hsphaven

I was discharged from PAPU, the four-bed, short stay psychiatric unit in the public hospital, two days ago. In total they gave me six days there, which is a lot longer than they usually give me, though still not enough. I was terrified I would be set up for more rejection when the private hospital sent me back to the public system. Usually the public hospitals just keep me overnight in the emergency department and send me home the next day, or give me a maximum of 48 hours.

During my fifth day there, I saw Dr Michael. He told me that management was putting pressure on them to discharge me.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I would tell the doctors. “I didn’t even want to be here. I wanted to stay at Delmont.” But Delmont wouldn’t take me back.

Michael told me that not talking made it hard for me to participate in the groups in private hospitals, which was total bullshit as there is not much interaction in the groups anyway.

“People need to stop discriminating against me,” I told him. “You don’t tell someone who doesn’t hear they can’t have a hospital stay. I’m fucking sick of it. Both public and private. There is ways around it like people who are deaf or blind.”

I was definitely the most unwell patient on the ward. The others all still had things they enjoyed, such as watching TV or making art. They had things to look forward to when they returned home. They spoke to one another, while I kept to myself and remained mute the entire time. I have now been mute for a month. I was sick of listening to this one loud, antagonistically happy patient when meanwhile I was so distressed I would try to suffocate myself with the plastic bin bags. It was such a bizarre place. You’re all lumped into this tiny four bed ward together but you’re worlds away mentally.

Each morning I’d wake up to the annoying patient’s voice. One morning she stroked the strings of the guitar sitting right outside my bed. The nurses would wake me at around 8am to offer me a 5mg tablet of olanzapine, which does absolutely nothing to help me. I kept asking them to scrap it but they wouldn’t. I would have been calmer if they’d just let me sleep.

I lost track of what day it was while in there.

I remained in grief over Damien, my disability worker, who, as I wrote about in my last post, texted me when I was in the private hospital to tell me he wanted to cut back our sessions. That is what led me to be put on an “assessment order” and sent back to a public hospital. My dad sent me some very unhelpful texts while I was in hospital which made me feel scared, threatened and like a piece of shit.

“Dear Zoe,

It breaks my heart to see your life ruined by the – “Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoia / Trauma”.

Damien is actually taking an enormous risk in not yet showing  your texts to his employer (which he is duty bound to do).

Damien has set a “boundary” or test, for you.

Either you respect his new “boundary”, and continue to see Damien EVERY WEEK …. Or you choose to give into your little evil voice – which tells you – “everyone rejects me”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Damien has NOT rejected you – he has just set a “boundary”.

He wants to know – “do you respect me”.

All you have to do, is say ….. “OK”.

If you don’t say ….. “Ok” …… Damien is required to show your texts to his employer, and they (like Jordan’s employer did) will ask Damien to cut off all contact.

Zoe, ….. please look after your best interests, ….. Please love yourself,…..

Please understand that you only have two choices……. Either you say “Ok” to Damien’s new “boundary”, ….. and then you get to keep your relationship with Damien,

OR

You don’t accept his “boundary”, and he will need to share your texts with his employer, and they will direct Damien to end the relationship.

This… “Duty of Care” principle works like this ….

If you were to kill yourself, there would be a coroner’s inquest.

If it turned out that Damien withheld your texts from his employer, then Damien is in the firing line (if only you had shared this information, we could have saved Zoe’s life.

Damien would be scape-goated, and may be made un-employable

Please talk this through with nurse – “Kath”.

She understands the “respect test” Damien is putting before you

Currently, Damien is “sticking his neck out for you”

He has made himself very vulnerable

Because,…. He actually loves you, and wants you to walk away from – …. This little evil voice which keeps telling you – “Everyone will reject you”

“If he loved me he would give me that choice not leave me powerless like everyone does!” I wrote back.

“No…. that is not true, Zoe !” my dad wrote. “Damien says that he has been trying to communicate that he is not coping in the relationship for a long time.

You seem to think that Damien is Mr Invincible !

Well he isn’t – Invincible.

Damien is sensitive, and is struggling to cope”

“He hasn’t been coping in the relationship for a long time?” I asked. “What does he mean? His message that day he came to Delmont to drop off the charger came completely out of the blue to me. What does he mean?”

“Oh Zoe, the story I hear from mum, and when I have spoken with Damien, is that he was receiving texts from you well after finishing his shift with you,” Dad wrote. “The story is that you have been sending emotional texts, which Damien can’t deal with.

He is not a psychologist or trained to be a councelllor – he felt out of his depth.

He felt that it was unfair of you to send him upsetting stuff.

