Panic Inducing PIP

I have my Personal Independence Payment assessment tomorrow, but the very thought of it is dread inducing. My throat feels as though its closing, trying to cut off my ability to breath or swallow. My mouth is dry. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it. I feel sick. There is such a knot of tension in my back that my shoulder blades feel as though they're being pulled together and my neck muscles are burning. I want to cry.

But it's worse than that. I want to die. I don't was to see a person whose purpose is judging me. I don't want to say the wrong thing when getting through the assessment is essential. I'm wondering about running away. I could steal my husbands car keys. I could disappear. I could die.

Part of me wants to cut. It might calm me. Another part of me is scared that dragging a blade up an artery might be just too tempting today. I want to crawl out of my skin or tear it from my bones. I want this to end . Advisors tell people with physical disabilities not to do anything they'll find too painful... yet with a mental problem I'm supposed to endure. Do what they ask even though my anxiety is heading of the charts and I'm one palpitation away from phoning the Crisis team.

I need out of this. But I can't just cancel because I need PIP. What alternative is there?

Pseudonymous Zombie
xxx

Two Hundred and Eighteen

218. That's the number of times I put a razor to my leg at 3am and pressed down, drawing it through my skin and then watching as blood welled and trickled over my calf. My left leg is scars from just above my ankle to just below my knee. Scar, after scar, after scar, one on top of another. In the past I've had words cut into my skin. 'Help' was the first phrase I wrote. 'Kill yourself' was the last. Not that the words are visible now. Not under the scars I've added since.

218. That's the number of cuts it took to calm myself out of putting my suicide plans into action last night.

Why cut?
Sounds contradictory doesn't it, that hurting myself can stop me from doing something worse. I know a lot of people who've never been where I am can't get their head around it when I say cutting gives me control. It's a pain I can choose to stop if I want. It's also a distraction. Very rarely it's a punishment, and when I start out punishing myself it quickly becomes soothing because I'm so used to being calmed by that familiar pain. I've acclimatised to it because I've been using cutting to cope since I was fourteen. It's how I self-soothe.

Cutting myself was the terrifying act which made me seek medical assistence in my early teens. My doctor referred me to a counsellor but the next time I saw him he told me that because I understood why I was cutting, and because I wasn't cutting severely, the counsellor had decided I didn't need to be seen...

To me, that's a bit like saying 'we've found a tumour, but don't worry, it's small and not serious yet so we aren't going to treat it'. The world seems to disagree.

That first experience of asking for help was sixteen years ago. It seems like a lifetime ago, yet it set me on a course that I'm not sure is reversible. It taught me that seeking help was futile unless I actually became suicidal rather than 'just' depressed. No one cared to address why I was cutting or try to prevent escalation. I wasn't ill enough to merit care.

Insidious illnesses take control...

I guess it was the age old problem, lack of funding meant only those with the greatest need could be treated. However, that ethos condemned me. I dread to think how much it's cost the NHS and student services to keep me alive since because I've struggled all my life. If someone had intervened then I might have recovered. At the very least I might have developed 'positive' coping methods rather than 'negative' ones.

There's the problem, you see; if you find the courage to ask for help with depression and then get told that someone doesn't want to see you, it damages your ability to request help in the future. You already know you won't get it because you aren't on the brink. You don't ask for help and you develope your own ways to keep yourself alive. The decision not to treat a teenager who's asking for help lets the wound fester. It encourages it. I still have scars on my arm which are a physical representation of what was going on in my head as a teen.

Back then it wasn't always bad. Yes, my self-esteem had been irrepairably damaged by long term bullying and other issues and that didn't help my state of mind, yet still there were some months I managed to live a normal life. Some I didn't, however, and that was when I'd drag sewing needles or the pins of badges over my skin. It was later that things went completely to hell.

When I started university at eighteen, my depression was already getting worse. Then my freshman year turned out to be horrific. Looking back, undiagnosed social anxiety had me on the back foot from the start. I moved into halls of residence but I couldn't gel with the girls in my flat. I didn't like to go out into crowded spaces. I couldn't join them in clubs and bars. I was an exceptionally private person and let very few people get close to me.

Feeling like an outsider in my flat, during my first experience of living away from home, was heartbreaking. Especially as my younger brother took possession of my bedroom at home so I never really felt I could go back without being in the way. The result was I spent most of that year staying overvat my boyfriend's parents' house, especially after he became my fiancé. He had one of those high level beds with a desk under it. I hated the bed so I used to sleep on the floor next to his computer, listening to its fans whirring all night because he never turned it off. To me, that was better than being in the flat with the raucous drunkards who couldn't wash a dish to save their lives.

