plasticwrap

Writing Things

Man, what a week. And it's only Monday... Losing Ruby has really thrown me, I can't get over how depressed I am. I mean, it's a cat! I should have stopped crying by now... but it just sneaks up on me, I am fine one minute and trying to explain my red eyes the next.

She was one of my closest friends. Thank you so much, everyone, for you comments and thoughts. It really means a lot. I think that's something that is really getting to me, actually, and I'm trying not to let it because it makes me sound like such a petty bitch, but... Keith and Leon haven't even said to me "we're sorry your cat died". I know they are both busy. I know Leon is really sick. I know I'm just a screwy friend of Deb's who lives in their garage. But if Leon's dog Savannah had died, or if any of the other dogs had died, I would have at least said to them how sorry I was. It really, really hurts to have them ignore it like this. But then I try not to let it, because it seems both selfish and silly.

So. Um, what have I done in the last few days? Practically nothing, really, read a hell of a lot, cried a hell of a lot, slept as much as I can. Rego'd the car today, going for a 3-hour assessment at the pain management clinic tomorrow (hah hah hah, the last one I went to, in Wellington about 5 years ago, I got told by the senior anethetist to smoke pot. Wonder what the advice will be this time?!)

I am feeling really directionless and miserable, partly over Ruby and partly over the fact that every time I try to get my life together something seems to happen to trip me up. I don't think I'll try working for a while again, I lost a lot of money and stress on the effort last time and it worked out to about $30/week better than the dole for working 40 hours and getting up at 3.30am, so maybe I'll lick my wounds on that one for a while.

I decided that I gotta feel like I'm achieving something so I will try to do some writing each day. I will post it in here, most likely, so if you see random unrelated bits of text, that's my excuse :)

---- random unrelated bit of text follows ----

It's funny how depression can ultimately kill you or allow you to live with a real sense of purpose, and yet neither result lasts very long. On the one hand, life is pointless, it is futile, it does hurt, and yeah, you're going to end up dead in 50 years so who really cares how soon you get there? It's just a shortcut, to kill yourself; a cheating of pain and sadness and lonliness and all those things that consume the depressed. Yet also, once you've come to the point of deciding that you don't care about living anymore, you're strangely free.

I mean, I don't know what it's like for other people. Maybe others out there genuinely want death, itself, as an end. I personally don't see how I can want something I've never experienced. In fact, I can't even really conceptualise death. What it must be like, just nothing. And I suppose that's the thing, really, isn't it; death isn't experienced, it's not like anything, it just is. I can't get my tiny mind to imagine its own non-existence. When I think about death, about killing myself, I just think away from, not to. It's more that I don't want to feel like this, be like this, look like this, live like this, anymore. The problems seem so insurmountable because they all require different answers and resolutions. I need money, I need self-confidence, I need a makeover, I need a lobotomy. Give me drugs, let me out of the prison of my mind because the pain and the screaming are just too much to bear...

But once you have come to the place of working out how to hang yourself from the rafters in your room, then maybe you have a degree of freedom. Once you've decided that you'd rather be dead, you can decide to pretend you are. No expectations from a dead woman. Everything I do becomes amazing, because a dead person couldn't do it. For a while, after I decide I'd rather be dead, I find almost a sense of peace with life.

Nothing lasts, however. Depression is an ugly disease that stalks over a period of years. It makes me so uncomfortable to think, write, talk about suicide that I retreat to third person: you, they. Writing it from an I statement feels dangerous, too revealing, too painful. Too close to home. Too seductive an idea, as if the closer I bring it to myself and my own experience the more likely that I will repeat the pattern of so many years and try again.

They probably don't count as suicide attempts, really. I kind of wanted to die, and kind of not. More I wanted someone to see my distress and swoop down and carry me off, somewhere safe, where people would love me and care about me and I wouldn't be an ugly little misfit anymore. But unfortunately, once you're in the system and labelled as a suicidal type, unless you really do have that loving, perfect-yet-inexplicably-missed-this-bit family in the wings waiting to have that emotional reunion with you, you're screwed. Doctors won't listen and won't give you decent medications in case you overdose. Every physcial ailment has some mysterious "psychosomatic" component. Once you're mentally ill, you'll never have another cold. A psychiatrist once told me that a heart attack is psychosomatic. The sad thing is he was completely serious. It's a Catch-22. You're insane, and therefore totally marginalised. You will be judged (and found wanting) by a jury of the sane.

Posted by phreq at June 14, 2004 05:18 PM | TrackBack