Tag: Suicide

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

More lessons

Posted on by WeeGee

I feel that I should write something. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to write, but if I don’t write something soon I’ll get out of the habit of writing and that’d probably spell The End for How do you eat an elephant? Which would be a bit of a shame…..

I suppose I should start by filling you in on the last couple of days which have felt like something approaching good. Yes, you did read that right – I said something approaching good! Okay, so I had a minor melt down at the start of the week but it had been a long time coming I suppose and I’ve just about forgiven myself  because I feel like I’ve learned some important lessons along the way. Which is no bad thing…..

Important lesson of the week # 1: If you can’t keep going you have to stop keeping going until you’re ready to get going again.

I’ve also been busy taking care of myself and making a plan. It feels like ages since I’ve a) properly taken care of myself or b) had a plan. It feels so much better to have something to aim for other than Eastenders* I’m not talking about any kind of grand ‘sort your life out in four weeks’ plan, more of a ‘let’s get from a to b and worry about c later’ type plan.

Important lesson of the week # 2: You don’t have to do EVERYTHING right now because there’s plenty of time for everything.

I’ve had a few words with ‘the brain’. It’s a ridiculous state of affairs – we can’t hate one another for ever because we’re pretty much stuck with each other** and whether we like it or not we’re going to have to find a way to rub along together. The deal goes something like this: I will nourish rest and generally take good care of the brain if the brain promises to make a concerted effort to stop with all that over thinking it nonsense. In the fullness of time I’d like the brain to give up on all that up/down/backwards/forwards/shake it all about stuff, but hey! At least we’ve got a start.

Important lesson of the week #3: If you take good care of your brain it will be remarkably compliant when it comes to doing deals.

One week. One meltdown. Three lessons. Could be worse eh?

In conclusion I think things are looking okay. That’s as far as my ‘state of the nation’ update goes: WeeGee is okay. Which is pretty much okay.

Never fear – I’ll be back later with some of the more usual rambling idiocy

Love WeeGee xxx

*Yes. I watch Eastenders. What of it?!

**What with the frontal lobotomy being out of fashion and all….

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Learning lessons

Posted on by WeeGee

Where to begin? I suppose I should start with the story of the last few days which can be summarised thusly: ‘the good, the bad, and the downright shitty’. As I write I am somewhere between bad and downright shitty which although not ideal is a whole lot more ideal than just plain downright shitty….

I’m currently signed off from work owing to the downright shittiness that descended on Sunday morning. Being off work is an unusual state of affairs for me and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. All I know is that I got to Monday morning (somehow) and it became blindingly obvious to me that I couldn’t carry on going on the way I was going on. My GP and my employer agreed.

Thankfully, it’s a short term ‘rest’ rather than long term sickness. I think a period of long term sickness would drive me mad (ho ho). I’m expected and expecting to be fit to return to work next Tuesday on a ‘phased return’, which would probably be a bit extreme were it not for the extent of the downright shittiness that has been upon me. By the way I’m not going to tell you about the downright shittiness – I’m hoping you will take my word for it: it was DOWNRIGHT SHITTY SHITTINESS for a little while there.

It’s tough enough for anyone to admit that they aren’t coping, but I manage to make it double difficult on myself, because coping is the only thing I do well: whatever the horror in my head, however low I go I make it my priority to function because I don’t want to let people down. I don’t want people to make allowances, or worry about me, or (to be honest) know how bad things have really got for me.

Trouble is that’s pretty much the same as pretending and you can only play make believe with your broken brain for so long….

In the end, for me it came down to a simple choice. Take a break, and go back to work in stages or find myself being a gibbering wreck, probably in hospital and definitely unable to work for a considerable amount of time. As tough as it’s been to say ‘Help!’ and ‘I need to stop’, I feel like I’m doing the right thing and taking care of myself (possibly for the first time in my life)

So I finally said it – in no uncertain terms: things are bad and I can’t cope. Truth told, I already feel like I’m coping better just for having said it. I don’t have to be ‘strong’ all of the time or rather perhaps I’ve misunderstood ‘strength’. I suppose you could call it a lesson well learned.

