The howl deep down

I read somewhere a while ago that depression is just anger turned inwards. I’ve been thinking about that today after last weekend where I basically woke up with no spoons at the start of the day. It’s been a while since that has happened but it’s been a stressful af week… So I’m trying to think instead of why I’m sad, why I’m actually angry.

I’m angry at my family. 

At my step dad for basically ghosting me since my mom died (the irony). I’m angry at him because I’d wanted an actual functional father figure for so long that I was so desperate to stick that label to him. I’m stuck in this weird limbo where he’s just not replying to me or fobs me off when I offer to meet up with him. I haven’t seen him since maybe 2021. I’m angry at him because when she died he just fell apart and made everything worse. I’m angry with him because he has her ashes in the house he’s never at and most of her stuff. I was hoping I could meet up with him so I could just say ‘look, if you want to move on and forget about me it’s fine. JUST TELL ME’. I keep psyching myself up to try and initiate it but it just keeps being a bad time to try and instigate it.

I’m angry at my actual family. I keep offering my house as a meeting space, offering to meet up with people. I sent my aunt an afternoon tea voucher for Christmas in the hopes it will mean she will actually visit me. She keeps fobbing me off. I realised they had no idea about what my dad was like, that I had no contact with him and why. Surely they would have wondered why he wasn’t at my wedding??? Why he wasn’t at my mom’s funeral??

I’m angry at him for deciding to side with his dillusions rather than getting help and fighting for me and his wife but the whole ‘daddy issues’ is a whole entire other post.

I’m angry with my friends.

I’m not a priority. I keep trying to meet up with people and they just don’t bother to help me sort something out or they cancel and then I can’t rebook with them. My so called best friend who wanted me to move here in the first place and set me up with my ex is the worst of all this. As soon as I stopped chasing her friendship she just didn’t even bother trying to contact me anymore. 

I have friends that are popular but they never tag me or my husband in anything, like they’re ashamed of being friends with us. I know it’s dumb but it drives me insane with the things we’ve done to help them but we’re essentially second class citizens.

I’m angry with the world.

I’m never going to retire. They’re on about raising the retirement age to 71 and I’m 36 now. My husband has a manual job that pays less than me. There’s no way he can keep doing that till he’s 71. If I die at the same age my mom did then I’m already halfway through my life and I won’t even get close to touching that age. I’m sick of everyone suffering because of money and the lack of it. I’m sick of trying to fight my own mental health when I feel low just to try and carry on the capitalist wheel where if I dropped dead tomorrow the company would send out a sad email and then carry on.

I’m sad because choosing not to have kids is a different ballgame to not being able to have them

Everyone I know thinks I don’t like kids. This is a myth I convinced myself of when I was with my ex who 1 – would have been a useless parent and 2 – didn’t really want kids as such. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of babies. Give me a kid at 3/4 upwards and we’re cool. I got some medical issues and while I’m not getting the phone call with the results till tomorrow I think essentially I’ve got something that would have made it difficult if not impossible to have kids.

Since my mom passed away it was weighing on me a lot that as an only child that whole branch kind of dies with me. Except it doesn’t. She had 4 brothers, all but one had multiple kids. My dad has 2 half brothers, his aunts both had kids. But it weighs on me. Having sorted through my mom’s stuff it just became painfully obvious to me how one day I’m going to die and all of this will end up in a bin. My mom saved my first pair of shoes and now they just live in the bottom of a cupboard because I don’t know wtf to do with them. It feels rude to just get rid of them but why am I keeping them? Because it was important to her that she kept them… but it’s not like anyone is going to give a shit about my first pair of shoes after I’m dead.

If my husband hadn’t had kids from a previous marriage I think we would have had one of our own. Would I have been a good mom? What would our kid have been like? Would they have ended up looking like my mom or my dad.

All of this is just topped off by an urge to just speak to my mom. I don’t have anyone. I don’t have a dad. She’s gone. I can’t talk to anyone else about it. I don’t have anyone that could fit that role. My aunts are so distant from me and there’s no way I’m talking to my mother in law about it.

