and late that if you expose any unarmored part of yourself, people will use it to hurt you. And it was impressed upon me early on rather forcibly that no one cares, anyway, except to be annoyed at being bothered. But I'm also beginning to feel that if I don't say it, I will die, or be as good as dead. ("Silence = Death")
I've been having a hard time lately. I keep trying to pull myself out of my PTSD depression, but there's a feeling that I think comes from very, very early in my life that rolls in like a dark cloud of smoke and blocks everything. And, like smoke, I can't get hold of it or move it or anything. When I try to see the feeling, I think of the story about how in ancient Greece, babies who were judged to be less than perfect would be left out in the wilderness to die of exposure or be eaten by the wild animals -- when I imagine what they must have felt like, that's what this feeling feels like. I've been waking up in the middle of the night with a free-floating terror: that something horrible is happening or has happened, and it's probably because I did or didn't do something, but I don't know what. And I find myself muttering, "I wish I were dead," maybe so I wouldn't have to feel this.
During the day, I'm not so aware of the terror, but I have a hard time doing anything, I just want to distract myself with mindless stuff like the WWW (the opiate of the masses ☺); the idea of doing something constructive, like vacuuming the bedroom, evokes too much anxiety. I used to motivate myself to move forward by telling myself, if you don't, you're effectively laying yourself in your coffin and waiting for someone to nail it shut, but that no longer works. It doesn't feel like there's a forward to move to.
I feel like I should reach out to other people, but when I try to do anything with other people, it feels like there's a thick wall of bullet-proof glass between me and the world of humans. It's only gotten worse with all the COVID precautions, and at times, I'm not sure whether I'm in the real world or not.
The scary part is that I'm running out of any sense that there's a point in being alive. I tell myself, I can't kill myself or let myself die because I have two (adult) children who depend upon me for emotional support. But if I imagine them not there (FSM forbid!), I'm afraid I would just let myself float out of life, like Ophelia. It just hurts so much.
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The Abyss of Self
We fall into that hole without realizing it. Once in there seems to be no way out or it's pointless to try. Who cares about us? Ah ha the abyss has done it's thing. Who cares about us?
It's not about me, myself, I but about others. However we got pulled into that self pity spiral believing it's about me. Never make it out of the dark hole believing it's about me. One must focus outside themselves caring for others, other things, other prospects in life.
I've been blessed all my life even though God dropped the boy-girl gender blender on me. Solved other people's problems, had a great family, helped others with trans issues, always had livestock or animals to tend and take care of.
Asche are we starting to connect yet? You must find a way to get invested in life again. It doesn't have to be a paying job but something that interests you and attracts your mind. Even if it's sitting out in the middle of the pasture with the goats and zoning out. Only been to a club once in my life. Wasn't impressed. I don't suggest that to get your life back on track. I don't date women nor men but invited women to dinner to talk to them, socialize, and hopefully get them settled back into living again when they hit a rough spot.
This life isn't about me, never was. It's the only way I manage to make it through day to day, looking after livestock, the farm, other people. Do you want to talk? DM me and I'll post my phone number.
hugs Asche
Barb
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Your Hurt Is Real
There's nothing less than real about your pain.
You're not alone. Some sources suggest that one in fourteen people have similar feelings.
That is in no way meant to diminish what you feel.
Several times in my life I've been given very heavy loads to carry. Like you, I often thought of suicide. I had several million dollars of life insurance and had convinced myself that suicide was the ethical thing to do.
Of course, it wasn't. I'm now financially secure and have welcomed three grandchildren into my life over the last eight years. They give me purpose.
Twice, in my low points, I vividly outlined insurmountable sets of negative circumstances to my spouse. I stated both times that we had at least three or four huge problems -- that could not be solved. Over the next several weeks and months, in both instances, I overcame all of those problems.
I've had a truly wonderful life. Yet, by failing to live in the moment I missed out on a great deal. I spent a huge amount of my time trying to gain revenge for things done to me . . . and worrying about the future. 99% of the time the negative futures I had imagined never remotely occurred.