Seriously, there were monsters growing in the fridge and every surface of the kitchen, even the dining table. I kept my plates in my own room because it was the only way I could avoid coming in to find some new green and blue growth  over my belongings. It was disgusting and the clutter made my depression worse, especially as the other girls realised I was an odd introvert and merely lived with me rather than engaging with me.

The change of environment, loneliness, and the feeling uprooted on top of pre-existing stresses led me to start cutting again, just so I could cope. I fantasised about jumping off the Tyne Bridge and drowning myself. If it wasn't for my fiancé, I would have done it. He's the reason I sought help again at all.

Unfortunately, help is rarely forthcoming...

I'd had to move to a new doctors when I moved out of home and into halls which was unfortunate. I joined a practice which university recommended. That proved to be a mistake. My new doctors kept their main surgery for general, local patients. They had a second door in the side street which led to a grubby upstairs surgery. That premisis was where they ran drop in clinics for students.

The students unlucky enough to register with that surgery were only allowed to go to the drop-ins run out of the grim upstairs rooms. Getting an appointment with the main surgery was almost impossible as the receptionists actively turned us away. That arrangement made me feel like a second class citizen when I was already feeling worthless which wasn't helpful, but that wasn't the only problem with the practice. In addition the drop-in was run by triage nurses who weren't qualified to deal with my problems and had to refer me to doctors, who had to be seen at the drop-in and were only occassionally available on a sit-and-wait basis. More than once, I'd spend an hour waiting to be seen only for a nurse or doctor to announce she was going home sick and we'd all have to come back another day. The effort that took was almost insurmountable as my depression became  progressively worse and smothered my motivation.

'Luckily' the university operated a counselling service for students. Unfortunately, that didn't do me much good as the counsellor went on either long term sick or maternity leave, I can't remember which, before I managed to trust her enough to open up. I gave up on student services after that.

By the age of twenty I'd determined that there was no real help out there. That seeking it was a pointless endeavour because I just wasn't suicidal enough. So I continued on, struggling, cutting, binge eating, hating myself more and more with each passing year but hiding behind a masquerade of being a functioning adult, going to university and work but avoiding socialising to quite a degree.

The masquerade is hard to keep up...

I didn't get better. I just learned to live with the numbness, fear, hopelessnes, and self-doubt. I had no professional help and lot happened over those years which made it difficult to fix myself. I changed course twice, we bought a house, we were in car accidents, I was diagnosed as 'sub-fertile' and when I finally got pregnant after years of trying I was sick for eight months solid. I was sick to the extent that I weighed less in my last week of pregnancy than I did in my first. The pregnancy was fraught with worries, suspected miscarriages and health concerns about the baby. It wasn't the experience I'd hoped for. Alongside that, my husband was made redundant and then, the week I gave birth to our daughter, I was made redundant too. We had no money. Our mortgage went into arrears. I had to work sixty hours a week setting up a business to keep a roof over our heads. In the weeks before my daughter's first Christmas, I broke down in poundland because I didn't even have the £3 I needed to buy her three books.

That was a bad year. My confidence plummetted still further and I was stressed constantly. Anxiety prevented me sleeping and I was exhausted all of the time. Eventually my doctor referred me to a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist. I was offered antidepressants as well but I didn't want to become reliant so I didn't take them.

Sadly, CBT didn't do much for me. Funding meant the counselling service could only provide between six and twelve sessions, but no more. Yup, no matter my condition, my treatment was limited because of the underfuning of mental health services in the United Kingdom. I didn't go to my last appointment. What was the point? I was still depressed, despite my therapist saying I was improving, and I was about to be cast asunder by him. Once again the notion that seeking help was pointless reasserted itself. I'm not sure I've ever really functioned properly since then, but what could I do?

We then had our second child, a son. Because of money issues I was back at work a week after giving birth. When I had an operation the next year, I sat emailing clients from my hospital bed. I never stopped. I never rested. Every day was an act of survival. All I did was work and worry, and feel completely worthless. My children deserved so much better than what I could provide and that was a constant nagging declaration in my mind. I didn't get better. I cried. Me and my husband fought horribly. Most months, I wasn't sure we could even be together any longer. It was year after year of hell. Eventually I managed to find new employment which paid more than my business. I though 2015 might finally get easier.

'Better' is a hard place to find...

Then my dad was diagnosed with cancer. Terminal cancer. He was given four years but there was just something about the situation, about his mad rush to get his affairs innorder including refurbishing the house he wanted to leave to us, that made me think four years was optimistic.