It hurts so much. 

Post birthday anxiety

My birthday was… a mess.

As much as I had a good time it just unfortunately really fucked about with my head.

Went to dinner with my husband and that morning I realised I’d had no cards from my only remaining family. I had an email from one of my Aunt’s saying she was so caught up in my cousin’s wedding the weekend before that she hadn’t had a chance to send it. Then while I’m at dinner, on my birthday, my aunt sends an email out to the family saying ‘what a wonderful time we had at the wedding, now to move onto the next landmark event *Uncle*’s birthday’. No acknowledgement this was being sent on my birthday. No comment at all.

I’ve just felt more and more like I don’t have a family other than what I have on my husband’s side but I still don’t KNOW them. Then one of his sisters is on about moving to the US and his parents are on about going to Scotland.

Then at the same dinner my husband sees he needs to get called into work the following night. I’d booked time off work and nearly cancelled it but kept it booked in because I’d actually be booked off with him. It just really upset me.

One of my friends asked how his job was going and I said ‘depends what day of the week you’re asking’. The pendulum flies between “I hate this job, I want to hand my notice in tomorrow” and “I had a good night, I can do this job” and of course the common catchphrase “I’m so exhausted”. He used to at least have a regular shift pattern so we could plan things but that’s gone out of the window.

Then my anxiety has really kicked off in terms of my dad. We’ve now been in the house for a year and I’m worried if he’s sent a card or something to the old house they will have returned it. I’m worried he will somehow know where I am and turn up and try and hurt me or worse hurt my dog to hurt me. This is the same guy that threw my dog over a 6ft+ hedge when I was a child because she was barking. He only let her back in the house because I was screaming-crying that I hated him. He’d done the same to my mom’s dog when they were together before me. This is the man she chose to have a child with -_-

My counsellor would say when I would worry about these things of ‘do you think he would actually do this?’. The problem is yes and no at the same time. Given some of the horrible shit he did throughout my life – yes he is capable. If I’m trying to be a rational grown adult – no I think this would be too much effort.

Logically though he must be retired now or at least coming up to it given his age but I have no idea. I tried searching for his step brothers and stepmom on facebook to see if there was any sign of him but I think they’ve officially cut ties with him as well.

My latest anxiety is he’ll pour petrol through my letterbox and set my house on fire and I won’t be able to get to my dog. Or that he’s been sat outside watching me come and go from the house to confirm it’s me. The new owners of my last house don’t have my forwarding address but what if he paid someone to find me?

My head is such a state at the moment and I don’t have anyone to talk to because they all had normal human beings for parents. Given my mom’s side of the family seemingly had no idea I didn’t see him at all there’s no point me trying to talk to them about it.

It’s awful because I think of the day when he actually dies I’ll feel free but will anyone even tell me? Sometimes I search his name to see if he comes up in any news articles. He’s a computer luddite so he’s got no online presence at all.

I just want to feel safe.

Bucket of sad

I feel like in the inside of my chest cavity there’s a little plastic bag full of sadness and sorrow, like a waterballoon. I can feel it sitting there, if I poke it mentally I can feel the sadness rising up inside me like I want to wail. It won’t come out of me.

I went for drinks yesterday with my work colleagues and my husband wanted to go out afterwards and it just made me feel sick and sad. I’m not that bothered about drinking, I’d rather have food but I do it because of trying to masquerade as a human being who enjoys socialising with other human beings.

I think he’s autistic. I’d put money on it. So I don’t know if what he goes through is autistic burnout or if it’s just the depression from having to cope with nearly half a lifetime of being undiagnosed but it’s… a lot. We had our holiday and it was nice but I came home and everything I’d left behind just hit me. I purposefully made a video on holiday of where I was sitting in a hammock that was attached to an orange tree, slowly rocking under a clear blue sky. I knew that I would need to remember that life can be different to how it is 99% of the time but I was hoping it wouldn’t have to be so soon.

