The Cover Up

I've always covered up my pain with joking. I feel like it started as a pre-teen and feeling ugly and unwanted. I would cut myself down with the silent hope I'd be told I was wrong. I was rarely told otherwise and usually laughed at. This carried over into making jokes about my deepest pains but acting like I didn't care. Again, typically laughed at. I now can't accept a compliment no matter how sincere. I feel like it's only being said to stop my negative self-talk. Usually my mind goes into overdrive on the back-end thinking "Why did they say that when it's not true? It can't be true. It's what I'm dying to hear but I can't believe it so it hurts."

I make jokes frequently that I'm dying alone with my cats. I say it as a brutal way to force myself not to hope and to accept my fate. I say it and act like I don't care. I say it like I'm just cutting up and cracking good ones. Yet each time I say it and the other person laughs and nods in agreement, a little part of me dies. I get sent memes and jokes talking about women my age alone with their cats. Jokes about how if you're alone by a certain age all the cats know to show up. Funny things depicting a woman alone. I give a big laugh react and a "LOL" as I wipe tears. I gave them the material to laugh at so it's my own fault for the outcome.

The whole dying alone thing is a tricky one as there is nothing you can do to change it. Sure you can position yourself at places to meet people, be social, get out there. But the chance of you running into "your person", "soulmate", "the one for you", is luck and coincidence. When I attempt to explain this to someone with a partner I hear "Well you know relationships are hard." I have to bite my tongue from getting snarky about being in a relationship over two decades so I actually know this. Usually at this point they decide to put the blame on me for not loving myself enough. Because apparently when you hit peak loving yourself, then your perfect person appears!

I've also told myself to stop covering up the pain and just shut up about it. Find a reason to live and just accept you'll do it alone. 

Let It Go

Long before the annoying song came out, the mantra of "let it go" was a long held belief in the way to getting over something, and the ability to do this as proof of your efforts. I don't let things go. I hold onto them tightly, recalling every detail and nuance. But only the negative, the traumatic, and the hurtful things. I can not only let a good and happy moment go, I frequently forget they even happened.

Despite commentary as to if I've tried hard enough to do this, I have read and researched on it for decades. I've done the self help books. I've read about forgiveness. I prayed. I cried. I burned and burned and burned to release it. The pain remains.

With CPTSD, “letting go” is often difficult because the nervous system has not registered the matter as safely concluded. It may keep returning to it because:

The current event resembles an earlier injury.
Something important remains unexplained, denied, or unacknowledged.
You were once harmed when you did not anticipate what other people would do.
Your reality was challenged, so reviewing the evidence became a way to preserve it.
The mind believes that understanding everything will prevent another injury.
The body still responds as though the threat is happening now.

With my severe and compulsive rumination issues, it pairs well with not being able to let go, as my mind won't turn off investigation mode. In my thinking to let go of something puts me in danger. Even if the danger was decades ago, even if those people are dead, even if the fears aren't logical. So, I do every special calming breath I know. I take medication. I meditate. I do rituals. I write. I scream to the nothingness. And the pain remains.

I was looking back and asking myself if there is anything I was able to let go of in a healthy and conclusive way. I was reminded of my son's birth where I had decided that my birthing experience was going to redeem all the milestone events I'd missed in my life. This was going to be my moment. I was convinced that birth is something I could finally excel at and have a great outcome. The short version: 10 days overdue, induced, cord around the neck, emergency c-section. I felt demolished. I wanted that big push moment. I wanted my hand held and to be told I was doing great. I'd so desperately wanted that moment of being handed my baby and yet he was taken away (per protocol). I once again cried to the heavens, or to nothing, saying "Why? Why couldn't I have this? Women give birth and get this! Why not me?" It haunted me for years. I went to a c-section support group. It was years later I was at a new OB, still crying about not having a natural birth, and he said "Wait...how big was your baby?" "10 lbs, 22 1/4 inches." He looked me up and down, and then clearly recalling the pelvic exam he just did on me, and said, "You are very small. You pelvic bones are incredibly small. To get a 10lb baby out of you we would have had to crack you in half and break his collar bone." I was fine with me being hurt but when I pictured hurting my baby the tears dried up. I was fine. I never cried about it again. I let it go.

My mind can do this and I'm not incapable. So what will it take to let go of everything else? How can I stop my mind from trying to solve the unsolvable? How can I come to acceptance that I've haven't been given the life that most of the people around me have had, and this is just the hand I was dealt? And I feel the question needs to be asked....is letting go always the answer? 