I created an insurance company that has done marvelous things for millions of people. I created a non-profit that generated about $8 million in donations for my local school district. I coached about 35 youth sports teams and served on several boards. I created a marketing scheme that is now used by half the people in my industry to place $billions in premiums each year. That scheme has been good for all involved in that it has reduced angst for the participants. I raised four great kids. I created three businesses that I sold for more than $2 million each. My spouse and I have been together for 48 years. I've written quite a bit -- that seemingly has been enjoyed by a lot of people.
Yet - at two points in my life I considered my being to be so worthless that I wanted to end it.
You've supplied your own answer. Concentrate on the things in life that are really important to you. Your family seems to be one of them. Work at those things you can control and maximize your relationships with your children.
We're surrounded by a world filled with really, really bad people doing really, really bad things. That is what the world is like. From reading history, it appears that is what the world has always been like. What's different today is the amount of communication that puts the bad things right in front of us.
There are always lots of really, really nice people. We just don't hear about them as often. Many of those nice people do the kind of really nice things that don't go reported in the papers. Simple acts of kindness are powerful and plentiful, we just don't hear about them.
There is a point to being alive. You inherently know that, or you wouldn't have written your blog.
Depression is a real bitch. It isn't something to handle on your own.
I take fifteen pills a day for my heart disease. Of those various medicines, the fine print includes a warning about possible depression caused by several of them. Talk to your doctor.
Send me a PM, if you ever need to talk or simply vent. We're a lot alike.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
It's about pain and despair, not about "worthlessness"
It's not about feeling worthless (though I struggle with that, too.)
It's about terror/pain -- I put them together because it's a very primitive feeling, one that I have a hard time even putting into words. Maybe painful terror? It's not actually about anything in my adult life. It is something that has always been there, from long before I have any memory.
It's also about despair, something I've lived with my whole life. People talk about how you have to have hope to continue living, but I'm living (?) proof that you can get by without it. I've never had hope, I just put one foot in front of another and take one breath after another until the day comes when I can't. I try to Do The Right Thing, to be kind and do my tiny bit to improve things, to the limited extent that I can, because to do otherwise would amount to admitting that the people who broke me and made my life hell were right to do so.
"I wish I were dead" is about wanting the pain to stop, and being dead-tired in my soul from suppressing this, the greater part of myself, and from trying to do the stuff that you're expected to do when you're alive, to maintain the illusion. If I were to simply let go and act on my innermost feelings (something I've spent my entire life training myself not to do, to the point that I don't even know how to act on them), I think I'd just lie down and let myself die. I wouldn't even cry -- they conditioned the ability to cry out of me when I was quite young. Just to survive, I had to kill most of what made me me (cf. Randalyn's story Til Human Voices Wake Us), and I've found it hard to convince myself that there's anything left.
No, I'm not planning to kill myself. I've gone all these years without ever acting on it; I'm actually frightened by the possibility that I might. As a child, I would frequently think out how I might kill myself, but whenever I would start to imagine actually doing it, I would get scared and dissociate (that's been my main way of coping.) Move my consciousness to a place where neither I nor the world exist, so the pain doesn't exist either. Of course, my problems and my pain would be the worse for my absence when I came back to this reality, but at least I'd gotten some respite. I still make the plans, but I know it's just a safety valve for me, a way of comforting myself with the thought that if it gets bad enough, there's a way out. But it can never be half as bad as it was when I was 10 and 11, and I didn't kill myself then, so I know I won't go through with it now.
Hope?
What would "hope" be for you?
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Hope (my definition)
My interpretation of the word "hope" is having some emotional investment in the possibility of a future that is better than the present. That's what I don't do.
While I do make plans for the future, it is on a purely intellectual level. Emotionally, I simply prepare myself for the worst. (But sometimes the future is even worse.)