We were back for one day and then the next he soared straight off the deep end. It’s like everything is fine and then all of a sudden every atom of the world is wrong and horrible and he can’t cope. Can’t cope with his job, can’t cope with living. I’m trying to let it run but it’s hard. He’s on about just handing his notice in but we hadn’t even started trying to work on his resume etc, he convinced me we needed to move from my mortgage free house to move to this bigger one. I’m on a contract at my job that I don’t know if it will be made permanent and they’ve literally just closed half the business. Oh and I used the last chunk of my savings to help him when this happened last time on the promise I would get it back from his inheritance… that his mom has decided to keep for herself, or didn’t exist in the first place I’m not sure.

Then almost as quickly as everything is awful it’s fine. He’s fine. No problems. But I’m left drenched from this storm that blew over while he’s suddenly okay. I’m triggered and just stood there while he’s saying there isn’t a problem anymore. I’d bottled loads of this up before we went away and then told him how it makes me feel. I don’t know how to deal with it. I’m trying really hard to acknowledge that most of this is hitting triggers from my past but my brain just goes ‘fine, go then. Fuck off’. I’m so exhausted.

We had a whole day of face to face work yesterday about what they want the structure of the company to be in 2025 and I just felt like such a fraud sat there because I have no idea if they’re going to keep me or not. The more I sat there the more it sank in and just made me feel worse. It’s just intensifying everything because I feel like I can’t trust that I’ll be employed past June next year, maybe even before if things go wrong.

I want to cry but it just isn’t coming out again. I’ll cry for a short burst and then that’s it but I can still feel the sadness in me. I need to sort out so many things to do with the house but they all obviously involve money and my instinct is to not spend anything.

It’s my birthday soon and I don’t want it. I know if I want to do anything it will be on me to plan, it will be on me to organise and I just don’t care. I wish I hadn’t booked it off work. All I want is for someone else to look after me and do things for me but I’m always the responsible one, I’m always the one that has to do things and organise things and make things happen. My dream would be that my husband turns round and says ‘I’ve booked this restaurant, I’ve got you this really beautiful cake and some flowers’ That’s all I want but I know it’s not going to happen. Yes I could be less petulant and ask him but that’s on me again.

Blocked pipe

I need to cry. I want to cry. Nothing is coming out. Just tears kind of leaking out of the sides of my eyes. So much has been going on at the same time that hit off all my triggers and the only person I can talk to (my husband) is part of it. Last night he said he wanted to talk about it and then just immediately fell asleep while I was trying to work out where to start which sums up the past couple of weeks.

He’s struggling with his job. Again. I think this is because of what I suspect to be undiagnosed autism and ADHD and I’ve been reading up on masking and autistic burnout which is what I think is going on. I’m trying to get him to at least stay in the same job for a year but he’s already mentally halfway out of the door. With all the costs for everything going up this is just making me feel sick. I bailed him out in 2021 when he took on a new job and then basically burnt himself out so badly he was suicidal. I used a huge chunk of money from my inheritance from my mom dying which he burnt through in 3 months only to end up back at the company he’d left before he moved to the awful one. It was supposed to be coming back to me with what he was expecting from when his nan died and then unsurprisingly enough this hasn’t shown up. I’ve then used pretty much the entire rest of it for us to move and poured it into this new house and all that’s left is my actual savings. It still makes me feel ill.

Running parallel to this is the fact that I’m only on a contract at my job which is up in June next year and last week they shut one half of the business down and pretty much everyone in that half is redundant. They’ve said that they will let me know by October whether they are going to keep me on longer or not but this recent stuff hasn’t made me feel great. I can’t really talk to anyone at work about it though as at least I am currently employed and just have PTSD from going through redundancy stuff so many times. Worst of all we all met up for a work social outing the weekend before it all happened -_- So he’s flailing around about his job and all I can think of is that I don’t know if I can support us if this all goes tits up. Every job he’s had since I’ve met him he does fine for 6m and then just starts loathing it.

In the background to this has been all sorts of troubles with my stepkids. They said a load of stuff about their life at their mom’s house the last time they were up and we tried to raise it with people but effectively unless they’re being beaten black and blue no one cares. The worst part is one of them was told not to talk about things which immediately triggered me. The whole thing has triggered me.