For the first time in quite a while my dad made the effort to spend time with me. The whole thing was confusing. I'll go into the problems stemming from my relationship with my dad another time, but it's safe to say being told he had cancer caused a great deal of conflicting emotions and even my grief was confusing. I often didn't know whether I was grieving for my dad or for the father-daughter relationship we'd never had. It was only in those months of treatment and uncertainty that I managed to vocalise something I'd struggled to say since my teens.

I managed to say 'I love you'. And I meant it.

For the first time in goodness knows how long we hugged and he said 'I love you too'.

I don't know if it's a good thing that we got closer then, or whether it led to more pain because we didn't have enough time to fix all the problems that had made me unable to tell him I loved him in the first place. That was hard, and it got harder and harder every time he was admitted to hospital and it became more and more obvious that four years was unlikely, that even two would be difficult.

The hum of anxiety and depression had never left me since my teens, but late last year, after dad's cancer diagnosis, I went into a tailspin. One worse than ever before. The diagnosis raised childhood problems. My head filled with things it would be unfair to raise but which would never be resolved by silence. I didn't tell my dad any of the hundreds of things I wished I could explain. I ignored the past and let dad know the one thing that mattered; I loved him. Because of how my brain works, how I've been trained by experience to turn off my feelings for people if I need to, I had to choose to let love back in because I'd shuttered myself off from dad so many years ago. But choose I did.

Syill, during the months that followed, my need to cut grew a hundred times worse. I even ended up carrying a knife in my bag so that I could cut wherever I needed to. Parked in a car park. Locked in the bathroom at work. Anywhere. Rather than doing a few cuts at a time like I used to,  I'd do ten. Then twenty. Then fifty. Then a hundred. Up and up and up. And I became more suicidal than I'd ever been before. While driving to and from work I'd imagine driving away; running, vanishing, dying. I day-dreamed about driving off the coastal cliffs near my home. It became so bad that in January, despite having avoided it for years, I went back to the doctors. This time I accepted the antidepressants. I was also referred to counselling again, and placed on a waiting list.

Then my dad had died in March, more than three years earlier than the estimate he'd been given, and the day after his death my family imploded. Grief caused a number of people to say things they shouldn't have. My depression led to anger and I lost my temper, I shouted because it was the only way to avoid breaking down and my family fell apart. Thats how bad I am. Anger is another coping mechanism. I shout when I can't bear to cry because I simply can't function like a normal person. I've never had the help I needed to be able to.

Now several people I love won't speak to me. At all.

Apparently I'm disposable...

One of those who fell out with me won't speak to mam either because she was more concerned for my mental state than his in that moment of falling out. The other has told me that I only self-harm to control mam. That, despite me having hid my self-harm from her for months until I just couldn't any more. Apparently I'm manipulative because I let my mam know I was falling apart and she wanted to help me rather than telling me to stop being childish, selfish, disgusting, the way others did.

I lost three loved ones in two days, and two of them blamed me for that. No amount of apologising or explaining could change that because, with me, they saw behaviour they couldn't understand rather than an illness.

Everyone had gathered around dad. Wanted to support him. Mourned his loss. He had cancer and we watched him fail. With my mental illness certain people saw me as inappropriate, as disgusting, as if I chose to feel what I felt. That's the difference between physical illness and mental illness; people see mental illness as a choice, but no one would choose this. No one would choose to live in a state that made them want to die.

In the aftermath, someone I cared for deeply told me he'd had enough of making exceptions for me. Making exceptions for me, because I'm ill but he won't accept that. He tells me he understands mental illness but that I'm a brat whose behaviour disgusts him. He claims the coping strategy which has cept me alive for sixteen years is actually just a way to control my mam. He says that not everything is about me, indicating he thinks I think it is, and ignoring the fact I hid my worsening depression while dad was sick. I hid it. I told no one but my husband and the doctor how much I wished to simply not exist because everyone had enough on their plates.

That doesn't matter though. Apparently, with mental illness, the very act of asking for help and empathy is attention seeking manipulation because everyone can have a rough time. Everyone can get down. It's not something that should make it hard for sufferers to interact normally...

 
Even after he told me I was manipulating my mam, this person went on to say this, "I have done nothing wrong to you. But you have made my life horrendous and stressful. Just because I don't blow up every day and make a fuss doesn't mean I'm not hurting or depressed."