 

The Plan

Author's note: this writing will include intense, disturbing, and possibly triggering descriptions. Please read with care and caution.

When I take a PHQ-9 (depression test) before any mental health treatment or session, there are a few questions I always give the same answer to:

Feeling bad about yourself — or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down - Every day.
Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way - Every day
Secondary question: do you have a plan? - No

I admitted recently that I'd been lying about my plan and I did have one. My psychiatrist said, "Will you tell me?" I said, "Will you commit me?" She said, "Do you have intent?" Me, "No". "Then I won't commit you." I revealed I'd watched some gossip show talking about some child stars that had killed themselves. And then Dr. Drew not only explained what they did, but gave the exact drugs they used to stop their heart and breathing. My breathing stopped just hearing this. I'd always had the plan to kill myself with drugs but I never knew the perfect combination. I was worried I'd just OD, or fry my brain but still live. So now I had the two drugs to combine, and though I didn't have them, they wouldn't be too hard to get. 

TRIGGER WARNING

The plan was to fly to Mexico where you could get drugs from a pharmacy without a prescription. Get the drugs I needed (unlike Dr. Drew, I won't reveal them), take a snorkeling trip to a cenote, and then have a terribly unfortunate drowning (because you can't just do it and be selfish even though the pain is debilitating and killing you).

I know it would hurt people deeply. I know it would fully destroy my son. Fuck do I know. Yet I still wake up every day and think "How much longer?". I look in the mirror and think "How many more times do I have to see that fucking face?" I look at my life and think "You are a loser and the lowest and most pathetic person everywhere you go." 

I've said this before, but I get why you would want to live. Not saying there aren't problems and issues, but I see your good life and see why you'd be happy to keep going. I think most people look at people like me through their personal lens and make their judgements from there. But really, look at me, how would you feel to be me?

Luck, Rumination, and Hopelessness

"Wow! You really do have terrible luck!" Not the first time this has been said to me yet it still hurts every time. I had a friend say she wished people wouldn't say this to me as it then puts it in your head that it's real. This is true. I've never felt I had luck, history to prove it, but there is something about someone confirming one of your deepest pains that hits in a way that feels like being stabbed. The man I thought was the love of my life said this to me in Vegas on what was supposed to be a whirlwind New Year's Eve weekend. He was a big gambler, I'm not because of the no luck lifetime streak, so I said I'd just watch. He did some slots and quickly lost. He turned around and said, "You really are bad luck!". I hadn't done anything. I'd stood there. I'd watched. I'd done nothing yet I was getting blamed. He later went on to say it was just a joke but only after I'd fallen apart in a drunken sobbing fit. Sometimes I think what bothers me more than just being one of the unlucky, is that the lucky ones don't acknowledge what they have. I won't say I've had nothing lucky happen. I got pregnant easily, without trying, no miscarriages, and a healthy pregnancy. I fully own this was luck and coincidence, and would never tell a woman with a different experience how she should feel about it, much less give her some "unlucky" comment. How hurtful. Yet I hear it all the time. 

I ruminate over these things obsessively. More than I tell people. More than I've told any mental health professional. It's too shameful to fully admit how bad it is. I've tried, alluded to what my mind does, only to be met with a metric shit ton of shame. "Well, you should stop doing that!" "You are only making yourself feel worse!" "How is thinking about that going to help you? You are trying to make yourself feel bad." If I told you to stop breathing for the day, could you? The amount of energy to try and stop the thoughts, and it never working, is a mental level of exhaustion and failure that makes you just give up. Though I don't give up. My methods are sometimes healthy, sometimes very wrong, but I can't explain that I'm trying when all others see is failure. 

I explained to my psychiatrist that the rumination has gotten much worse. My nerves feel exposed and things said to me are like acid being poured on them. I find myself on spin cycle "Why did they say that? Like why the fuck say that to me?" She feels I may be getting "flooded" with the extensive ketamine treatments and this feels like a perfect description. Imagine every pain, bad word, trauma, upset, sorrow you have swirling above you at all times. Even when smiling and talking it's there. And then someone laughs at one of the worst traumas of your life....how would you react? I saw a meme that said "Rumination is your mind trying to solve the unsolvable". That hit so hard but also dead on. "Why couldn't my father love me?" "Why am I also the lowest person wherever I go?" "Why did he say he loved me and then purposefully devastated me?" Why? The mind just won't stop.