It became apparent when I met with my mom’s side for my uncle’s funeral that no one really knows what went on when I was a kid. No one knows how my dad treated us and what it was like. The worst part being my mom drilling into me that I couldn’t talk to anyone about anything because if it got out my dad was an epileptic who was driving around and had never reported it he’d lose his job and the only person in the family who could drive would get grounded. Forget about the fact he’d lose his job anyway when he’d inevitably have a fit or he’d crash the car on the regular because he was having a fit in the car. I spent up until the age of 17 not saying a word to anyone. My mom knew I had depression and anxiety when I was 10 and she never took me to the Drs, she just got books out the library that made her tell me to “write 3 positive things down that I’ve done today” in a diary in the meantime my dad is emotionally abusing us all and I’m living in a high stress environment. Why didn’t she help me? She knew what was going on and she knew I’d tried to kill myself when I was a kid and she just… didn’t do anything and I don’t understand it. It fucking hurts. I’m seeing how my husband is tearing himself up over this and yet she stuck with this guy for 21 years till he just got so insane she couldn’t deal with it.

I think the worst part of this all, and generally everything, is how much I just want to talk to her. I don’t have anyone to talk to. I can’t talk to my husband because he’s just in this permanent state of ‘I’m stressed, I’m too upset’ and I get it because I understand that his job is stressful and he’s going through awful things but… he’s literally the only person I have. His catch phrase at the moment is ‘I’m so exhausted’. Not really a great time for me to talk about how I feel. I have other friends but one of my oldest friends lives miles away and hasn’t gone through anything near this, one just ghosts me and the other two are constantly on a horrific rollercoaster going from one disaster to another.

I feel like I can’t trust him to be reliable. I don’t feel like I can rely on him and it’s setting me off, setting off all the stuff that reminds me of my dad. He was so late back from work last week and I worried because with everything going on I didn’t know if he’d gone and killed himself somewhere. He tells me he wouldn’t but I don’t trust that. I know he’s attempted stuff before we met and I know how he was in 2021 when he was in such a state.

I just feel like I don’t matter. I can’t help with anything that is going on, no one is bothered enough to help me.

It’s my birthday next month and I would love him to organise something, even just a really nice cake. It doesn’t have to be a surprise, just a sign he’s actually thought about me and that I actually have some kind of value to him. I know he won’t. I can’t be bothered to do anything for myself, there just isn’t any point. He keeps saying I should just go on holiday myself but what’s the point? Just more money out the window when the rates of everything are going insane.

I’m so, so fucking tired because I’m not sleeping. I’m worried that all of this shit is going to come flooding out of me the moment I’m not at work because it isn’t even coming out now having typed all this stuff. I’ve stamped down on it too hard.

I want my mom. I want someone on my side who cares. I don’t have any close family left. I don’t have anyone to talk to. I’m not anyone’s priority.

Self destruct

My husband is going through a really bad time at work. Again. He has a load of things that I think he has but he’s never got diagnosed so only has the coping strategies that he has worked out in his time on the planet and then me trying to piece him together. He blew up in 2021 or at least he did so in the worst way since we had been together. At this point we hadn’t moved house and I still had money from my mom’s death that I could sink into him taking time to recover. All because I’d encouraged him to look at another job thinking it would be really positive thing for him (spoilers: it wasn’t).

He had a reliable job but again had got sick of it and got sick of the shitty pay and the fact he knew he could do more. So I helped him apply for a job in management job. Now he has more money and is blowing gaskets even more. The money that I’d used to support him during his bad time (that we never told anyone about) he was convinced he would pay me back from an inheritance. I would never do something with money if I knew I wouldn’t be okay with never seeing it again but he was sure he would pay it me back. Only we’ve moved house, things have gone wrong with the house and he hasn’t seen this inheritance and I don’t think he ever will. I went through a big phase of wondering whether it had ever been an actual offer at all or if he had just been sure of something that was never there.

