I hear the silence.  I try to fill it but the words went away.

So instead I'll post something from, my personal journal that pretty much sums it up.

I’ve not written for a while and yet it was not intentional.  What to write with when the words, they went away? These fingers twitched and this heart stuttered, yet you can’t talk in punctuation.  You need the words.

I feel irrevocably broken.  It’s no clean snap nor delicate fracture.  It’s pieces.  Mainly bits.

I can’t control this.

Yet it’s controlling me.

I’m swinging violently through moods that cycle rapidly.

There’s the incandescent rage, it’s burning my veins and giving my breaths teeth.  My eyes are looking through lens’ made with malice and my thoughts are dripping with vitriol; thick and bitter.  I find myself wanting to break things, to destroy everything with my hands and teeth.  I want to make life bleed.  I’m snapping at everyone, my poor babies have a monster for a mum.  My tolerance levels are reaching none existent.  I’m a lit fuse that can’t be extinguished. I’m on fire.  I’m burning.  I’ll burn you.

Until I’m falling.  Like a stone. Plummeting.

It’s dark, so fucking dark.  I can’t see you.  I can’t see me.

There is no me.

It starts with explosive distress.  The white noise is screaming.  The black dog; he’s howling.  I watch it shred my remains into ribbons and the ribbons, they fray.

Make it stop.  Make it stop.  Make it stop.

Everything is black and red.  Why won’t this noise stop?

& then it’s raining.

It’s raining and I’m drowning.

Violent sobs that choke me.  (Can’t breath. Can’t breath.  Can’t breath)

You can only fall for so long.  Eventually you land.  You hit the bottom.  With a thud, or a splat.  Inelegant and messy.

Into the grey.

Breaths are slow and thick; chunks of misery that stick in your throat.

This is the despair.

Utter despondency.

There is no hope.  No light.  Just the silence and the white noise in sloppy competition.

You can’t see through this.

You can barely move.

This is the harrowing.

Most things pass, eventually.  The wheel turns.  The world tilts.

& then you’re numb.

Life is the grey cat that’s claimed your lap.  It’s going nowhere.  It barely acknowledges you and yet it’s preventing you moving.

You’re inanimate.

The apathy is a new skin, this skin is heavy.

Yet there is a peace here.

Hear no evil.

See no evil.

Think no evil.

Speak no evil.

Do no evil.

You just are, and yet also so dreadfully not.  Anything.  Anyone.

There’s no anger here.  No fear. No distress. No despair.

& no joy.

Until the wheel moves again.

Grenade under her tongue

The problem when you are afflicted by several things at once is that you're never quite sure which is the culprit of how you're currently coping or as the case may be not coping.  The lines blur between what is normal and that which is not until you have to ask yourself are you okay?  Or more often than not, how not okay are you.

It’s not the words that 

I need to share

It’s the silences

that I wish you could hear.

The world is flat and grey.  A thick impressionable grey that begs to be reached through, smudged or drawn upon yet you can't even touch it.

The emptiness is overwhelming, it's not around you, it's within you.  Sometimes you exist stupefied within it as it spreads like some vacant barren expanse that you're never quite sure if you're on the precipice of waiting to fall into it or else simply in the midst of it, lost.  Other times it's those million shivering holes, vicious and paralysing.  Carniverous and invisible.

 & I can’t remember if I’m the holes

or the remains.

It's hard to explain why you don't do that which needs doing, the laundry has been ready to put away for days, the pots ready to put away too and they're right in front of you yet you're exhausted mentally because you got dressed today.  You brushed your hair. You may have even had a bath in the last few days. You're remembering to provide answers, of a sort, when spoken to.   You're lazy, they say so you obviously don't give a shit and to an extent they're right.  It's not that you don't care it's that you can't.  You have lost the capacity to care about everyday things.  There's no room to think about them when your thoughts are consumed by breathing in and breathing out.

You're overeating, again.  It's not even like you're hungry.  You don't need this food, hell you don't even want it.  Yet you're eating it.  It's like a compulsion.  You're not even sure why, is it some physical attempt to fill that void inside?  Is it just another form of self destruction, to become the hideous that you feel.

You can't control this.

You lie in bed for hours in agonising silence as you feel yourself suffocate from the inside out.  What is that noise?  That strangulated noise?  Then you realise.  It's you.  It's been so long since you cried, the sound is alien and you can't breath.