I know you like to text (as I do too !) and we do it, as a way to organise our thoughts.

It is just that Damien doesn’t see his job to be your counsellor.

He feels inadequate to know how to respond.

And he feels that it is unfair of you to ask him to give up his spare time to process these texts.

Damien has 15 clients, and only gets paid for the time he spends with them.

He feels disrespected and “used” unfairly.

He says that he dropped hints that this was difficult for him, but obviously he was not assertive and clear in his frustration, and that he needed to fix the situation.”

“What “hints”?” I asked, genuinely shocked to hear all this. I couldn’t even remember the texts I’d sent him. “When? Before he told me he wanted to drop his second shift with me? I’m just in shock.”

“Zoe, I do understand your shock,” Dad wrote. “I genuinely believe you – when you say you had no idea that Damien was struggling, before saying that he wanted to drop one of your days – last Wednesday.

Damien can be a bit confusing.”

“”used”, “disrespected”…. Were those his words?” I asked my dad. “If I sent him a lot of texts and he responded then I thought he could bill for that extra time.”

“No, …. Those words are mine,” Dad clarified. “All I really know is that Damien is unable to deal with your texts – he feels overwhelmed.

He is now afraid to get communication from you.”

All of these messages from my dad made me feel so shit about myself and threw me into my old trauma so much that I tried, multiple times, to kill myself on the ward. I would empty the rubbish bin in my room, or in the bathroom, tie the plastic bag around my head and try to suffocate myself, until I gave up or the nurses found me. Kath the nurse found me hiding in my sleeping bag with the bag around my head and quickly checked my pulse. I didn’t manage to do much damage, except give myself a headache.

I found comfort in “If I Die Young” by Michael Henry and Justin Robinett, “Asleep” by The Smiths, and “Cutter’s Lullaby” during my darkest hour.

“I am ready to die,” I told Kath, with “Star Seeds Come Home“, a song a friend of a friend made, playing in the background. “My soul is ready to go.”

“What is this you’re listening to?” Kath asked.

The nurses took my belongings and told me I had to keep my curtains open so they could see me from that point onwards. I then went out into the courtyard in a fit of rage and scribbled disturbing messages on the walls with chalk.

I paced up and down blasting angry music. I listened to a lot of Lunatic Soul.

“I can’t describe what’s going on with me,” were lyrics blasting from my phone. “A different nature moving rapidly. Being half way here and half way somewhere else. My whole life starts to flash in front of me…

I regret all those things that I had left undone
And I wish I could fix everything that was wrong
I wish I could tell you how sorry I am
This is not the end
It’s the start of something that I’m really scared of
That I’m scared to life
I’m scared to life”

I then tried to kill myself again. I had taken the roll of plastic bags that were left at the bottom of the bin in the bathroom and hidden them in my pocket, so I had plenty left. I had just passed the point where my body stopped fighting it and I started to surrender when the nurses found me again. They brought me inside. I then lay on the floor behind my bed and tried again. Whoever said suicide is the “easy way out” obviously has not tried.

“PAPU doesn’t seem to be helping her,” a male nurse said.

I hated that I was just confirming their belief that hospital does nothing to help a person with BPD.

They seemed annoyed that I wouldn’t get up off the ground.

In the end Kath said it would be best to take some medication and go to sleep. She had already given me 10mg of diazepam but it did nothing. She then gave me 10mg of olanzapine. It was a wafer, which I usually refuse as I believe it is poison and full of carcinogenic chemicals, but I was in such a bad way that I accepted it. She put it in my mouth and I let the bitter tablet dissolve. I still couldn’t sleep, and was up again shortly. I was given more benzos, 20mg of temazepam this time and two tablets of melatonin. I got a few hours sleep but then woke up again around 4 or 5am. I then asked for more diazepam.

Being told that Damien was scared of communication from me brought me back to my years at school where I was accused of sexually assaulting my friend Tamsyn when I was six. I was separated from her and other friends. We ended up at the same high school together and there her friends rallied against me, telling me that Tamsyn was afraid of me so they had to keep me away from her to protect her. They threatened me when I went anywhere near her. She refused mediation with me. I was made out to be this horrible, abusive person.

My final day in PAPU was distressing. I was told Damien had gone on stress leave, which made me feel even worse about myself.

“I’ve burnt the poor guy out,” I told my psychotherapist, who was going to mediate things between us. I told him I felt so sorry for him (my psychotherapist) as he was all I had left now and I would probably burn him out next. He assured me that I could text him all I liked as he had spoken with my NDIS coordinator and she said he could be reimbursed for all the texts.