Lots of love,

WeeGee xx

Posted in Welcome to my world

You know you’re having a bad day when….

Posted on by WeeGee

…. You get two calls to the crisis team in before supper*

I’m going to have to issue one of those ‘trigger warnings’ now. I don’t want to upset anybody or put them in a bad place so please bow out now if you are vulnerable about – self harm, suicide attempts, weird food stuff or mental madness in general.

Is there anybody left? Are you sure? This is quite long and not very cheery until the very end….

So, yeah, self harm, suicide attempts, weird food stuff and a bit of mental madness to boot. I have some larks don’t I?

For three or four days my brain was on best behaviour. I managed to trick it into playing a game of ‘let’s just try really, really hard for a while and see what happens’ and it worked until my brain decided it wasn’t going along with that anymore. As brain quite rightly pointed out, what’s the point of trying really, really hard if you end up where you always do anyway (which, for the record, is curled up in a teeny tiny ball trying desperately not to make plans to end your life sometime soon)?

I had a rotten dream last night. I could have done without it because when I woke up and remembered it (at just gone three am this morning) it stirred up some stuff that most definitely didn’t need stirring. I guess everyone has stuff that doesn’t need stirring – I’ve got a lot of it and if I have learned only one thing about stirring stuff that doesn’t need stirring it’s that if you absolutely have to stir it you should NEVER EVER do it between the hours of 10pm and 7am because of the golden rule of safe stirring: stirring is not be done when it is quiet and everyone else is asleep.

Thankfully (maybe) not everyone was asleep because there was my local friendly crisis team – on call 24/7 for my every mental madness emergency. So I phoned them up and told them I’d broken the golden rule of safe stirring and was now going a bit mental.

We tried to work out ‘what had gotten into me’ but for some reason (I don’t know which reason) I didn’t tell them the whole truth. I told them I wasn’t hungry and there was nothing obviously dangerous in the flat. Two breaths, two pointless lies. Why? Just why?

The truth was that I wasn’t hungry but starving hungry having eaten nothing but a bag of Doritos all day. Actually, here’s another rule for you. If you absolutely have to be mental, avoid being starving and mental at the same time AT ALL COSTS. It’s rubbish. Truly rubbish.

Why hadn’t I eaten anything all day? I decided not to. That was it. I just decided and once I’m decided on something like that I’m totally decided. The theory goes is that I use deciding not to eat in order to punish myself somehow. I don’t know if that’s it but it’s as good a theory as any, so I guess I have to go with it. Why didn’t I tell the nice crisis support people that I hadn’t eaten? Because I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep it all to myself.

Why was there something dangerous in the flat? Well there wasn’t – not in the ‘usual’ sense which is really just to say that I hadn’t deliberately brought anything into the flat in order to deliberately hurt myself. But a girl’s got to shave her legs, right? So there were ‘the emergency disposable razors’, which were not intended to be dangerous but which could be with a little determination) And I didn’t tell the crisis team chaps about them because this was an emergency and I had all the determination I needed. I was mental and angry and frightened and, in all honesty, I didn’t want anyone to talk me down. I dismantled the disposable razors with relative ease and bob’s your uncle, fanny’s your aunt…. I hurt myself. It hurt and made me feel small and foolish and even more frightened. It was supposed to make it better – it was supposed to get rid of whatever it was that had gotten in to me.

A period of pacing commenced. I felt like I was waiting for something. I don’t know what – maybe it was the thing I thought was going to happen the other day? I decided to curl up and do my waiting on the couch. It started to get light and I wondered if that was what I was waiting for – morning, because everything is better in the morning? Except it isn’t – it’s exactly the same. Every single lousy morning is exactly the same (that was broken brain’s take on it by the way).

I tried the crisis team again because I didn’t think I was going to make it. They suggested diazepam (another emergency ration, but GP approved unlike the disposable razors) and if I couldn’t do that (I’m scared of diazepam because it’s habit forming) it was ‘maybe time to think about coming in’.

