(tw: suicide) replies~ love you guys~~

manhating-babyeater said: I feel a lot of this <3 

 <3 <3 I really appreciate you

thejoyofq said: So beautiful and real. I really identified. Thank you so much. Xx

Thank you for reading and commenting.  Sorry you can identify, but it is nice to know you’re not alone <3

chaffinches said: youre really brave, i cant imagine living through all that. its also strange to read that you set yourself a kind of deadline for suicide as well? its a lot more common than i first though

thank you, but honestly I don’t feel brave.  I guess sometimes it’s hard to feel brave when you know you’re just doing what you have to do.  Did you set yourself a deadline with suicide?  I have seen mentioning of it in Post Secret, but tbh I don’t really get to have very many conversations about suicidality with people who actually are/were suicidal.  It kind of makes sense though - it might be a sort of way of being optimistic.  I have until this time to enjoy my life - might as well do crazy shit, and hey, if things get better, maybe I’ll live through this.  I always came up with excuses - “I’ll wait till I’m 16 so I can do it in a car and make it seem like an accident so my parents’ feelings aren’t hurt” or “I’ll wait till I’m in college in a different part of the country so it won’t affect them so much” - but I think I also kinda didn’t want to die.  I mean, I did feel enormous guilt over the possibility of hurting everyone with my suicide, so there’s that.

tw:mental health; thoughts on recovery and mental illness

I really wish depressed sick days were things. I really need to meditate and refigure my priorities and my methods of recovery. And cry - it’s just been a while. I feel this tightness in my chest and I want a release.

So instead I’m gonna write about it on here while I’m at work. This whole entry is going to be potentially triggering and tl;dr jsyk.

I have so many confused feelings. I am going through this thing that I go through every year - what is me? What is my disorder? What is my recovery? What is the me that I want to be versus the me that I don’t want to be? Why am I so obsessed with being as much myself as possible?

I think about when I was younger, what I was like then. I was almost the same person - creative, clever, passionate, social justice oriented, smart ass. I hated people who had power over me, namely boys and adults, mostly male adults. I hated how they looked down on me as if I weren’t their level, when in some cases I knew more than they did. I had a couple of elementary teachers who asked ME to teach other students, since they couldn’t do it/didn’t understand the material. You have to understand how this made me feel. I was angry at them for simultaneously acting like I was a stupid ten year old girl and also acting like I ought to teach my peers, since it would be the right thing to do. This knowledge that I was cleverer than people wanted to give me credit for, but enough so they could admit I knew things other people didn’t, helped me understand how to act in order to get people to read me the way I wanted them to read me. I wanted to cut out this “but you’re a girl-child” reading of me and introduce myself with the “you’re a clever person” side.

This was not the first time I realized I had the ability to change how I was in order to change how I was viewed, but it was the first time I did it on my own volition. (When I was younger, I acted like I wasn’t shy even though I was extremely shy, because my mom would scold me when I acted shy) I realized how easy it was to only show a part of who you were in order to manipulate the way people perceived you.

This was when the manipulation started. It became very useful when I was twelve and developed major depressive disorder. I hid it so well, none of my friends noticed the slightest change. I became incredibly suicidal and my friends actually voted me the happiest person they knew. The irony cracked me up! I was extremely proud of how well I hid it. I admit, it made me feel clever.

When I was 13 I started starving myself. At 14 I started self harming, and this was when I really needed to hide things. People continued thinking I was unnaturally happy. I have a cheerful disposition, which can easily be made to seem like I am a cheerful person.

Between hiding my mental illness(es) and pretending to be only cheerful and clever, when I was obviously other things too, I got pretty good at manipulation. By the time I was 16 I had convinced three different people that they were in love with me. Three people in three years seems like a pretty good record, but I didn’t feel good about myself. I never lied to them: I was manipulative, but I was not a liar. But I was very particular about what I told them, and when. I seemed to know how and what to tell them things about myself to make them fall for me. Unfortunately, two out of the three love birds wanted to save me. This made me resentful of them, and disgusted with myself for using my mental illness(es) to “get” people to fall for me. Especially because, at this time, I had no desire to get better. Getting better was an impossibility! It could not happen. Even if my moods were stabilized, as is possible with mood disorders, my personality could never change, so what was I to do with this personality disorder? Also, how was I to know which part of me was my personality, and which parts were my disorders?