So now the wheels are weebling and wobbling and may fall off again only now I am down a significant amount of money and we are up a significant debt (yay mortgage) and I am 6m into a possible 18m contract. I’m hoping it will get extended but I genuinely have no idea.

So much of the bad feelings that I have are tied up with my fucking parents and their awful relationship and awful money management. I can remember growing up my dad consistently losing his job (usually towards xmas, great timing) and my mom just having to suck it up. Later she told me that she’d tell my dad he had to find another one or he wouldn’t be eating. All of this going on makes that my immediate go to with my own current husband but as I go to reach for it I get the macro vision of my parents’ marriage and realise that I can’t use any of the fucking thing for any kind of template to work on.

So I feel all this pressure on top of me because if he just breaks again and loses his job he’s back to square one and I’m back to being the provider again. So then my brain just goes ‘get rid of him, what are you doing? Protect yourself. Just ditch him’ and it’s taken me a while to unpack why this is happening. Why do I just immediately shut down and wall him off in my heart when this comes up. Suddenly the other day I was walking the dog and it came to me. Daddy issues. My entire teenage years all I saw was my dad draining money, my dad creating yet more problems. I remember asking my mom why did she pay for his gym membership at a stupidly expensive gym when he hardly ever went and did anything, why didn’t he pay for it himself? The only method I had to deal with my dad was to freeze him off, wall him off out of my being. The problem is I don’t know how to fix this. I’m just fucking tired.

I am so tired of being responsible, I’m tired of carrying on and being the one who doesn’t break. I’m sick of myself and all of my shit. I’m sick of not having anyone to speak to and all these so called friends that I don’t matter to. I’m like a z list friend but one that will cut her own limb off to help you. Nothing I say matters to anyone. Nothing I do actually has any impact on anyone around me.

What am I doing?

One of my friends said there’s a job opportunity at his company that pays a lot more than I’m currently on and would be permanent and all the fuckery with my husband is making me feel like I need to take it. The faster I can pay down the mortgage the better we will be. At least then if he spiralled right off the deep end then I’ve got some cushion to pay both of our parts of the bills. But I like where I am even if it is only 18m. So do I risk jumping to place he’s only just gone in the hopes it will just be better for me financially?

God forbid I should break. We would be royally fucked if that happened because no one is coming to save me this time. Who do I even have? Just half a family that have no idea of what I’ve actually been through. That were utterly shocked and saddened that I don’t speak to my narcissistic abusive father.

I genuinely think I have CPTSD. I mean we already know about the undiagnosed depression and anxiety. Why did my mom never take me to the doctor? It’s not like it would have cost her any money. I tried killing myself when I was nine or so. I hade massive depression and mental health issues in year six that she kept me off school for but she just got a book out of the library that told me to ‘write down things I was good at’. I wish she’d bought a book that had said ‘how to divorce your abusive pos husband’ instead. It might have saved me some years.

If I even got diagnosed with CPTSD would it even help me? I’m pushing 40, what good is it to me now except something to hang my hat on?

What I actually need and what I know my body needs is to just take off for like 2-3 weeks if not a month and go live on a Greek island somewhere. Not an option though is it. Not when that’s a nice old chunk of money and I might end up being the sole breadwinner again.

Dear me of the past, what happened to wanting a normal boring stable guy? Ah yes, the soul crushing loneliness where I’d lie on my floor in the hall. Excellent.

Stream of unconsciousness

I can’t stop thinking about death. It’s almost a joke given I spent so long being suicidal and wishing I would get hit by a car or an asteroid or could be given an excuse to just stop existing. Now I don’t want that. Now I can’t stop thinking about the things I’d leave behind or even just the process of knowing that you’re dying and the weird interim period where you’d almost inbetween worlds.

It’s because my uncle passed away. I’d seen it on the horizon thanks to one of my cousins crashing into my wedding anniversary to say they thought he was seriously ill like they wanted me to do something about it. At which point I raised the fact that there isn’t anything you can do with a 70yo man who wants privacy and has capacity. I’ve been trying to listen to my gut and my gut has been telling me something is wrong for a while, just like with my mom and sure enough it was right on the money again.