Okay. So I thought about ‘coming in’ and dismissed that because I felt more mental than I’d ever felt before and decided that if I went in, I’d probably never get out again. I didn’t want that to happen. So I carried on waiting. Waiting and thinking. It all got a bit boo hoo and grizzly.

And then there was an epiphany moment in WeeGee’s broken brain. What I was waiting for was…. the last day WeeGee would ever spend on Earth. Not only that – I’d made it. No more waiting! Today was the day.

Once I had decided that this was the last day that WeeGee would spend on the planet things got a bit easier. There are things you need to organise if you’re about to bow out like making sure ‘the box’ is in order. ‘The box’ lives on top of my wardrobe and has a copy of my will, bank account details, information that my parents need about probate, insurance document, strict instructions about dealing with The Cat, a couple of photos and some letters. Ever since I got hit by a bus** I’ve been paranoid about making things as easy as possible for my loved ones  if I check out early – whether at my own hand or by an act of god. ‘The box’ was in order.

I had a shower and got ready. It took a while to decide what I was going to wear but in the end I settled on the skirt I wanted to be buried in (don’t ask – it’s stupid). I fed the little man and then fed him again. I think that was guilt. And then I headed to the outside world to purchase a tin of Heinz tomato soup and 32 painkillers. It’s a bit dangerous that I know that there is a shop within walking distance that sells painkillers 32 at a time. I see that now but I don’t know how to ‘unknow’ it. That is a problem for another day.

I got back – opened the curtains (because no-one wants to spend their last moments on planet Earth in the dark) and heated up the soup. Heinz tomato soup isn’t much of a last supper is it? All I can say is that if you have decided that this is the last day you will spend on planet earth YOU ARE CLEARLY NOT OF YOUR RIGHT MIND and are almost certainly in no fit state to decide what your last meal should be.

I washed up and emptied the bins and then fed Gryff again. A lot of food this time in case I wasn’t found for days. And then I sat staring at a box of 32 painkillers for a very long time. First of all I put them very far away from me, and gradually I brought them closer until they were right in front of my face. And I looked at them for another very long time.

By this time Gryff was sitting in ‘croissant cat’ position looking at me looking at the painkillers. And I came all over all soppy. I thought about the worst life night of my life ever (which was also the worst night of Gryff’s life) and how when I finally got to bed that night be had jumped up, burrowed under the covers and curled up next to my tummy and stayed there all night to stay safe and to keep me safe. And I wondered who he would curl up with to be safe when he realised that I, the only person he ever trusted, wasn’t coming back. And then I thought about Mr Friendly, and Mr Wise, Mrs Worry and Mr Hilarious who would all, in their own ways, blame themselves even though it was nothing to do with them. And I thought about my mum who would never, ever be able to understand no matter hard she tried.

And then I thought FOR FUCK’S SAKE GAIL WEEGEE. Are you really going to top yourself BECAUSE YOU HAD A BAD DREAM? After everything that happened and everything you bounced back from? Seriously! What is the matter with you……. PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER.

‘Pull yourself together’ is not something you should ever say to someone with mental health problems. But, if you yourself are mental you are allowed to say it to yourself. Not because it will make it all better but because it will stop it all getting worse. Sometimes that is all you can hope for – things not getting worse.

Where am I now? I’m mostly back. I’m fed and watered and safe. I’m playing ‘let’s just try really, really hard for a while and see what happens’ once more. It’s the only game I’ve ever been any good at.

Love from WeeGee  xx

PS – I re-read this one and realised that it’s a bit wonky and meandering and mental. Sorry. But you know me 🙂

*Dinner if you aren’t pretentious like me. Or tea if you are from The North

**Which is a whole ‘nother story!

Posted in About today

Fix me

Posted on by WeeGee

Just so you know this isn’t going to be a particularly cheery one. Now you know….

