I’m 29yrs old. I’ve had problems with mental illness for as long as I can remember. For the first time ever it looks like I’m not just being dismissed.

I had an assessment yesterday. That was painful stuff – raking up everything from my past; trigger, moods, the lot. Figured I’d be waiting until next week to hear back from the guy, after he’d filled stuff in and thought, etc. Turns out not so much – he called me this morning.

After our chat things now stand thus:

I have an appointment in January with the locum psychiatrist. I could wait for the non-locum one, but that’d take a few months, and he didn’t want to make me have to do that.

Current favourite for what to diagnose me with is Cyclothymia. Kinda like a chronic but milder form of bipolar – in that the moods shift from hypermanic to depression faster, without a period of being levelled out, and this also makes sense of me being able to keep certain things and certain levels of these shifts under control to a certain extent, before they slip out of my grasp – as they have done the past few months.

Being at risk of self-harm, getting something done to help me sooner rather than later is a good plan. So if this psychiatrist agrees with cyclothymia, then it’s probably gonna mean psychotherapy and mood stabilisers. I think the CPN I saw is gonna hint to my GP about them, especially as antidepressants are not the best idea with cyclothymia, but he has no authority to tell her what she should put me on or not, so we’ll see. I go back to her again on the 17th.

So that’s where we are now. In other stuff, I have a deadline which I need to meet for Uni. Cos of other stuff I need to have this thing done to hand in no later than Tuesday morning. It’s not going well so far due to distraction and being on the down side of the mood cycle.

Instead of Uni work I have staring into space, lethargy, and those kinds of things. Best of the lot is, as always, paranoia. It’s my own voice in my head – that’s fortunately not a thing I’ve ever had – that tells me that the people I care about, who sometimes I think care about me, really don’t. At best they pity me, at worst they hate me, either way they just don’t know how to tell me or to make me go away because they’re too nice and/or afraid of what I’ll do to myself or them if they tell me the truth. It also tells me that people are talking about me when I’m not there – sharing bitches and gossip and everything bad about me and laughing at how pathetic I am.
On top of the paranoia we have the self-hatred. I don’t deserve them anyway, all I ever do is hurt people I love, I’m supposed to be alone because that’s all I deserve anyway because I’m a worthless shit. That’s the sort of place the self-harm comes from – but so far I’ve at least resisted that urge. Not sure how – mostly stubbornness, I think.

Part of me is going “This is good, there may be diagnosis and treatment and that’ll help!” while another part of me is going “Yeah, but it means stigma and meds forever and all of that crap.”
Yet another part of me is going “Just fuck it all, you don’t deserve to feel better – you’re like this because it’s what you deserve.”
And a fourth part, “So what if you get helped and feel better? What then? What’s that gonna be like? At least you know where you are when you’re crazy.”
There’s a few more bits too, but those are the main ones.

Mostly today it’s the paranoia. Even when I know I’m doing it, it’s so damned persuasive. I’ve never found a way to counteract this. Possibly that’s partly because if I were to consider asking someone for help, I’d have to do it through screams of “You KNOW they’re only doing it cos they feel they have to, right? They’re gonna bitch about you behind your back – that’s what everybody’s doing already anyway, you know that right?”

It’s so bad that when somebody actually says or does something nice, my immediate reaction is suspicion.

Well, we’ll see how things go. Right now I need to hit that deadline, even if it’s not with anything very good. Unsurprisingly the paranoia and self-hatred not so helpful with this either: because I’m dumb, I’m useless, I’m gonna screw up and fail anyway. And my writing? My fiction? Oh man, don’t even go there with how awful I am at that…

Yeah. It sucks. And I get to watch myself do it and be completely helpless to exert any control. That’s the thing most important to understand here, I think: I have no control over any of what’s happening in my head. Not the moods, not the paranoia, the hatred. I have learned over years of hard work to keep my damn mouth shut sometimes and not say the first thing that comes into it. I have learned, in this way, to keep it all locked away and pummelling at the walls inside my own head, not at anybody else. I’ve done the lashing out at others thing (verbally, not actual violence – never that) and I won’t do it again.

Hopefully this time is the time when my repeated attempts to ask for help are finally listened to. So far it looks like maybe, but experience has taught me never to trust that. So we’ll see.

Potential trigger warnings for self-harm, depression, etc

I keep a lot to myself. I’m told I come across as open and, sometimes, painfully honest. To a point, this is true. I’ll talk about things, bad and painful things, as events that have happened. What I rarely do is go into detail, talk about how things affect me. What I also rarely do is talk about what goes on in my head most of the time.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve had what my mum used to term “black moods”. She used to tell me I was spoiled, seeking attention, and just needed to stop and cheer up, etc. It’s kind of a family trait – on both sides – to ignore, dismiss, and generally not acknowledge.