You're angry.  You're distraught. You're empty.

Your apathy is deconstructing life around you, demolishing it bit by bit.  It's no dramatic explosion it's mere crumbling through neglect.  There's a handgrenade in your mouth, you're tonguing the pin, it's all the things you can't say.  the things that would blow apart your world.

& I can’t decide the greater evil

The inability to feel

 Or the possibility of feeling

I’m terrified by the allure of

Loaded thoughts

As words poise unspoken

With the potential to blow

Apart

My world

I’m afraid to ask myself questions

In case I discover how to answer them

Everything feels wrong

I am a hand grenade

And the pin is decaying

What would happen if your life was reduced to rubble?  Sometimes you're tempted to pull the pin, just to feel something.  To destroy everything.

Some days I’m desperate for something violently radical to happen, just to check i’m still here.  Underneath all this. That somewhere somebody sees me.  Maybe in time, they’ll hear me.  

I’d introduce myself but I don’t know who I am.

Anymore.

Then there's a small break, a mere crack in the clouds and you're clambering to it on all fours attempting to drink the light in hungry gasps.  For this short time you're breathing. .  You're feeling in colours and thinking in shapes.  Everything is so vivid and bright as you stare at the most inconsequential things in exquisite awe.  There's a fluidity in your movements, an unstoppable stream of words that need to be spoken.  It's like the world's in some subtle dance against your body willing it to move as you see revelations in the clouds.  The energy is electric, you need to go here, go there, do this, so that and you're laughing.....the sensation of laughter is ripping apart your veins in it's insanity.  It feels good. You're laughing in air to empty hungry lungs.  It's like the kiss of sunlight on dead flesh, you just want to feel this for a bit longer, just a little while just a ...

It's gone again.

I'm gone again.

Trying to breath out without

breathing in

the grey turns to black

if you swallow

it swallows right back.

Empty.

What happens when you have no idea who you really are?  We’re not talking basics such as name, address, history etc we’re talking the inside part, the part that makes you, you.  What do you do when you stare into the abyss that is self only to see, nothing?  Imagine you’re introducing yourself to someone yet you genuinely have nothing to say about yourself.  Nothing to offer anyone.  Empty.

It can be exhausting trying to be somebody, anybody, trying to fill this cold void inside.  You try on different you’s hanging in a ‘to rent’ closet yet they’re uncomfortable and none of them ever quite fit yet it’s imperceptible to anyone other than you.  After a while they become grossly uncomfortable, cumbersome and so hard to wear.  You try and shed the layers yet it’s so cold when there’s nothing underneath them.

So when the energy runs out, you retreat.  Somewhere where you don’t exist and nor do you have to. 

For me this is when my obsessions take over, insignificant obsessions that temporarily consume me, such as reading an entire series of books in a few days or watching several series of the same programme back to back over a few days.  A different world, where you cease to have to exist, where you can disappear.  Sleep becomes overrated as the next fix needs to be had then the feeling of being absolutely bereft when it ends and there’s simply….no more.  The emptiness is overwhelming.  

You need to fill up the soul vacancy again…with something.  You need to try and be someone again.

& the white noise inside my head is deafening.

Promised myself I wouldn't weep.

The thing with having long term invisible illness' is that you're either written off or else people assume that you're over it.  It's the ongoing part that people struggle to digest.  That and the general gross misunderstanding of mental illness.

If you have a migraine or a broken leg, you suffer and then it gets better.  If you have a terminal disease you either recover or you die.

If you're slashing at your wrists, having hallucinations and delusional whilst crying 24/7, you're depressed enough to warrant being depressed. The depression is visible and thus real. If you have situation or event triggered depression, people will molly coddle you for a while then it's a 'there, there dear. You'll be okay soon' which translates roughly as 'Oh gosh, how terrible! I don't know how you cope.' which then turns to a 'pull your socks up' after they deem you've had long enough to 'get over it'.

Yet, If you suffer from long term depression, anxiety or personality disorders that was triggered by nothing other than faulty wiring or genes, people rarely know what to do.  They understand neither the longevity nor the peak and troughs that accompany it. You're not seen as ill, you're just flaky and mercurial. You obviously can't have Social Anxiety because they saw you say hello to someone last week.  You're obviously not depressed because a few days ago they saw you smile and Egads, laugh. You, you faker you!

