would you even notice if i just disappeared
i think i move across your life like a shadow on a windowpane
fading ghost touches in and out
i’d rather be rock solid and real
instead i’m just invisible
Tag Archives: my brain chemicals are wonky
Things for me to remember.
Others: I love you.
Me: *turns funny colour, goes shy* Why?
Voices: You think they actually care about you? THINK AGAIN! They hate you! They will never love you because you simply cannot be loved! You are a waste of space and everyone is glad that they aren’t you!
Others: You’re so pretty.
Me: I’m not perfect and I’m not sure what you are seeing, but I’m glad of it.
Voices: They’re lying! You are the ugliest thing to ever walk this Earth! You are gross! They’re only telling you this so that you don’t feel as ugly as you truly are!
Others: I will NEVER leave you.
Me: I’ll try not to hold on so tight that you want to.
Voices: You know how that works out, sweet heart! Everyone that has meant something to you has left you. EVERYONE. These people will do the same! Might as well be lonely forever.
Others: Please don’t kill yourself, I’ll miss you.
Me: Just hearing that helps me not do it.
Voices: ~laughter~ You think they’re being honest with you? Watch, you’ll kill yourself and a week after your death EVERYONE will have gone back to their normal lives. Nobody cares about you! Nobody ever will! They’re all lying to you!
:
Me: The voices in the back of my mind aren’t the real me.
ooc
Not going to be on for a while — I slept really badly last night due to having arguments with people in my head, and I’ve got to properly get back to my taekwondo. No use nagging at people about doing the things that help (meds, exercise, therapist) unless I’m doing them too.
Going to leave early yet to pick up Avengers BluRay, and then be back hopefully about 8:30 chicago time. I might do a little roleplaying from the studio with my tablet, but I’ve got a long personal post in mind I want to make and I think that one is going to take priority.
Am I, then, to infer that there is no longer to be /any/ interaction between us? Am I unofficially removed from the roleplay? Had someone else been assigned to tell me that and simply not logged on yet? Forgive me, but I hadn’t thought that relieving you of my personal problems meant cut-off of all contact whatsoever. I’m sorry if I’m a little confused.
Obviously, tumblr doesn’t tell you the timing of when someone unfollows you. I chose to stop following you right after you posted that … whatever it was that basically called me out for trying to help you. That hurt. I can’t afford to put myself in that line of fire. As much as I help myself by helping others, there comes a time when the pain it causes me outweighs the good it does me, and the selfish way you lash about causes a lot of pain.
I don’t know what you were thinking when you posted it. It apparently vanished a little while later, but I’d already seen it. I don’t even know if you meant me to see it. Whatever your motivations were, at this point, don’t matter.
I’ll still roleplay with you. If you were removed from the roleplay, I would tell you immediately, and myself. But I can’t actually expose myself any more to someone who … not only active rejects everything I have to say, but does so in a way calculated to hurt and draw attention.
I’m posting this answer publicly, because I don’t want to lose what I had to say and be misquoted later, and because I don’t, ever, do things in the dark, behind backs.
I truly appreciate your denigration of all that I’ve achieved in over twenty years of wrestling with this cancer in my soul. Please excuse my feeble attempts to help you by sharing my experiences; I won’t bother you anymore.
I’m just…going to stop before I…
Sorry. Really. I really am sorry.
You won’t see anymore about…
I’m sorry.
I love both of you dearly and I hope we can all get along. No feelings were meant to be hurt I’m sure.
I can see both ends of this. Depression is, at the end of all things, a mental disorder. So, attitude and initiative really do make a difference. It is a battle, and it is hard, and it is up and down. There is no “cure.” Also, doping youself up on medication doesn’t really count as a cure anyway, wouldn’t you say? But, anything used correctly and moderately can help. If it truly is a physical disorder, and not just an attitude problem, then it can and should be worked through. Because it’s holding you back from being who you really are.
That’s my two cents, anyway, take or leave! <3
Right now, I’m so annoyed by the way things were phrased that I can’t really see straight. I’m … I’m bending over backwards, is what I’m doing, to be helpful, to share my experience, to give out parts of my story and my past that are actually a little painful to expose, a little embarrassing.
And what I get in return, seems like to me, is being told that what I’m doing isn’t good enough for that person. That I don’t understand.
Well, fuck you! You’re right. Nobody can understand what you are going through unless you tell them clearly — and when we fall over ourselves to ask, it’s the same “oh they’re stupid small problems I don’t want to put my pain on you I don’t want people to feel the way I feel”. Very noble. Very pretty. Very selfless — not.
Not at all. Those words, that kind of phrasing, to people who are offering to help, to listen, to care, is the worst, most selfish bullshit I’ve ever heard or had come out of my own mouth. Who am I, who are you, to choose what other people can bear to listen to, can bear to carry for you or with you?