Do you know what's wrong with that statement? What's wrong every time such things are said to a severely depressed person? It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of a condition. There is a huge difference between hurting and suffering a mix of severe depression and chronic anxiety. Claiming to have done nothing wrong after telling a depressed person they only self harm to control others is laughable. His exact words were holding my mam 'hostage'. Also, saying I blow up everyday was just melodramatic. I exploded once. The day after my dad died because I couldn't cope with what was happening. I apologised the next day. Any argument following was because I was being attacked or asked to apologise again. The person name calling and throwing around accusations was the other party, not me, and we didn't talk regularly enough for him to assess what I did day to day anyway. This person also kept requesting yet another apology. That's the thing with mental illness, sufferers are required to apologise for it.

Would you apologise for being unable to play football if you'd lost both feet?

No one tells a cancer sufferer to apologise for the effects of their illness. No one asks a person with a broken leg to apologise for not being able to walk. But an illness of the mind? A broken brain? That's different. That, sufferers are made to feel guilty for. As someone said to me, "If you think you've apologised enough then you really are an idiot". Or another example, "Maybe people talk to you like you don't have a clue because you go on like a brat. Thanks for confirming I am doing the right thing. Shouldn't have even bothered holding a (wedding) invite back in case of a miracle sincere apology. You proved me right. Don't contact me again to bitch about a problem of your own making."

The 'sincere' thing came up several times because he wouldn't accept any apology I offered. He walked away and decided I was a 'selfish arsehole' who he didn't think 'could get any lower'. And that's the better of those two people I fell out with...

The other one doesn't just ignore me. He turns his back on my kids when they say hello to him, even if I'm not there. He won't let his kids speak to them through a six foot fence. He's taken his anger at me out on my children. And that pisses me off even though I've successfully shut down what I myself feel for him.

So many of my problems come from abandoment. They come from being told I'm not good enough or that I'm some how deficient, from the bullying in my youth and from other relationships. I have an illness which has sprouted from feeling worthless and abandoned, but many people react to it by leaving. By making a sufferer of a mental illness feel worse than they already do.
I developed a survival tactic a long time ago. I can switch off my affection as if I'm flicking a switch. When someone leaves I'll hurt for a day, maybe two, and then I will decide to feel nothing for them. I don't think that's normal. I want to speak to mental health professionals about it, but the ability stems from the same place as my hopelessness, my anger, and my low self-esteem. It's a defense mechanism and right now people are probably judging me because of it. But do you judge someone with a broken arm from shielding it? That's all I'm doing. Shielding the broken part of me. Society treats physical ailments so differently to how they treat mental ones...

You don't tell a cancer sufferer they're only threatening to die to hold someone hostage.

You don't tell someone in a wheel chair that they should apologise for not being able to do things 'ordinary' people take for granted.

You don't tell a deaf person that they're clueless because they can't communicate the way you do.

So why tell a depressed person they're only self-harming or talking about suicide to hold someone hostage? Why tell a person which chronic depression and anxiety that they should apologise for not coping with distress the way 'ordinary' people do? Why tell a depressed person that they are clueless because they have difficulty communicating in a normal way? I have yet to understand it, but I've gone off on a tangent here so lets get back to how I got to sitting on the floor of my bathroom, cutting myself 218 times.

By April everything that had happened, everything I'd lost, was too much to bear and so I picked up a sheet of paper and wrote a letter. I apologised to my mam, husband, and children. I reiterated that I loved them but that they'd be better off without me. I'd struggled for sixteen years and I was finally ready to let my condition kill me.

After addressing that letter to my husband, I popped all of my Fluoxetine pills out of their blister packs and lined the green and yellow tablets up in front of me.

Then I started taking them.

I swallowed one antidepressant after another, fully intending to swallow every pill available. Unfortunately my husband came home earlier than I'd expected. He grabbed the pills from me and called an ambulance. I didn't die that day. When doctors asked if I was likely to try again I said no to avoid being hospitalised, even though I had other plans. I was sent home having failed to take my own life...

But I did achieve something. The hospital's self harm team contacted the counselling service immediatly. They got me an appointment the very next week. After months on the waiting list, I had a counsellor.

The hospital were also going to refer me to the community mental health team. Trying to kill myself seemed to be getting me the help I'd been asking for since my teens. It was just as I'd suspected back then. The only way to get help was to prove myself on the verge of suicide. For the first time I felt a spark of hope... The difficult pill to swallow was that even while suicidal, I was more optimistic than my situation merited. I hoped to get help, but help still hasn't arrived.

No further forward...

