I am struggling every day to hang onto this thread of sanity that feels like it is going to break at any second. I am doing it without the aid of medication or therapy, and honestly I think I’m doing a hell of a job. I am tired, I am lonely, I want to wrap myself up in my blue blanket, lock myself in a closet, beat my head against the wall until I pass out and god willing, die. This is how I feel most days. Not because I don’t love you, not because I don’t love my children, not because I don’t love my family. Because I don’t love myself, I hate fighting this silent fight every day. This fight that doesn’t show itself on the outside, this fight that no matter how much the world at large is trying to comprehend, it still judges. People like me are perceived as weak, as morally corrupt, as ungrateful god-hating sinners. If I had cancer, or even AIDS I would be perceived as someone to pray for, someone to try to comfort. But no, I am seen as a worthless soul, someone not even worth pitying. It’s my fault that I’m this way, I haven’t found God, I don’t have a back bone, I don’t try hard enough. This is how people struggling with mental illness are perceived in our society. We are broken, but not worth fixing because we haven’t tried to fix ourselves. If I had cancer, no one would say I didn’t pray hard enough to be cured. No one would expect me to keep a smile on my face and not ask for help.
I want help, I am begging for help on the inside. But I fall in that gray area, I make too much to get help from the government, but not enough to help myself.
I feel like one of those plastic Meijer bags that skirt along the curb. I am here, I am going along, but I am not worth stopping to pick up, or even given a second thought.
I feel that I am out of options. I’m not even sure my mom would take me back, she’s bailed me out of messes so many times, and I know she’s tired of it. I know she’s struggling to keep herself afloat after losing my dad… It’s not fair to her to have to take back her grown child. I am a grown woman, I should be able to take care of myself, but I have come to realize that I can’t. It’s not even fair to you to have to take care of me. I don’t make enough money to even support myself, let alone my children. I feel like such a failure, such a waste of space, of love. I know that this is wrong, I know that it is selfish, I know that there are people that would miss me, but I can’t control it. I am tired of panicking over paying the bills, having the gas shut off, wondering if my cell phone is going to work the next time I pick it up. I am tired of worrying about getting pulled over and taken to jail for that unpaid ticket. I want my car back, I want the gas on, I want more than three edible things in the refrigerator at any given time. I want to see my mom, I want to see my kids, I want to go on a vacation, I want to be able to buy some clothes and get a haircut. I want to buy a simple white dress and marry you on the beach…
I have a will to live, but I don’t know how to get there, how to claw my way out of this pit of despair, this place inside my head that tells me to give up, to kill myself, that I am not worthy of love. Yours, my children’s, my family’s, not even God’s and certainly not my own. I want a normal life back. But I look at myself and see no way out, no way back to normalcy. This is how it is, this is the bed I have made for myself. I want to crawl into it and float away and never come back. You can bury me or scatter me to the wind, I don’t care. I just want everyone to forgive me and forget me. Or at least forget the me now, and remember the me that I was before. Remember the me that loved her children and laughed and danced and had a joy for life that didn’t stop. Not this me, not this tired, miserable, scared abandoned me. I want people to remember the me that smiled, that wasn’t afraid of her own shadow, that didn’t try to escape into a drug induced facsimile of a happy heart. And I don’t want to be locked up in a padded cell for the rest of my life either, that’s no way to live. I don’t want to be visited by my children and they see this wreck of a person, this husk of a woman that used to be their mother. I don’t want them to remember me that way. I don’t want anyone to cry over me, I’m not worth the tears.
Yes, I think about it. Yes, I think about it all the time, multiple times a day, EVERY DAMN DAY… I actually dream about it at night, of floating off into nothingness. No sadness, no self-pity, no misery, no loneliness, no one judging me, just gone into nothingness. Just gone into the blackness and numbness of not having to feel this way anymore. To just be deleted from this existence that is worthless. I try to actively will my heart to stop beating, beg my body to give up.
Everyone can live without me, but I can’t live trapped inside this thing that has become me. Where my soul once was is the gapping sucking black hole of nothingness. No happiness, no desire to be, nothing.
My heart has these glimmers of hope, of loving you, of laughing with my kids, of hugging my mom. But those things seem so far and few between that the glimmers get fainter and fainter. More often than not I think everyone would be better off without me. This is how I feel on the inside, I know that it’s wrong, I do, but it’s like this never ending tape in my head. Sometimes I wish it were voices, voices that aren’t my own. Then they would give me meds to make the voices go away, to numb the pain that is living inside this broken mind of mine. But it’s my voice telling me these things, it’s snippets of memories of being abused, being beaten and left for dead, being told I’m worthless, told I’m a bad girl, being rejected, these things race through my mind all the time. They paralyze me, they make me want to escape, escape into food or drink or drugs or sex or pain or even the finality of death. The one thing you can’t escape from is yourself, and I am trapped and tortured and I’m going mad. I’ve been here before, I know how it feels and it’s happening again. It’s pulling me under and this time I don’t know if I have the strength to try to swim up again.
Maybe I’ll go to heaven, maybe I’ll be whole there again. Maybe I’ll get to sit with my dad and feel like a whole person again. Feel like my life wasn’t the waste it feels like now… But then again I worry that I’ll get there and he’ll be disappointed in me because I failed again. This is the shit my head swirls around day and night when I get bad. This is all I can think about…
I love you more than I can even describe. The reason I am not already dead is because the fact that you love me reminds me that it might all be okay. That I might be worth loving. I question how someone can love me when I loathe myself, but somehow you do. I don’t know why, I know I can be awfully hard to love sometimes, and that I can be a bitch when I’m tired and sad and not getting my way. But I love you, and even though God and I don’t talk much, I do thank him for you every day. I thank him for finally allowing me the luxury of being loved by someone because they choose to. But maybe you feel trapped because you can’t dump a crazy girl, it would be mean and against that glimmer of right that your parents instilled in you. See where my head goes? I was taught as a child that God loves me no matter what, even when I sin, even when I’m a bad girl, that he will forgive me, but how? How can he forgive me for all the bad things I have done? My sisters have given up on me, my kids don’t know what to make of me. My mom says she loves me, but I know deep down she’s just disappointed in me. To her I am a failure because I didn’t take all the opportunity she handed me and run with it… I should be working for a big firm as a senior project manager making $70K plus, raising my kids and having a vibrant life. Instead I’m on the verge of suicide everyday, I can’t keep my gas on, and I hide from everyone and everything. I am so far in debt I will never get out of it, unless I win the lottery.
I am sure that this letter has freaked you out and I am sorry. This is why I hide how I feel, why I clam up, why I keep the negative thoughts to myself. This is a glimpse of what it’s like inside my head, what it’s like to feel that I have a broken empty soul. That no matter what the positives in my life are, somehow the negative win. Please don’t freak out, please don’t commit me, just hold me in your arms and reassure me that it won’t last forever and that it might not be easy but it will work out.
Submitted May 16, 2015 at 01:42AM by 3blueeggs http://ift.tt/1KbaJjS bipolar
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