It’s hard though when fighting against anxiety to work out what is actually my gut and what is my anxiety. My brain has been fully attacking my husband in my head to the point I’m convinced he is an evil manipulative liar but when I actually sit with him and he speaks to me I know it isn’t true. My brain always tries to destroy everything till I’m just sat in the dirt with nothing. I’m on a contract with work and it’s attacking that too which is affecting me.

I want to go back to therapy but it’s been so long. I genuinely need to see a psychiatrist to get diagnosed because I have a very strong feeling I’ve got CPTSD.

Seeing my aunt who is now widowed without kids is making me think a lot of myself in her scenario. I don’t have any clue what my relationship to the kids would be if my husband died. He’s convinced they’d stick by me and still want to know me but I just don’t think that would be true. As much as they get on with me I’m only here because of their dad and if he died they’d have no reason to want anything to do with me.

I keep wondering if I will ever actually even get to retire or if something will take me out beforehand. At which point what is the point of anything. I’m so so tired. I’m so tired of this world. I’m so tired of trying to keep being employed at jobs that just turn round and want to reduce staff and costs. I’m tired of the cost of literally everything going up. I’m tired of having to consider everyone and everything and most of all I’m tired of looking after myself.

When my mom died, apart from the aforementioned aunt, literally everyone disappeared. I know that I had my then boyfriend but we had been seeing each other for just over a year when she died. That’s not family. So when my uncle died and then suddenly all these relatives came round to help her… yes I’m so glad that she has that help but I’m so sad that they didn’t do this for me. When she died I felt like I was completely alone in the world. The more I’ve interacted with my family since she passed the more alone I’ve felt.

When my uncle died my cousin posted this whole thing about him being a grandfather figure… bitch you had GRANDPARENTS. You had them and knew what that was like. My dad’s side is essentially gone. Sometimes curiosity gets the better of me and I look on facebook to see if my grandpa is dead yet or not. I’m non-contact with my dad. I don’t have anyone, I never had any grandparents. I don’t have siblings. I feel like I’m alone on an island.

Slump

This is just going to be a stream of consciousness. I’ve felt like crap for about a month or so now, bizarrely since I got a new job. I wasn’t especially looking for one and this is only and 18m contract so I’m worrying that I will actually have a permanent job. We have a wonderful mortgage now and things in the house keep breaking oh and we’re in an inflation and energy crisis so it’s not the best time to be unemployed.

Ever since I handed my notice in I just feel so demotivated. I’m waking up in the morning 30mins before I have to log on and just feeling like crap. I don’t want to do anything, I don’t want to speak to people. I think I just feel let down and angry at the company. I’ve got my exit interview on Thursday and I know it will mean nothing. No one seems sad or bothered that I’m going just irritated because it is going to inconvenience them.

One of the main reasons I wanted to go was because of the utter feeling of dread at how the company is going but the other was definitely how lonely I’ve been feeling. All the people I used to speak to have already left. Every morning I’d just get 15mins of speaking to people and then that was it. I’ve never worked in an office with any of the team where as they’d all worked together before -_- I’ve just felt like a massive outsider this whole time and like I haven’t been able to talk to anyone.

I’ve been trying to work through why I didn’t feel ecstatic when I handed my notice in? I think this whole job has just been an endurance run the whole time. I didn’t really want it but it was the only option I had other than being made redundant in 2 weeks. I had to fill out the application and do the interview while really not wanting to do it. Then the whole premise of the job has been ‘you won’t know what you’re doing for the first year’ which has really made me feel like an idiot. I don’t feel like I’ve had decent amounts of training. Then I have to start training the new person when I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing.

I’m just so exhausted all the time. I know I need to be trying to do more healthy eating and exercise but everything feels like a struggle. All I want to do is be in bed or asleep.

Maybe I can just feel this way and it’s okay? I’m sure this isn’t just a thing that’s occurring without a reason.