Weeks of counselling and a change of pills later and I'm no better. I haven't been assigned to a community mental health nurse yet. I can't see a psychiatrist even though my doctor wants me to because there isn't enough of them available. On top of that, my counsellor has decided he can't help me and has stopped our sessions and put me on the waiting list for more CBT. CBT, like the therapy which had failed me the last time I tried it.

To me, my counsellors decision felt like further abandonment. It felt like someone else giving up on me. September had come. Five months had passed since my suicide attempt and I was back where I started, only my leg was more scarred than i'd ever thought I'd make it. More scarred than my mam knows. I can't tell her because I don't want to be told I'm controlling her.

One of those who won'the accept my apologies knows I attempted suicide. Afterwards he reiterated that I was controlling mam, but I don't know how I'll control anyone from beyond the grave, which is where I'd intended to end up. But what the hell, it doesn't matter. I'm more bothered by losing my counsellor than losing him now, because I can't allow myself to care.

Not only am I still cutting, and worse than ever, but after my doctor chased up the community mental health team several times after my hospital trip. It turned out the self-harm team hadn't referred me as they'd told both me and my doctor they would. They'd sent a report to the CMHT but that was all. My doctor had to refer me instead and I was only placed upon their waiting list then, several tear and blod filled months after I should have been.

Since that referal I have seen a mental health nurse to be assessed. He agreed that I need treatment and support. He agreed I have severe depression and anxiety and I need help. So he's put me on yet another waiting list. He told me I'm 'amber'; in need of help because I have plans for suicide but lower down the waiting list than others because I'm not 'red'. In other words, I'm not in hospital or currently in the act of stepping off a cliff or swallowing an overdose.

If I find where my husband has my pills hidden and take them all, maybe then someone will throw me a rope. That's what it takes to get help when you have a mental illness. I knew it at fourteen. I knew it when a hospital worker arranged the very counselling I'd been waiting months for in a matter of minutes, all because I'd tried to overdose.

I'm not advocating making a suicide attempt in order to get help. If you're dead you can't be helped at all. I know that, and I want to emphasise it. Yet on my frequent bad days, I want to do it. Not as a cry for help but because I can't bear my existence. I don't care if a failed suicide attempt earns me treatment or if a successful attempt leaves me dead. Either is better than what I'm going through now.

I'd like help so I can see my kids grow up, but if I am beyond help or not worth the effort and funding, then I'd rather just die. Get it over with rather than waiting. Always waiting. Never living.

I don't feel alive anymore, you see. Emotionally I have about four settings now. Numb. Panicked. Enraged. Or more often than not, hopeless. Completely hopeless. So hopeless that there's no point in getting washed or dressed. No point in getting out of bed. I'm not going into that though as my hopelessness and lack of ability to live is covered in my last blog post entitled 'Raising the Dead: The Day to Day Life Of a Zombie'. Instead I'll summarise...

The truth about seeking help with mental health...

What have I learned over the past sixteen years? If you're diagnose with cancer, you'll get help. You'll get treatment to cure or slow the disease. It might fail, yes, but you will see doctors and nurses and they will try to help you. They'll provide painkillers. I would never wish my dad's death on anyone. It was horrific. But he spent his final days surrounded by his family. Surrounded by medical professionals. That's worlds apart from the situations those with mental health problems experience.

We're diagnosed but if our condition isn't going to kill us in the next week, the next day even, then we're told to wait. We're told that we're not a priority. We can have a chronic, life threatening condition for sixteen years or more without ever receiving the treatment we need. For any other condition wouldn't that be medical negligence?

And if we're lucky enough to receive some token attempt at treatment but it fails us? We don't die with people crowding around us talking about the good times. Our illnes isn't even marked down as our cause of death. We die alone with several bottles of pills and enough vodka to drown in. We die as we step on the cliff edge and plunge into the darkness. We die bleeding out from a self inflicted wound. Or we die with our necks bruising under the rough rope of a noose. We die from suicide, not depression, as if somehow the two are seperate. As if suicide attempts aren't symptoms of an illness.

If my next suicide attempt succeeds, I won't die as the documents are likely to say. I won't die of an overdose. I won't drown. I won't die from suicide. I'll die from depression. I'll die from an illness that was allowed to fester in my childhood and became an unstoppable force in adulthood. It's something I don't think I can escape because it is ingrained in me. Part of me. A dark part that has spread through me and left me scarred.

My death won't be today. It probably won't be tomorrow. It may not even be in a months time, but I have a plan, and sooner or later my coping methods will fail and my plans will become action again. I don't doubt it because I don't believe I'll ever get real help. But that should worry me. I've learned to time things carefully now. My husband won't walk in on me next time. He won't save me next time.