The hardest goddamn lesson I ever had to learn with respect to this fucking cancer I have is that there is a huge, universe-spanning difference between a) asking for help, b) being offered help, and c) whinging pitifully. From the inside it is almost impossible to tell the difference, and I finally finally managed to just make myself say ‘yes’ when someone asked me was something wrong, could they help.
I’m not trying to put people off, or say their problems are not important, or small, or whatever bullshit your chemically-addled brain wants to put on it, when I say GO SEE A PROFESSIONAL. When I say TRY A MEDICINE. Okay? That tag I put on these, it’s not a joke, it’s not me making a cutesy tag for my commentary on depression.
It is the literal truth, that I have tried to run away from for damn near twenty years, since I was FUCKING TEN YEARS OLD AND TRIED TO KILL MYSELF THE FIRST TIME.
I have had to accept that while the biggest part of my problem is not me in the sense of being a bad person, it is in fact me in the sense that my body does not work right. And the only way I can deal with the part of my depression that is old habits and low self-esteem and really stupid societal tapes IS TO TAKE THE MEDS THAT FIX THE CHEMICALS.
Because without that I’m trying to bail the ocean, and it will not ever work.
I’m actually, okay, I’m really genuinely upset about all this right now. I have to remind myself that a lot of people with depression don’t have my intellect, or they don’t have my resources, or they just don’t damn have my years and experience, and I fucking KNOW that sounds condescending, but I will by damn not ignore all the stuff I’ve built up fighting this cancer just to make someone else feel better about themselves. So I’m trying to offer this information, I’m trying to listen and to care and to respect and to share.
And I will not … I cannot continue to do so to someone who denigrates all that I have achieved in accepting myself and my disease and what that entails. I fought for years to find a drug that didn’t, what was it, turn me into a “ chemically-induced sunshine-and-daisies-everything-is-perfect Mary Sue, addicted to anti-depressants or, more likely, mood stabilizers, completely devoid of anything that even remotely resembles my true personality.”
And I flat refuse to be guilted, accidentally or otherwise, into taking back what I had to say in response to that, or any of the things I’m saying here, because someone is hurt by my anger. I worked damn hard to get to where I am, and I’m scared to death of backsliding even a little bit, and I hate like poison the things I have to keep doing in order not to backslide, and I am trying with all my heart to make it so that as many other people as I can reach, as are willing to talk to me or listen to me, will not have to go through some of what I went through.
And now it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, and the single biggest symptom I have not conquered is the fucking sleeping habits, so if you will all excuse me, I’m going to go curl up next to my fiance and try not to think about this any more.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel worse…
You aren’t making me feel worse. Just thinking about it doesn’t usually trigger me. Luckily, or I’d be in tears every time I went to see my therapist! Most of my struggles are to do with self-esteem, with how I think about myself. There are things about myself that I like quite a lot — Summer’s long hair is the same as mine, and it’s a point of pride with me. Same with my writing.
But when it comes to my looks as a whole, or my general niceness as a person, or my skills at almost anything else, I’m very leery of compliments, and I’ll protest as a matter of course that I’m no good. Not worthwhile as a friend or a person. That secrets meme running ‘round the roleplayers? I submitted a couple, about some of my bigger fears.
It’s okay. Does it at least make you feel a little better? To talk about it?
Sometimes. Even when I try to be off the drugs, I make an effort to see someone, someone trained, at least every couple months. Since … well, since a lot of things, but mostly in the two years since I last tried to kill myself, I go much more often.
I don’t often talk about it to people I consider my friends. I … warn them, sometimes, but to push the whole tangled mess of this onto them seems a bit unfair. It’s not an act of friendship, to my mind. But to listen to them, help them … yeah, it’s a bit screwy.
I think I once knew what it was like to live without it. But it’s long, long since been foreign to me, now.
Then you’ve more luck than I, anon. I’ve never been able to remember. Even before I was diagnosed, before the move dragged it all to the surface, I was always different. More emotional. More affected by other people’s emotions. More apt to fall into sadness.
I can’t remember what it’s like not to have to take some drug just to settle the chemicals enough that I can control myself. I keep trying to stop taking it, but that’s my unwillingness to face reality — it’s not /just/ thoughts, not /just/ emotions, bad habits. It’s chemicals in my brain that don’t stick around long enough.
Damn. This was not supposed to be mememe, but I don’t know how else to help you except by giving you all my own experience.
It’s not a crutch. >.>
How can it not be? A thing that’s so familiar a part of you — we rant and rave about manipulating people, about guilt trips and give and take. How can you not, even without thinking about it, lean on it as a way to escape things that are hard, to gain attention, to … I’ve used mine as a reason to butt into lives that I have no business in. This morning I was using it as a crutch for my slothful sleeping habits.
Do you know what it is like without it? I don’t.