“In the end we lose everyone and everything,” I wrote to my therapist. “All we are left with is ourselves. But I feel like I’ve lost even that. There have been times lately I haven’t even recognised myself in the mirror.”

I felt like I was being sent home to a war torn ghost town now that I no longer had Damien. I just froze and felt like crying when I went through my bag and found things I’d bought with Damien. I ran the texts I sent Damien past some people in a Facebook group for clients harmed by therapists/mental health professionals. Most members sided with Damien. They told me I was verbally abusive towards him so no wonder he doesn’t want to hear from me.

“Is there a group for therapists harmed by clients?”, one member posted.

“They’re being quite patient, if a client swore and spoke like that other therapists would use it against you – terminate you, write how you’re disrespectful and inappropriate,” another member wrote. “Therapists have responded worse with clients who hasn’t even spoken like that.”

A nurse tried to get me out of bed to have a shower.

“Said with love, but I can smell ya,” she said. I hadn’t showered in over a week, I hadn’t changed my clothes and I had my period.

“It’s too much,” I told her. “ I don’t give a shit about my life, let alone a shower.”

She told me she would be calling my dad to get him to pick me up then. Thankfully my dad said he couldn’t come until five, so I got a bit longer there. I managed to get up and have a shower. They had left me some clean clothes to change into: a navy cotton tee, which brings out the blue in my eyes, and some pink underwear, which actually fit me.

“Do you feel better from the shower?” the nurse asked me. I didn’t say anything.

“Lets not admit that I was right,” she joked.

It was my 32^nd birthday. A couple of friends wished me happy birthday, which felt like waving a red flag to a bull. It was not a happy birthday! It was yet another CRAPPY birthday! I sat in the courtyard alone. A nurse came out.

“I hear it’s your birthday,” she said. “Do you want to celebrate it?”

“I don’t give a shit about my birthday, but thank you,” I wrote her.

I was distressed about Damien, about life, about the world, about my body, my tremor, my injuries, my vibrations and all my other physical ailments, about being sent home no better to a shit home life. I have these ugly red web-like marks on the insides of my thigh which I found out were caused from using my hot water bottle too much over many years. It is called “toasted skin syndrome”, where repeated exposure to low-level heat causes skin damage. I found out about it through an autism group, where a member posted that her attempts to self-sooth through the use of a heat pack had damaged her skin. Kath found me outside crying with my pants down taking photos of my legs, which also frequently bruise and I have no idea why. She asked what was wrong.

“I’m ugly,” I told her.

“You’re not,” she said. “The marks will go away.”

“They won’t,” I said. Apparently the condition is irreversible. I now cannot wear short dresses, skirts or shorts as I feel self-conscious. I tried to stay positive and shared with the autism group the poem I wrote a few years ago about our skin condition.

“Oh, thank you so much for sharing your beautiful poem with me!” one member wrote. “It is amazing how it captures how I feel too. I love it so much. I am sorry that you must live with LR as well. Sending love from one mermaid to another <3”

“You are beautiful,” I told her. “I’m glad you liked the poem <3”

“Thank you so much for writing such a kind and thoughtful comment to me <3” she replied.

So that was something nice at least amidst the horror of my life. I still fell into a deep suicidal depression again, though. I knocked on the door of the nurse’s station and played “Suicidal Thoughts” by The Notorious B.I.G.

“When I die, fuck it, I wanna go to hell. ‘Cos I’m a piece of shit, it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell,” the song spoke for me. “All my life I been considered as the worst. I swear to God I just want to slit my wrists and end this bullshit. I’m glad I’m dead, a worthless fuckin’ Buddha head. The stress is buildin’ up, I can’t, I can’t believe suicide’s on my fuckin’ mind, I wanna leave. I swear to God I feel like death is fuckin’ callin’ me. But nah, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Where did you find this song?” the nurse, who I’ve never thought much of, asked me.

I showed her my YouTube “suicide playlist”.

She told my nurse Kath, who came to see me. I told Kath I wanted to kill myself that day. I wanted the day of my birth to also be the day of my death.

“Why?” asked Kath.

“I don’t want another year of this,” I said. “Plus it lines up nicely, to die on the day I was born. My OCD mind likes that.”

“Well that would be very sad for your parents,” Kath told me, and then she got up abruptly and left mid conversation.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to leave on a bad note,” I later wrote to Kath. “The stay has helped but it’s just been hard as a lot more crappy things have happened while I’ve been here which keeps on knocking me. I will try and make it through another year.”

I wrote the message as I was scared they would never let me stay this long again as they’d think it only made me dependent and worse.

“Thank you Zoe, I appreciate that,” Kath said.