But I'm only 'amber', so help can wait.

Wait, even though my mind will continue to torment me, belittle me, tell me that I'm worthless, that my family would be better of without me. I'll hate myself and be more disgusted by myself than anyone else ever will be, even those people who turned away because I've hated myself since I was about eight. I'll continue cutting because it stops me doing worse, at least for now.

218. That's how many times I dragged a razor through my flesh at 3am. It's how many wounds I bled from just to keep myself alive last night. That might be the most I've ever done in one sitting. I don't know. I don't usually count. All I know is that my calf is scarred from ankle to knee, and it isn't the only part of my body I've permamemtly branded with my badges of self-loathing.

And my mam doesn't know, because I cut to control my own emotions, not to control people.

218.

But I dont blame the NHS, or the CMHT, or my doctors. They can only work with the funding that's available, based on how society values mental health services. Everyone understands A&E and why it's essential. Governments know they have to fund A&E. Not everyone understands mental health or its devestating affects, and because of the governments get away with underfunding mental health services. It's time for a rethink. Many of us urgently need the wider world to rethink.

Pseudonymous Zombie
xxx

Raising the Dead: The Day to Day Life Of a Zombie

So, why Pseudonymous Zombie? The pseudonymous is self explanitary. I'm using a pseudonym. The zombie... well that's a metaphor for several of the states I regularly find myself in.

Not all zombies are 'walkers'. Some can't get out of bed at all...

Some mornings getting up and living is a lot like raising the dead. Impossible.

Today has been one of those days and I feel like a failure. I'm failing at life. I'm wasting life. I'm a burden on my family and most days I wish I wouldn't wake up at all. For me, a good day is waking up and not instantly regretting it. That doesn't mean I'm happy to be alive or enthusiastic about the day ahead. It doesn't mean I'm motivated. A good day means I'm emotionally numb, rather than actively hating myself and my life. I take my pills. I carry on existing. That's a good day.

On such a day I might not cut, because I'm emotionally numb rather than suffering from my relentless self-loathing and hopelessness, or the whirling anxiety that sends me into uncontrolled panic, a panic which I can only stop by sliding a razor blade through my skin over and over again. Twenty times. Fifty times. One hundred times. I've cut over one hundred and fifty times in one sitting before. My husband found me surrounded by pools of blood in our bathroom. That's normal to us now. We clean me up. We keep going. We wipe away the blood so it's gone when our kids get up in the morning. I hide the scars and try not to cry at the dinner table when I look across at the two beautiful faces of my children and know that those two perfect little people deserve someone so much better than me as their mother.

Those two are the reasons I'm still alive, but on a bad day my mind tells me over and over that they would be better off if I was dead. On those days I want to leave them with their daddy, walk out of the house and drive to the cliff tops three miles away. Then drive off them. My family would hurt, yes, but they would move on. They would no longer have to deal with me and they could have better lives. That thought process is why I no longer have access to my car key, because one day I started driving away intent on not coming back and it was only because of a lucky stop and a lucky phone call that turned me back.

Another day, before I went on long term sick, I drove home from work and spent an hour in the car outside my house debating leaving, running away and finding somewhere to die. My husband saw the car parked and he phoned to tell me that my son wanted to see me to say goodnight before he went to bed. That made me bawl my eyes out but I got out of the car and went inside to be a mother to my kids. Two months later I waited until my kids where safely at school and took a planned overdose of anti-depressants, knowing my children wouldn't have to see me. They'd be protected. I survived that suicide attempt because my husband came back sooner than I'd expected. Even when he walked in I threw back more pills until he grabbed them from me and called an ambulance. I'm not allowed to keep my own pills now either. My husband gives me what I need every morning.

Luck (or lack thereof), more than anything, has ensured I'm still breathing, but I don't feel like I'm alive. So what's the point in getting up in the morning? Especially when I can't go anywhere or see anyone?

Unsociable and better caged than being a menace...

Depression and anxiety have kept me housebound for seven months. I can count the number of times I've been out in public since March on my hands, and on none of those occasions have I been alone. I need my husband or my mam with me whenever I do venture out and even then its hard, especially while going somewhere busy. Twice I've tried to go with my two children to the soft play, with my husband and mam at my side, on both occasions being sat in that busy environment has caused distress. It starts with a gnawing anxiety and becomes panic. I feel unsafe and I start to fidget. I can't stop worrying and eventually it gets too much, my brain feels like it's being squashed under the weight of my anxiety and I need to leave, to get away. Even though my kids still want to play, we have to go home. I can't manage an hour in a place with more than two or three strangers. After both trips to the soft play I hid away in my bedroom, needing to be completely alone, away from even my family, while I reset. Resetting is a process that can take days. Days just to be able to face my husband and children.