I’m really, really fucking angry with the only family I’ve got. My cousin picked my wedding anniversary, of all days, to message me to tell me that my favourite uncle seems to be seriously ill but isn’t talking about it or getting treatment. Apparently my response of ‘and what do you expect me to do about it’? Wasn’t right. Like… I don’t know if it’s been my life of dealing with my horrific dad, my ineffective stepdad or something else but I’ve come to the understanding that these are GROWN PEOPLE. If he is refusing treatment there is literally nothing we can do except offer support. It just really upset me. One because he obviously doesn’t know enough about me to know it’s my anniversary, two because any anniversary of anything just makes me sad about yaknow my mom suddenly dying, three because I’ve just felt more and more alone as time goes on. My husband’s family are so in each other’s pockets, they even helped me out the other weekend by driving me to a festival when the train strike wiped out my options. I find it so, so hard to ask for help because growing up we had no support structure. My dad drove people off, we had no grandparents and my mom’s family we’d see maybe once a year even though 2 of my uncles lived about an hour away by car. My husband is constantly confused by me never thinking to ask his family for help or thinking it’s weird but I’m so conditioned to deal with everything myself. There’s also the fact that said cousin just didn’t turn up to my wedding. No apology, nothing. Just didn’t turn up.

It’s making me feel really crap about my family and everything else which just makes me sad. I don’t have any brothers or sisters so I just feel so on my own.

The world is making me so tired. I wish I could pull up out of this but I just can’t get myself to change.

Don’t go into the void Carolanne

I’m really struggling with suicide ideation at the moment. On Monday night I sat in the bath till it went dark outside holding a scalpel that we have in the house. I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking of my husband and the dog. I kept reminding myself of the quote that has pulled me out of things before which was that if I ended it there then nothing would ever get better. Plus i mean what if ghosts are genuinely a thing. I hate myself enough as it is without being stuck naked and wet for the rest of eternity.

We went to the cinema the next day and all I could think of was how I nearly wasn’t there.

I wish I could say that this was a fix and I feel fine now but it isn’t true. My brain just keeps throwing it up as a solution. Like a pressure release valve. It’s a good job that I’m too much of a wimp to follow through. That and I’d need to make sure I had my will updated.

I’m so fucking lonely. That really isn’t helping either

Death by 1k cuts

Moving house (or at least trying to) is one of the worst things I have/am doing in my entire life. The amount of damage this whole process has done to my mental health is unreal… and it isn’t even over yet.

So we nearly made it. We saw a beautiful house that we fell in love with and accepted an offer for. We were nearly at the end of the process when the mom of the family got seriously ill (hello trigger) and they had to pull out. So we went back to a house we’d made an offer on the week before we saw the house that made me cry and after a load of toing and froing he finally accepted the same offer that we made 2 months previously. Aka if he had actually accepted our offer at that point we would have probably already moved.

This whole process has been especially horrific thanks to the fact that it hinges entirely on me. My current house (that I own thanks to my mom dying) is the deposit along with the last of my inheritance. Therefore everything to do with selling this place can only go through me. Oh and I have crippling financial anxiety thanks to growing up broke and having dyscalculia. I thought I’d factored in all of the costs involved but apparently not given things like getting pressured to get the heating and electrics tested (at my cost) that then got used to barter more off the price, insurance indemnities for the area where you put the bin out etc.

2 weeks ago our solicitor said he would propose signing the contracts last Friday and moving this Friday. We then both got Covid for the first time but obviously we still might have to move. Picture us hauling stuff out of the loft, boxing things up all while coughing and having temperatures. I’m ringing moving firms trying to get quotes but I can’t book anything because I don’t have a definite date and unless I have that then I lose my deposit.

Finally chase the solicitor who admits by the day before we are supposed to be signing that we won’t be because our buyer’s solicitor still has a stupid query. So everything is back on hold. Most of what we own is in boxes. I am exhausted.

I am so, so so tired. I do not have anything left. If this falls through I’ve told my husband I give up. I can’t start this over again. The kids will have to suck it up, we will have to suck it up.