You know how I love Frank Turner? Well here’s a Frank Turner song to get proceedings underway:

http://youtu.be/gdBcqlcttLI

I love this song so very much for lots of different reasons, not least because I am of the delusional belief it’s actually about me. If only it was possible to ‘take away the part that hurts and let the rest remain’ things would be just fine and dandy for me. I’m not all rubbish, just a little bit rubbish. If I could just cut out the rubbish then I wouldn’t be rubbish at all. So yeah, fix me please.

I’ve been in hiding. It didn’t really occur to me that I was doing it until Mr Friendly pointed it out to me, mostly I think because it’s been a different kind of hiding. But I’ve been withdrawing from people, and things and from my blog – it all adds up to hiding, and I’m hiding because I simply can’t cope. Everything is futile and empty and there isn’t a point – to anything or to any of it. The only point is that you keep going even thought there isn’t a point. I can’t believe that I’m the only person who wonders why you keep on doing pointless things even though they’re pointless and there isn’t a point

I know what I need to do. I’ve had a broken brain for a very long time and, if nothing else, I know the drill. I don’t know why I’m not doing what I know I need to do. Maybe it’s that self sabotage button coming into play again? Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether I do what I need to do or not because it won’t change the fact that it’s pointless? I don’t suppose it matters because either way, I’m not going to do it, whatever it is. I know that much.

When I was a tiny little thing, I opened the back door of my parents’ house and a giant black bird fell out of the sky right before my very eyes and landed on the lid of the wheelie bin – stone dead. It should have been horrifying and maybe it was, in a way. But it also made a little bit of sense to me that a bird could just fall out of the sky like that, because even then I felt like I was right at the edge of something, ready to fall off.

Birds die and fall out of the sky; WeeGee lets go and falls off the edge of the world.

I told you it wasn’t going to be a cheery one, but hey – at least I’m not in hiding from my blog anymore…..

Lots of love from a tired but clinging on WeeGee xx

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

The long and the short of it

Posted on by WeeGee

I’ve had to write two versions of today’s post – a long version and a short version.

I wrote the long version first and then I thought ‘Crikey*, what a jolly* miserable post that is, it’ll probably bore the arse** off everyone’ so I wrote the short version too so you could still get the gist even if the long one bored the arse off you and you had to stop reading it in order to work out how to re-attach your (probably lovely) arse to your (definitely lovely) self…

The short version

The short version starts with this video:

And then goes something like this:

Boo hoo. Woe is me. Boo-bloody-hoo. I hate myself and I want a pie. Sob sob. The end. Sob.

The long version

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin….

I thought I’d start at the end today, just for a bit of a change. I know that it’s conventional to do the beginning, followed by the middle, followed by the end but this is a blog about my broken brain and today it’s the end that is at the front of the thought queue so that’s where I’m starting.

The end is this: None of this was supposed to happen. My life has taken me to the point at which I can only decide that this is all wrong, that this isn’t what I wanted and that this can’t possibly be what was supposed to happen even though it did. Now what?

Let’s have a song while I make my mind up:

I haven’t made my mind up yet. Oh bums.

One of the things I tell myself, over and over again is that the fact that I’m mental is the least interesting thing about me. Sure it means that from time to time I do some interesting things, but aside from all the mental madness stuff I’m essentially a proper person who cares about stuff.

Except I’m not; it’s a lie –  I’m not real or proper and if you could look into my heart the only thing you would see would be more nothing that you ever thought imaginable. Nothing is probably the only thing on earth that you can’t bring yourself to care about***.

If I’m not a proper person, the only things that are left are the impressive**** collection of ‘disorders’ I have managed to collect over the years. That’s all I am now, disordered and broken and that’s all I can be, because it is all there is to me. Boo hoo, sob sob, boo-bloody-hoo, poor me.