I'm a better mother and wife if I don't leave the house at all. At least then I can face my husband and kids rather than hiding away on my own. If I go out, they're going to lose me for a day or two. If not permanently.

It's a nightmare. The panic that makes it impossible to go out in public also prevents me answering the phone most of the time. Every time the phone rings I feel a sense of dread, that whoever is calling will have bad news or wish me some harm. Sometimes I manage to answer, most times I pass the phone to my husband. I can't make phone calls either. The idea of having to talk to strangers, to call center employees, or the staff at the doctors surgery, even my friends is terrifying to me. My mind tells me they'll judge me. Or I'll say something stupid. I feel sure I'll do something that makes the person on the other end of the line think less of me. Because of that, my husband makes all my phone calls for me. Sometimes I have to get him through security question but that is all I will do. State my name, date of birth, and the first line of my address. I can't actually have a conversation about whatever I needed to phone about. Even getting through security leaves me feeling distressed, and then I feel like such a failure for not being able to manage such a basic thing. Something most people take for granted.

My inability to make a phone call is dangerous as well as being disheartening. I keep telling health care professionals that I'd phone the crisis team if I got to the point of putting my suicide plans into action, but the truth is that I'm incapable of making that call. I'd have to hope that my husband was with me and that he could make that call for me. There's no way I can call a stranger at my most broken and tell them what's going on. I can't even call people I know... People I love dearly.

I have a friend who I've known since the age of twelve. She's my best friend. Yet I haven't seen her in months. I haven't phoned her. I've stopped replying to her texts. Not because we've fallen out but because I'm scared. I'm not coping. I'm failing as a friend and I don't want to burden her with my shit. I don't want her to hate me for it like others do, and so I'm hiding myself away. Logically, I know that's the wrong thing to do. I know I'm pushing her away at a time when having a friend could help. But the illogical voices in my head, the depression and anxiety, they whisper the opposite every day, that I shouldn't burden her. That I'm worthless. That sooner or later she'd walk away from me anyway because I'm such a horrible person. Those feelings have control at the moment and I can't seem to fight past it.

So I don't leave the house. I don't interact with the world outside. I stay in the cage that my own mind has locked me in. What's the point of getting out of bed when that's my life. Even when I do get up, it's only to move to the sofa, where I'll spend the day in the same pyjamas I've spent the last week in because getting showered and dressed takes to much energy and feels pointless as know one but my family will see me anyway. Sure, with my husband's help I make sure my kids brush their teeth and get washed. They always go out in clean uniforms, well fed and well rested. But what I ensure for them, I can't do for myself.

I only wash and change at all with my husband's prompting. He needs to prompt me to perform any sort of self care. If he didn't cook, I wouldn't have meals. I might binge eat the can of condensed milk from the cupboard to try and make myself feel better, or munch my way through the christmas biscuits which are seven months out of date, but then I'd just stop eating. I'm regularly dehydrated because I don't drink unless someone prompts me to do so. Everything about functioning is just pointless to me, but it isn't the futility alone that affects me... It's also hard for me to even remember to do the most basic things.

Zombies are characterised as having diminished brain activity...

Poor memory and poor cognition is another symptom of depression and it's hit me hard. There are times I'll listen to what someones saying to me and not understand a word. I'll misinterpret situations. I'll misread letters. My brain seems to be functioning in a fog, and if you tell me something, don't expect me to remember. Unfortunately, my problems with cognition might not be down to depression alone, because depression and anxiety are no longer my only health problems...

I received a phone call from my doctor yesterday, one of the few I've managed to answer after my usual deliberation. She thinks I have fibromyalgia, which would explain the pain I feel all over my body and my poor cognition and memory issues. Basically, I can't catch a break, and if I did, it would probably be in a bone.

Shuffling, moaning, and not really alive...

In addition to fibromyalgia, an x-ray on my wrists shows minor changes which look like the onset of osteoarthritis. I'm only thirty. That diagnosis may seem completely separate from my depression. Although many fibromyalgia sufferers are depressed, my battle with depression started in my teens, not with the conditions of chronic pain which have plagued me over the last few years. However, that pain is feeding my depression and making it worse. Right now my lower back, neck, shoulders, wrists, fingers, calves, ankles, hips, and even my toes hurt. When I managed to drag myself out of bed, a task which took three hours thanks to the stiffness in my joints and the pain in my back and neck, I took every type of painkiller I could (in the correct doses while supervised). That helped a little, but I'm still in pain and I know from experience that when I sand up, unbending my body with be excruciating.