I wake up every day during the working week with a sense of dread because there might be yet another email needing money or another set of quotes I need to get or another piece of bad fucking news. I wake up on the weekend surrounded by fucking boxes, unable to find things. I can’t move around my own home.

I am so exhausted. I have a fear response to the googlemail pop up which is not very useful when Linkedin keeps emailing me.

But apparently this is all just me ‘sucking the fun’ out of moving house! Oh what a terrible drag I am PAYING FOR EVERYTHING, RINGING EVERYONE and HAVING TO DEAL WITH ALL OF THIS SHIT AND GIVE UP MY SAFE, PAID FOR SPACE FOR 2 KIDS WHO WOULDN’T CARE IF I DROPPED DEAD.

What am I doing? This is the only space I’ve known for 10 years. It’s got me through the treacherous ending of a 7 year relationship, job losses, my mom passing away. It became my security and my thing to rely on even through its unreliable angles.

I’m trying to tell myself that this is going to be beneficial for me and my family but in the other part of my mind all I can see are the rising fuel bills everyone is experiencing and the cost of living shooting up.

I just want this to be over. I want to wake up in the morning in a room where I know that I won’t have to move everything I own. I want to be able to put my art up and my altars. I want to feel settled and I haven’t felt settled in well over a year and a half now.

My dad sent me a letter and I just don’t care. I don’t have the capacity to care about things at the moment. I’m sick of feeling. I started disassociating last week from stress. I feel on the edge of tears almost all the time. I can’t make plans because I don’t know when The Event is going to happen.

I am so so so exhausted and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it.

Vibrating brain

I don’t know how to describe it…

Like I thought when people talked about ‘brain shocks’ that this was going to hurt. I stocked up on headache meds just incase.

It doesn’t hurt… it’s like a kind of vibration/static. Like a reverberation.

Honestly, people on the internet talk about ringing their dr and going down to more of a decreased dose but the one I spoke to basically said “oh you’re only on 50mg, just take it alternate days for a week and then come off”. I mean short of grinding them up and splitting out the powder how am I going to make the tiny tablet any smaller?

I had no idea it was going to be like this. I feel dizzy in bursts, static head rushes in bursts. Thankfully the emotional stuff wells up but I can fight it off unlike last week where I just spent a day crying.

I was researching on the internet and it was basically saying there’s hardly any research done into the side effects of coming off but rapid eye movement from side to side can set it off and I think that’s definitely true. It makes it worse but definitely not the only cause.

Today I’ve been sat at work and I feel like my brain is in a foggy soup where getting any information is hard if not impossible. I am absolutely exhausted despite getting sleep. Walking to and from a corner shop made me roasting hot. If I mentally poke at my emotions I could burst into tears. Honestly I could do an oscar winning performance right now.

Worst of all is having to have the ‘coming out’ about having mental health issues. Back in the day I would have chopped my hands off and eaten them rather than admit to having issues, I didn’t even admit it to myself. My previous manager ended up finding out when I fell apart over thinking my dad was missing/dead a few years ago. So far I’ve got it under wraps with the new team as they generally don’t seem to care what’s going on with me as long as I’m doing work.

I already feel inadequate and shit at this job. The idea of having to ring my manager and say ‘Hi Manager, I have mental health issues and I’m coming off my meds and my brain feels like it’s in a blender on PULSE at the moment’. I know I have to be honest but I don’t want to be. But I know my old manager might say something assuming the new one knows and then I’ll look like a shithead.

Honestly, for the brief period that I feel like these tablets helped I don’t feel like it’s currently worth it. I don’t feel like the impact was as big as I wanted it to be… I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting it to suddenly change things and I’d be HAPPY all the time but I feel like such utter shite and it’s only been a week since I had my last 50mg dose. The Dr said I wouldn’t feel anything until two weeks out. WRONG.

I just want to lie on the sofa under a blanket and cry but I have to be a functional person and I hate it. The only thing I’m counting my blessings for currently is that the kids aren’t here as honestly I think I’d have checked into a hotel or something. I pray that I’m feeling better when they come up.