It’ll probably come to no surprise to you that I live alone. It certainly comes as no surprise to me. I don’t want to live alone, in fact I mostly hate it but how can you be so broken and share it with someone? Some things are better done in private, especially being mental. The thing is I’m always going to be mental. There isn’t a magic wand or a make-it-all better pill so I know that I’ll always be mental and it follows that I’ll always be alone. But I don’t want to be alone. Cards on the table? I just want somebody to save me. I can’t care about myself and I can’t take care of myself – I only really work in relation to other people. I wasn’t built to be alone, even though being alone is the only logical outcome of my condition.

Nobody is coming to save me. I don’t know how to save myself. This wasn’t what I wanted to happen.

Boo hoo, sob sob.

Love from WeeGee (once again hoping tomorrow is better) xx

*Yes. That’s actually how I talk. You know I’m British right?!

**In America I believe you say ‘ass’ which is fine by me even if it does make me think of a donkey and cause impossible and disturbing images to form in my head

***Except for Margaret Thatcher and possibly, the Eurovision Song Contest

****I don’t really think of it as impressive, but you know what I mean

Posted in Welcome to my world

A post about nothing followed by a lame joke

Posted on by WeeGee

I hope you won’t mind but I really need to get this out of my head. I’ve been swimming around in it for a few days now and I’m tired. Before I go any further I should say that this is a post about suicidal feelings. Reading about suicidal feelings isn’t everybody’s cup of tea so you may prefer to sit this one out.

Let me be frank* I wish I was dead but, just to muddy the waters, I also don’t want to wind up dead. Makes perfect sense, eh?

For a very long time I’ve had a strong feeling that I’m not going to live to be an old person. I don’t know where it comes from or when it started I just know that it’s there and that it sits in my head. It’s one of the many things on the list of things that Wee Gee will never do for one reason or another**. I mentioned it to Mr Friendly once but he just thought it was a) sad and b) silly. It’s one of those residual feelings that never really goes away. And then I have a few days like the few days just past and it becomes clear to me that it isn’t silly at all because the longer I live, the more likely it is that I won’t live to be an old person. And yes, I know that statement makes no sense whatsoever except in my head.

I don’t often think about suicide – I sometimes go to bed willing myself not to wake up, but that’s a different thing altogether – and I don’t make plans to take my own life. By all accounts that should mean that everything is fine and dandy but it doesn’t.

The thing is it doesn’t matter that I don’t think about it, plan to do it, or want to do it; what matters is that once in a while I just snap and decide to try and do it. Thus far I have always been okay but one of these days I’m going to wake up dead and to say that would be an unmitigated disaster is something of an understatement.

Saturday was one of those days. It was a day of nothing – you know the days when nothing matters, nothing makes sense and everything feels like nothing? Nothing is the thing that I struggle to deal with the most of all – it’s unspeakably heavy and just as loud. Nothing is the reason that I do so many of the things I do to hurt myself and is the thing that sends me into hiding. Some people seem to think that having nothing on your mind is a good thing, but I wonder if those people really understand what nothing feels like? Waking up in the morning to find that everything that was your head yesterday – the little plans, the promises you make to yourself, the things you like, the stuff you care about – has fallen into a giant hole of nothingness taking you with it is no fun at all.

I’ve tried very hard to work out where nothing comes from and what happens to make it rise up and take over but I just can’t figure it out. Sometimes I think there must be a little chink of nothing at the heart of me that has to come up for air every so often, that I’m simply built around nothing and that I am empty at my core even if I pretend not to be. That’s when I jump off the cliff because I might get well enough to get out of bed without thinking about it, to banish the maddies, the jitters, fanatical food stuff and all the other crazy nonsense but I’ll never get well enough to fill the nothing up and it’s the nothing I can’t live with.

I don’t know when or why nothing is going to strike which makes it hard to go about keeping myself as safe. I’ve got my safety plan and I try to follow it to the letter but, in the grip of nothing I find it quite easy to stray from the plan and end up in all kinds of trouble. Bottom line of all this is that I’m mostly terrified of myself which is absolutely exhausting. I’m afraid I’m going to go and do something that I won’t live to regret without even meaning to do it.