The thing with invisible illness' is, people only accept them in their most visible moments.  They only see the mask.

Mental illness isn't just about the darkness, It's the torturous rays of light that momentarily blind and panic you too.  It isn't just about the blackness, it's the fifty shades of choking grey in-between.  It's not just the drowning, it's the unexpected hard slaps that put you off balance.

It's not that you're okay or even not okay, it's the varied struggle of trying to be okay.  It's the soul cracking realisation that you may never be okay enough, again.

& the mask keeps slipping.

Please Mr Postman

It feels like a lifetime has passed since I had the appointment.  It's almost as if it never really happened at all, all that bravery to finally face things head on, face to face seemingly wasted.  Everything is still stagnant.  Every day I wonder if the postman will drop that letter through my letterbox.  The letter that's a copy of what will be sent to others, about me. That she thinks I have many traits suggesting Borderline Personality as well as some traits of Bi-Polar II and III in conjunction with the depression and social anxiety. The letter that will say I'm too broken or maybe not broken enough.

I need this thing to be named, to know that it isn't me nor even a part of me.  To know that there still is a me, somewhere.

I don't even know who I am any more.  It sounds so dramatic and verging on the ridiculous yet it's true.  It's painfully obvious that I'm not just severely depressed.  That there's some disorder within my personality.  Every day I awaken thinking that today will be the day when I'll find myself again.  When I'll be myself again.  Yet what if there is no self?  what if the past is just different versions of the present.  Different suits that this emptiness tries on desperate to be someone, to feel something.  I have no sense of 'self'.  Who am I? what do I like? I just don't know.  I've tried to be so many different things and so many different people and nothing fits.  Beyond the obvious physical, I have no idea how to describe myself.  How to relate who I am.

I'm tired of shutting things off and shutting things out.

What if there is nothing in the centre?  take everything else away only to find there is nothing left?

It's not merely a  case of wanting to reinvent myself, the minor and rapid reinventions is just the confused fast paced searching for self, that never stabilises.

I'm running out of places to look.  Of people to be.  Nothing feels right.  Nothing feels like me.

Woe is me navel gazing

Now the shit has finally got real, with an impending appointment with for want of a better term, the shrink team, I find myself questioning everything.  The depression first started to manifest when I was around ten years old.  I first hinted at problems to a doctor a whole fifteen years later.  In the past 8 years I have spent 1.5 of them pregnant and on and off a total of around four years on anti-depressants.

I'm thinking back to un-medicated times when I was most happiest, in my late teens and early twenties.  It was easy to dismiss the depression as typical teenage goth crap, yet it's not the depression, the self harm and the suicidal tendencies that I find myself questioning, it's the other parts.  The times when I was mischievous, hyper, bouncy, creative, flirty.  The times when I was incensed and incandescent with rage and vitriol.  These were the times I always thought were real, as they punctuated through the suffocating dark yet now, well now I'm beginning to wonder if there was ever anything remotely normal about them at all and if they were just as alarming as the depression.

There's things I did that aren't necessarily out there by any means yet when compared to the rest of my life back then, looking back they seem a little, to be frank, wtf-ish.

I'm beginning to wonder if I've ever truly known who I am and if the me I miss, was just the flip side to the me I am now.

Part of me fears a further diagnosis yet another part of me craves the relief to know that maybe none of this is truly me, the reason I'm so many mismatched parts is because not all the parts are me.  That maybe I can be fixed.  That it's not my fault I'm broken. Yet the other fear is, what if there isn't an explanation and this really is just who I am.  I can't bare the possibility that this is it.  Forever.

Sometimes I feel like a ball of nothingness that inhabits a body it doesn't even like trying on the skin and personalities of people that don't really exist hoping that one day I'll find one that fits and has my name inside.

I have two names yet I don't feel like either of them.  The medication flatlines my personality.  There's no spark.  Nobody is home.  I just exist.  Sometimes I crave to come off them again, just to feel yet I'm afraid of what I'll feel.  Afraid of what I'll do or say.  Petrified that the faux clarity will pull the pin of the hand grenade that's in my mouth and I'll do or say things that can never be reversed.  Things that will blow my life apart just to feel something.  Just to do something.  Just to try and be someone new, again.