Six months of ketamine treatments. Nine months since I nearly killed myself. My PHQ-9 scores (depression screening test) had me at 9 - 3 weeks ago. A single digit is a big deal as I was at 21 when I came in. I've been 18 for two weeks. It's been 2 weeks of a lot of stressful situations, reasons to not be happy, but I also feel the regression. And I hear the comments. "I thought you would have been better by now." "Are you doing the work?" "I've been watching and can see you are improving." It feels like have your little sad moment but the clock is ticking. 

The catch-22 of being open is that people often mistake access for invitation. I share because openness and vulnerability matter to me, and because someone else may need to hear that they aren’t alone. I was talking to a friend about cutters and said that though I never did it, I always understood it. She said, "Words are your cutting." Possibly one of the most telling statements of my life. I have an almost physical need to say things out loud. It isn’t because I think everyone needs to know everything about me, and it isn’t simply a desire for attention. Saying it lets the pressure escape. But when someone tells you something personal it doesn’t suddenly make you part of the story. It isn’t an invitation to interpret the experience, tell them what it “really” means, or prescribe what I should do next. Sometimes I need what I’ve said to be received, not reviewed.

It's so hard to end a writing piece without a cute conclusion. Though I haven't tied it up with a pretty bow in a while. The hopelessness is overtaking me again. I feel constantly on the edge of breaking down. It's that feeling like when you're about to cry and you don't want anyone to see it, so you pinch yourself and bite your tongue, and act like something is in your eye as the tears come out...all day long. 

Though it's frequently discounted, I have been trying my entire life. I've tried. 30+ years since one of my first diagnosis and pumping me with meds. My situation isn't emotionally palatable to most. It's shape shifted, told things weren't as I remember, and all the shame and blame that I should try just a little more. I don't know what to do. Do I shut up, stop giving everyone access to me, and slowly implode? I've resigned myself to living but I don't want to. The memories of that night in December float around in my head and whisper there is a way out of this pain. 

Living in Uncertainty

It was less than a week ago I wrote about how accumulation affects my nervous system. The health scare I was writing about escalated daily, sending me sideways into days of silence while trying to still keep my responsibilities. While the steri strips are still on, I am relieved to say that the worst didn't happen and I'm OK on this. 

Was about to start something important and new next week and felt like the week where I should have been preparing and celebrating had been ruined with the health scare. I thought I have a few more days to finally be able to be safe and take a deep breath...and another blow came. It's not the outcome that is even leading the emotions right now. It's the uncertainty, because at this moment the stability isn't there. Yes, it might work out. And I could also have everything crumble beneath me. My mother was here when I found out and she tried to say what I knew was going to be some "good thoughts" bullshit and I barked "Not a fucking word about me thinking something good. That's a bunch of bullshit." She shut up. 

With uncertainty in a dysregulated nervous system, possibility becomes probability. I was talking with a friend who went into a speech about how I need to distract myself, how being scared won't change anything, how I'm just making myself more upset. I explained that it's not that I lack rational thought. It's not that I'm purposefully feeling that everything is catastrophic and don't have reason. As we spoke more she made a profound observation "What would be the opposite for you?" Severe depression and an emotional plummet. "And which feels worse?" I said the debilitating depression. When my mind is going over every possibility it's to attempt to make sure I'm not blindsided, as even if the news is horrible, I feel braced for it. And when I'm spiraling and flipping out my nervous system feels like at least I'm doing something and still attempting to survive. It feels better than the other side which is desolation. It's more comfortable to catastrophize than shut down.

I've had nearly 2 years on a roller coaster and it feels like the attendant has left the park. I don't know if I'll be able to handle the next drop. I feel sick, I'm dizzy, and it just won't end. The people on the ground are waving and saying the ride isn't that bad, while I am scanning to see if it's about to jump the track. I'm bruised from this ride. I have whiplash. It's easy to explain roller coasters when you're standing on the safety of the platform. It's a different conversation when you are strapped into a ride you can't get out of.

I've had 6 months of ketamine at this point. While still drowning in what is coming up, I'm more stable. Though I had a moment last weekend where I thought if I get one more hit of bad news I may even take them up on going to inpatient. Uncertainty, though I'm painfully aware is all of life, still wrecks me. 

Debilitating Accumulation

 "You are like me; your baseline is depression and when thing get bad or uncontrollable, it goes catastrophic." ~ words from a dear friend which I found to be one of the most profound insights about how I feel and respond to life

I drove home last night screaming, crying, and feeling on the edge of a heart attack (though I knew it was actually panic). Woke up at 3am sobbing and in hysterics. When all attempts to calm myself failed I took a valium to try and sleep...or just pass out. As I've attempted to crawl my way back to semi sanity and being able to function and not be this sad little wreck of a person, the blows keep coming. Between CPTSD, and the history of what went with it, when something happens to be it's not an isolated incident, as my nervous systems experiences it in accumulation. 