Even writing this is difficult. I'm not using a keyboard. That hurts my wrist, and when I was at work I had constant numbness down half of my left arm because of using a keyboard all day. Instead, I'm using my tablet which has a stylus which is light enough and precise enough to make typing on a touch screen a little easier on my wrists which are in constant pain. All the same, my left hand which is holding my tablet is suffering. The tablet's too heavy to hold without the connective tissues around my wrist joint burning. I'll have to put the tablet on my knee, but then I'm looking down and that is making my neck worse.  I have to change position constantly to easy parts of my body, only to put another part under pressure as a result, even though the act of moving itself is painful, often painful enough to bring tears to my eyes.

I cried this morning with the pain of sitting on a dining chair. It took me three hours to get out of bed because of my pain and stiffness. I'm in pain now. And worse, what I have has no cure. All I can really do is take pain medication. The doctor has advised doing gentle exercise like swimming or yoga, but thanks to my anxiety there's no way I can leave the house. Especially not to don a swimming costume or show the world that I can barely move and often only manage to shuffle like a zombie, moaning as I go.

I'd like to go for a walk in the countryside like I used to, but my back pain means I can't even get from my house to the shop at the end of the street without crying in agony and losing my ability to move. 160 meters. That's my maximum as far as walking goes. And if I need to keep going, if I force myself on with tears in my eyes and my brain telling me I should just kill myself rather than go on like that, then I'll put myself out of action for days. I simply wont be able to move the next day, or the day after.

I used to love kayaking, and strangely that doesn't affect my back the way walking does. However, it does affect my wrists and shoulders. It was the one sport I really loved to do. It gave me freedom and fun while also providing the solitude I need. My husband and I used to go to the lakes and paddle out to deserted islands. It was quiet. Peaceful. A new perspective. But now, on most days, I wouldn't be able to do it. If, on a rare good day, I managed it, then I once again wouldn't be able to move for days afterwards. That's my conundrum. If I make the most of a rare good day, pain wise, then that is followed by several of my worst days. It's just not worth it, because the intensity of the pain on my worst days increases my suicidal thoughts. Anything to make the pain stop.

Even cooking meals is hard now, which doesn't help with my lack of interest in feeding myself. I used to bake but I can't now because mixing cake batter hurts. I love cooking, but I can't chop a meal's worth of vegetables without increasing the pain in my wrists, and I certainly can't stand at the hob making sauces or stirring pans. I know. I've tried one of the rare occasions I had the motivation to feed myself properly. I ended up in tears with my back pain and had to get my husband to finish for me. I couldn't move properly for days afterwards and my feelings of failing my family increased again. I'm unable to perform even the basic task of making a family meal. Often I can't even open jars or bottles because of the pain in my wrists and fingers. And this is me, potentially for the rest of my life.

It's a relatively small thing that really gets me upset about the diagnosis of incurable fibromyalgia though... It's agony to put on a bra. Trying to get a bra on is excrutiating while I'm moving it into place and fastening it. What sort of person can't put on her undergarments without gasping and grunting in pain aged just thirty?

This feels like a life sentence. My anxiety and depression have me in a cage and have done most of my life to varying degrees, but now my chronic pain tortures me as well. Most of the time, living this way just doesn't feel worth it. I have no value because of it. I'm useless. On long term sick. Unable to care for myself. Unable to be the mother my kids deserve. I want it to end, but the only way it will is to take myself out of the picture.

So no, I don't wan't to wake up tomorrow. If I do, I won't want to go through the agony of getting out of bed and facing another day. If I make it downstairs, the constant pain will gnaw away at my resilience until I'm seriously considering suicide as the ultimate painkiller, as well as the best thing for my family. It's on my mind now, and I the only way I have to calm myself, to block out that need, is to go for my razor blade and add the the scars already covering my leg.

That's the thing about each of my conditions, from the mental to the physical. There's never a reprieve, not really. It's constant. Depression. Anxiety. Chronic pain. It's a constant gnawing, like rats chewing a cable; sooner or later the cable will snap. These conditions are things I'm fighting to survive day in and day out. It's exhausting enough to make getting out of bed difficult and getting dressed impossible. I'm not living. I just shuffle along, moaning in pain, unkempt and finding no joy in being on earth.

Pseudonymous Zombie
xxx