For me, safety lies in having few emotional investments. Mostly in my kids. To a lesser extent, in the value of doing good things, as opposed to bad. ("Don't be a dick" is my theology.) But I try not to anticipate that doing the right thing will actually make anything any better.
I've had some people say that my going on, just putting one foot in front of another, counts as hope, but they're moving the goalposts. That's not what the people who say "you gotta have hope" mean by "hope."
How To Be Perfect
I'm currently reading "How To Be Perfect" by Michael Schur.
It might be a good book for you to read.
I believe people lose "hope" when they no longer believe the world will treat them fairly when they make an emotional investment. This book has helped me realize that our perceptions of "good" and "bad" people are skewed.
I love the song "High Hopes." I once took a huge risk, betting my industry reputation and my business on a highly problematic and very public new strategy. We went through some very bleak times when things went bad in bunches. Editorials and letters to the editor were universally negative about what I was doing. Then everything started going right. One morning, I came into my office to find that my three partners (females) had bought me a rubber tree plant and had covered the leaves in plastic ants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJVewWbeBiY
"Don't Be a Dick" is a great philosophy. I'm not overly religious but I often think of of a Biblical passage when I make moral decisions.
"He replied, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
It's C-PTSD
The problem is that the despair/depression/whatever has really nothing to do with my life now, or with any of my adult life. I've actually had quite a bit of success in the course of my adult life. I've managed to earn my living pretty much from when I graduated from college straight through until I retired (in 2020), with a break for graduate school and a brief period of underemployment. Looking back on things, I think I've made good choices all along the way (the biggest one being getting the h*** away from home.) But the black cloud comes from someplace deeper. It's like it's something burned into my neurons.
Two books have really helped me make sense of myself: Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery and Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. There's a diagnosis that fits me pretty well -- Complex PTSD -- and whenever I look at a list of symptoms, I tick off most of them. For a long time, just looking at these lists and noticing how many of them describe me was more than I could handle -- I'd have to leave the presentation or shut the book or close down the browser and emotionally shut down. I've read that people who could not remember feeling safe with anyone while growing up (which describes me) take much longer in treatment (maybe more years than I have left.) I've been seeing my current therapist for at least 5 years (I don't exactly remember when we started), and it's slow going. We tried EMDR, but whenever we'd get close to anything, my mind would just shut down. We tried hypnosis, but as I was going into trance, my mind was filled with an image of wasps stinging me all over and I came out of it. She's concluded we have to take it slow. There's a lot I can't remember, and even more that I only remember as a few bare facts — actually remembering what it felt like is too overwhelming. My therapist says I'm getting better, but it's hard to see. I do suspect I'm beginning to trust my therapist a bit, which is hard because I learned at an early age that I could trust no one and had to hide everything that was inside me. I'm also beginning to imagine that there are people who won't shun me if I tell them something of what is inside me, but that trust is still very fragile. Maybe someday I'll be able to get through that bullet-proof glass and actually feel like a member of the human race.
It is the same for me.
I have this also.
Psychology
I took a lot of Psych courses in college. One thing remained constant: everyone recognized themselves in the symptoms.
If you were one of my siblings I would recommend more exercise and an improved diet. That's sort of my go-to Chicken Soup.
It's good you're seeing someone.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Not looking for advice
I realize I was not clear: I don't want advice.
I already have experts (esp. experts on trauma) who have spent a lot of time with me and whose advice I trust, and we've explored a lot of things, more than I can say in a blog post. Advice from people who don't know all that much about what's actually going on is — how should I say? — not helpful.
What I need -- what I suspect most people who are hurting need -- is to be listened to, really listened to. To have people out in the world ouside my head who understand what I'm going through. To feel less alone. To feel like there's a community that knows me.
FWIW, strong, supportive social connections are the most effective means of recovering from trauma, and of protecting from trauma in the first place. One of the stages of recovery from trauma is reconnecting with other people, which includes breaking through the silence and isolation. That's why I posted in the first place -- to break through the secrecy, denial, and isolation. (Cf. "silence = death.")
Okay
eom
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)