I dated this guy (not one of the people that loved me - I never dated them) and he convinced me that medication would change who I was. He tried to make me resign myself to the fate of a mentally ill person. At this time (I was between the ages of 14 and 15) I came to the conclusion that there was no way my life could end in a way other than suicide. I decided to kill myself when I was 16. I had already had 3 failed attempts, and I decided 16 would be the time when I wouldn’t fail. That number changed when I became 16- I started fooling around with girls and didn’t want to die a virgin. I changed the number to 18- when I graduated high school.

I guess where I’m stuck now - for such a long time I imagined myself as someone who would kill themselves. It was sort of an inevitability. I would think of Elliott Smith, oh that beautiful person who everyone hoped would be able to outlive his depression, but the tragedy of it is the same thing that gave his songs such haunting emotions that killed him.

People told me my writing would suffer if I got better. Let me tell you - my writing was not better when I was suffering. I could not write. I could not think about much other than my hatred of myself.

I was incredibly bitter when I was living with my disorders. I was jealous and angry that I could not dive into them in the way that I desired. I wanted to give into my depression and my ED completely. The fact that people loved me and prevented me from being as bad as I wanted to be made me hate my circumstances, and desire a time when no one would love me so I could do whatever I wanted to myself.

I worry that this is keeping me from fully embracing recovery. There’s parts of me that worry I still want my sickness, since it was never unrestricted. I know this is common for people with EDs: we think, I didn’t get bad enough. If only I were worse, THEN I’d deserve health. Is the fact that I think this about my depression too indicative of the intensity and all-consuming aspects of my ED? Or is it the reason why I developed my ED? Are some people born with a desire for suffering?

I love my life post-recovery. I have never been so happy. But I’m frustrated. Why do I have to continue to work? Why does this still not come easy? Why do I still miss my disorders? Why do I still feel like my disorders are a part of who I am? Why do I feel resigned to be someone who will always identify with sickness - is it because its true? I know addicts are always addicts, but I’m unhappy with the idea that I will always suffer from mental illness, if I don’t even get to indulge in my mental illness. Maybe this makes no sense. But abstaining from my negative behaviors (negative coping mechanisms) while still enduring negative side effects of my disorders… It’s bullshit! I guess my problem is abstinence is difficult. Hahaha isn’t it always? I don’t know. Maybe it’s not.

I’m not going to resign myself to my fate like I used to want to. I’m not going to give up on recovery, even though its been a tough four years. I remember I used to say, “I can never fucking relapse, because recovery is too difficult - I don’t want to go through it again.” I do genuinely believe that. I think it’s a little sad to think of recovery that way though.

But my recovery is becoming more mine all the time. When I broke up with my abusive ex, and I didn’t kill myself, that was a recovery decision that was my own. I had said for four years if we broke up I would kill myself - after all, I recovered for him! But I didn’t do it, and I didn’t relapse. So obviously I didn’t do it for him.

I thought the other day that relapse is always possible. I don’t believe lapses are relapses, so it’s interesting how my mind had that thought. I was not thinking, “if you self-harm you’ve relapsed” and yet relapse to me still seems like a cloud following you around waiting for you to stop running away from it so it can engulf you once more. I guess because relapse is in your mind. It only takes a second to change your mind, only a second to say, “Fuck recovery!” You can be recovered for years and in an instant be sick again.

But that doesn’t mean it will happen to me. But oh, I miss my sickness. I have not been being well. I’ve let my happiness detract from my stability. I have not been eating enough these past couple months. I haven’t been doing positive affirmations. I haven’t been thinking about myself as the love of my own life.

Recovery - you’re a slippery bastard, but I don’t need to catch you to have you.

“But he’s so nice though!” - says every family member of, friend of, co-worker of, etc of a rapist.

(Source: dansphalluspalace, via bleeder-resistor)