Coming up on 2 years of compounded incidents, and I'm sure more than a few triggers from the past saying "See....you just weren't dealt a nice deck of cards in life and it's never going to stop.". I wanted to title this "Catastrophic" but looked back at previous writings and see I'd already written it. Looking at the words I saw I was about to write nearly the same piece again. It feels like getting punched in the face again and again. No, you didn't die, look how resilient that you kept getting back up. Just hold on....another blow.

I'm having a health scare and it's one I've had before. Though a new symptom, and a highly concerning one, I know what tests I'll have to go through, and I do know that as scared as I was the previous times I ended up OK. The collapse I'm having now isn't because I'm scared I'm going to die. I'd welcome it if it didn't involve more suffering. My nervous system is saying here we go again. Another period of uncertainty. Another threat. Another emotional impact before I've recovered from the last one. It's reacting to the uncertainty, and in uncertainty it goes down dark roads trying to figure out what it will take to survive this or if it's even worth it. 

It's another spotlight on not having a safety net. Another reminder that though I am deeply cared for, I'm still walking alone. I was thinking about when I was married and I'd read a woman saying, "I don't want to be with someone who if I'm dying of cancer would sit on the edge of the bed asking me what we should do." One of many things I thought about when I was divorcing as that's how I felt my husband would behave. All on me. No matter how many people answer the phone, at the end of the day I'm still the one who has to walk back into an empty home, lie awake at 3am, fear my future, and somehow keep functioning.

I have no lived experience of what it feels like to be able to collapse and have someone else hold part of the weight. This is mine to survive. When I see someone with a soft place to land, I envy them, but I don't resent them. I grieve that I have no idea what that feels like.

And the accumulation just won't seem to stop.

Jumper

A few days ago I drove under a bridge where I saw a young man outside the rail and appearing to look like he was about to jump. I panicked trying to figure out where exactly I was on the highway, what bridge it was to call 911, while hyperventilating and starting to cry. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw an emergency vehicle was on the bridge, and others began coming from all directions, so while I wasn't comforted, I felt there was nothing I could do. I tried to reason that maybe it was a teen fucking around or a symbol of protest.

I later learned I was seeing someone about to commit suicide, and they were able to talk him down and get him to a hospital. This hit me from every angle as I thought about how it was less than 8 months ago that it could have been me on that bridge. Why I didn't go through with it was mostly because I couldn't figure out a way to make it look like an accident, because you sure don't want anyone saying you were selfish. I've had people say, "Aren't you so happy you didn't do it and you're alive!?" No, not happy at all. I'm resolved not to do it but the pain that brought me to that moment isn't gone.

I'm 5 1/2 months into ketamine treatment, and though I feel like I'm failing, my psychiatrist says otherwise. One of the measurements of if it's working is your PHQ9 score. When I started my score was 21, which is dangerously high. They wanted me in inpatient and I refused, as it was one of my biggest fears and the thought of living with that stigma was horrifying to me. My score last week was 9. Hitting a single digit is considered "mildly depressed". What I feel internally doesn't feel mild but I accept the score. The score today was 13. The last question is always how many days in the last week have you had thoughts that you would be better off dead, or of hurting yourself in some way. I'm back to several days. When I started ketamine the thought was daily up until maybe a month ago.

As ketamine "loosens" my neural pathways, and containers of what is compressed into my brain spill out and flood me, I live with a daily feeling of constant sadness. The crying spells are less, and nothing like they were as I bottomed out was daily laying on the floor scream sobbing like I was being tortured, but it's also a rare day for me not to cry. The hope of treatment is that as you face everything you couldn't, while it continually oozes out of you, that new positive pathways will form to replace the bad ones. You will still remember it all, but hopefully the good stuff will outweigh the trauma and pain. Yet from my vantage point, alone with my cats most days, nothing new and good is happening. 

My nervous system was shaped over decades, and I'm asking it to learn a completely different way of being while I'm still living a real life with disappointments, uncertainty, loneliness, and fear all happening at the same time. I think a lot of people assume healing is proportional to effort: do the therapy, work hard, gain insight, and you'll feel better on some predictable timeline. That's a comforting formula because it implies control. But trauma, especially chronic developmental trauma, doesn't work that neatly. You can do everything "right" and still have a nervous system that reacts as though it's protecting you from a world it learned long ago wasn't safe.

But for today....I won't jump.