Phew. It’s all getting a bit heavy here. Somebody should tell a joke…… Okay, I’ll do it: Q What’s invisible and smells of carrots? A. Rabbit farts. Boom boom {hangs head in shame}

Meanwhile in other news I slept right through until 6am this morning and I worked out that I spend about £300 a year on purchasing beverages from the coffee bar at work today. Nothing further to add save that I did squeeze a couple of asterisks in, so things must be looking up despite the rather gloomy nature of this post.  Oh. And I’m writing this in my lunch hour at FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON.

Sorry about this one folks – the next will be better, promise.

Take care, Wee Gee x

 

*Whenever someone says that I can’t resist saying ‘okay… who shall I be’?

**Other things on the list of things Wee Gee will never do: get married, have children, understand why anyone would voluntarily eat a mushroom

Posted in About today

Down with the kids

Posted on by WeeGee

I’m a little lacking in inspiration today. Truth told, I’ve been a little bit lacking in inspiration all weekend which is why I’ve had nothing to say for myself. Everything’s feeling flat and empty for me at the moment, like someone stole my brain and replaced it with cotton wool. I bet you can’t wait to read this one.

What can I tell you about this weekend then? I have continued to wake up at ridiculous o’clock, in fact, I’ve now seen 4am 4 days running. Sadly I haven’t been leading the kind of rock ‘n roll life that statement might imply – it’s more a case of being up with the mentals than being down with the kids. How life changes…. The thing about four o’clock in the morning is that there isn’t actually anything to do. I guess that’s why most people have the good sense to be asleep. Still, to put a positive spin on it I have used the time wisely and read the Internet. All of it.

Who knows what this waking up at ridiculous o’clock is all about. I guess it must be the medication which is also causing me to have some particularly vivid dreams – I feel like it really happened, and it’s mundane enough to have really happened so at the moment I have this odd sensation that I can’t be sure what actually happened. Does that make sense? Anyway, as far as I can tell I appear to be achieving a whole new level of dementedness that I didn’t even know existed.

Did I mention that the jitters have mostly passed? Well they have. The only time I ‘go a bit weird’ now is when someone creeps up on me, which happens reasonably often. It’s not that people are in the habit of deliberately creeping up on me, it’s just that I work in a very long office with my back to the door so people often appear without me noticing them on the approach. And then I jump right out of my skin and squeal in a comedy fashion. Nevertheless I’m glad to be mostly rid of the jitters  – I find that being flat and empty is much easier to manage than all that bonkers jittery stuff.

Saturday was a gruesome day for me. I spent the evening teetering on the edge of the cliff thinking about jumping off. I think my brain is trying to murder me which is a royal pain in the backside because I don’t especially want to be dead. Gawd only knows what I’ve done to deserve this from something which, by rights, should be fairly attached to the idea of me not being dead but there you go. The main point is that I didn’t wake up dead on Sunday so I make that Wee Gee: 1 Brain: 0. Round two will doubtless follow at an unspecified interval. Pah!

Sunday was about putting things back together after Saturday, buying a replacement hairdryer after my existing went pop and started making a horrid burning smell and watching a soccerball match that I didn’t care about because a) I’m Scottish and b) I just didn’t.

It’s Monday today and Project Rubbish has kicked off in more ways than one. Turns out The Man Who Knows is not the project sponsor and he does not like it one bit, primarily because he is The Man Who Knows who knows everything about everything. He’s sulking and refusing to talk to anyone at the moment which makes this whole working together thing difficult to achieve. What a giant arsehole. He is so getting a poke in the eye some time soon.

Meanwhile in other news I think somebody lied to me on Saturday – a pause before an answer and then a comment later on that didn’t stack up. This person had no reason to lie to me and, more to the point, I have no reason to care that they lied to me but they did lie and I do care which means I have to work out how I feel about it. I hate having to work out how I feel about stuff.

I’ve nothing further to add today save that I haven’t included a single asterisk in my post which is a shame. I’ve tried to remedy it, I really have, but I’m coming up with zilch. I guess that’s just the kind of day it is today.

Tatty bye

Wee Gee x