It wasn’t until about 7yrs ago, after the death of my Grandad topped off a bunch of other stuff to trigger me into the worst time of my life, that anyone paid enough attention to what I was trying to say about what happened inside my head to realise something was actually really wrong.

Unfortunately, one of the things wrong with me was self-harm, which nobody wanted to deal with, so after getting shunted between all the departments because nobody wanted to deal with me, I’m just incredibly lucky in the friends I’d found. People who barely knew me at the start, but still saw beyond what was going on, ignored my attempts to push them away, and just stayed there for me.

Alright, it’s been 5yrs since I cut – and though I’ve come incredibly close to doing that again, I haven’t. But there are more ways than one to harm yourself, and my thing has always, always been to turn everything inward on myself. So there’s always a constant low-level stream of self-beration, even on my best ever day. When I get really bad, as I have again recently, that gets very loud and very vocal.

Everything in the world that I suspect about  myself, everything I fear about myself, everything that would hurt me if somebody said it to me – these are the things that run on a loop around my head 24/7 at the moment. Everything bad I’ve ever done – or think I’ve done, or may possibly have had some vague relation to me: I get all the blame, and I get it in the most vicious ways I can summon up. Ways in which I would never even dream of speaking to someone else, and would probably jump and defend even a total stranger against.

My love for the world is immense. My hatred for myself at times like this is the exact mirror-image. Everything I do comes down to those two things.

I want to bring people closer, because I love them. But because I don’t deserve them, or I’m sure I’ll hurt them, or just to punish myself for existing – I then try to push them away or hide from them. I have more control than I used to, but still my first instinct is always to retreat into my own darkness and keep everyone else out. It’s selfish, it’s indulgent, and I know it – but it’s no more a choice than breathing. I can’t help it, it’s just something my brain does.

Same with the other side. The mania, well to a point I can channel that into writing, chatting, essays, work, games, whatever. I can funnel the energy, I can hide inside characters and other worlds, anything until it eases up a little. But there’s a point beyond that, where I can’t do anything except jitter, stammer, pace up and down. I want to just go for a walk, but the thought of there being other people outside freezes me to the spot. I want to sleep, but my body and my mind won’t let me. Again: I have no control over this.

I have this picture of a letterbox – it’s like a widescreen film. Between the two halves are the extremes of my moods, up and down. Where those letterbox halves are for most people is a place I never see. Where they are when I’m under control is about a quarter of where they are when I;m not. Right now they’re so far apart I can only see one from the other when I go all the way round in a circle.

Basically the thing I need is the ability to control those halves, keep them close enough together that my ups and downs are controlled well enough to allow me to live my life.

I know that the self-hating thing I do damages me constantly. I also know how much the people I love hate it – it’s why they only ever hear the tiniest amount of what really goes on in my head, though I know most of them suspect the depths of it.

What now? Well, I’m back on meds again – as a tool to help compress that letterbox in order for whatever else is going on to be dealt with, they’re helpful when we find the right stuff. I know amazing people, who I am fighting not to retreat from – sometimes by talking at them far too much. I have understanding tutors at Uni. I have a wonderful chaplain there too. I have stories to write. I have fun things to do for people. I sometimes even have the energy and will to actually do some of them.

I also have an appointment this Thursday for an initial review. That words like “Borderline personality disorder” are once again being thrown into the mix terrifies me. The idea of putting myself out there again and risking being rejected by the people who are supposed to be helping me – terrifies me. Sitting here writing this – terrifies me.

Terror and panic are the theme of the day – but amongst other things I’m both stubborn and contrary. It’s how I keep from retreating from everyone when that’s all I want to do, it’s how I keep going, it’s why I’m being more open than I’ve ever been before and putting it out to the world. At best, there’s at least the chance that somebody else might see they’re not alone. At worst, I’m talking into empty space.

I don’t want any of this. I don’t want the depression, I don’t want the mania. I don’t want the self-hatred or the fight that lasts all day, every day.

But I have these things and more. So I’m going to talk about them. And deal with them. And keep on being stubborn. Somehow, I will get through this again – and it’ll mostly be due to amazing friends, to whom no amount of repayment will ever be enough. And, yes, I will also beat myself up about that.

I can’t help it. I can’t stop. All I can do is force myself to keep talking.

Wednesday night is mostly going to be spent doing paranoia over the appointment on Thursday. Thursday, not sure yet, depends how appointment goes. Expect a lot of up and down, some silences or random posts about everything else under the sun followed by more of this. You know, just pick and choose what you want to read – I’ll always be clear about which the mental illness posts are.

For now, I have an essay to try and finish….