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.