After I was discharged I had some dinner and orange cake with my parents. My mum said that she had texted Damien saying that it had been a very stressful few weeks and if he wanted to talk about it he could contact her. She said he did reach out to her and told her he was dealing with family issues and was basically crumbling. She said it in a non-blaming way which I received better than all the texts Dad had sent me while in hospital.

I have been reflecting on my relationship with Damien. I have wondered if I have become too dependent on him, like he said. When he told me in the car recently that he wouldn’t be around forever, I went very quiet and teary. Then when I went to the farm, my freak out which led me to walk in front of traffic started when I got a text from Damien and wanted to reply but couldn’t as my new phone wouldn’t send an ordinary text (it often turns it into this stupid “chatting with” option where the other person has to be “online”) and the battery was dying as well. So I can see Damien’s point, but I still don’t think it justifies cutting back our sessions. I also felt a sense of betrayal, like the things I shared with him were later used against me to penalise me. There was the time when I had told him I was thinking of killing myself in a tent. I later asked him to drive my friend and me to a camp site because we were thinking of going camping. My friend was homeless and I told Damien that we just wanted to do something nice amidst our miserable lives, but he would not help us. I felt like a similar thing happened here, where I mentioned to Damien that I saw him more than my friends and would be sad if I lost him. He then ran with it and used it as an excuse to cut back our sessions.

I spoke about the situation with my autistic fairy friend.

“This society, the way people think about dependence/friendships and cutting people off is just strange and unnatural,” she commented.

“You’re right we live in such an individualistic society which sees dependence on other people as a bad thing,” I wrote.

She is somebody who knows deprivation well, having lived her entire life homeless with no electricity or water.

“I’ve just lived in deprivation all my life,” I wrote to her. “I know that is something you can relate to, though for me it’s been socially and emotionally rather than materially. The deprivation of friends, emotional support, understanding, touch, love etc. So when I find someone like Damien my NDIS worker who is kind and gets me and is here to support me I tend to hold onto them for dear life. And it feels so so cruel and painful when they withdraw that from me. I can’t just go and replace them with another worker either. That’s not the way I’m wired.”

Today I read a piece by writer Whitney Hanson which reminds me of Damien and all his predecessors:

I have been alone all my life having to deal with bullying and the most fucked up endless shit unimaginable. I should have received help much earlier than I did, and I believe that is why I have become so “needy” now, if that’s the right word. It’s not really that I’m “needy”, I have the same needs as any other human being. It’s just that they have been denied for so long, first by other people and then by the defense structures my mind has built up to survive, such as not letting most people get close to me.

I think if Damien had of explained that he’s got his own stuff going on, is just not coping and needs to cut back on his work then I would have understood. But instead he went all paternalistic and accused me of being too dependent on him, then told my parents he’s scared of communication from me. It sounds like this had actually been building for a while and I had no idea. I didn’t think I texted him all that much but would have stopped if I knew it was stressing him so much. For example I used to email my physiotherapist a lot. He eventually said the emailing was getting too much and set a boundary of no emails between 8pm and 9am, and I accepted that. Damien may feel disrespected by me, but I also feel disrespected because I wasn’t included in the decision to cut my sessions, it was just dumped on me, like I am a child rather than an adult capable of making my own choices. I feel like we had many other ways to deal with this situation, as I said in my texts to him which I included in the last post.

Below are some screen shots of the more supportive responses I received when I posted the situation to the Facebook group (except for one).

I ended up turning off comments to my post.

“I am extremely disappointed with the majority of comments I have received here,” I wrote. “I made myself extremely vulnerable posting this and have been feeling bad, suicidal and traumatised over this whole thing. This group no longer feels like a supportive space and I feel like leaving it. Thank you for the few of you who showed me empathy, it has meant a lot. But the rest of the comments are leaving me so distressed that I will be turning comments off now as I can’t handle this.”

After considering everyone’s feedback, I decided to write this final text to Damien:

I feel I was very generous in this message. I know I don’t have to be the “big” one and write a message like this; it reminds me of the way some people grow up with the roles reversed, where as children they have to care for their parents. But I wanted to write the message and meant everything I said. I also left myself vulnerable in this message, as Damien may very well say he doesn’t want to see me at all anymore. He hurt me. He left me powerless. He re-traumatised me. He set me back massively in my healing. He made me feel like a burden. But I can forgive him. I listen to “I Forgive You” by Thomas Newman and forgive him. I hope he can also forgive me and we can give our relationship another go. I don’t know when or if he will get the message. He may have blocked me, who knows. I feel a lump in my chest every time I see items in the house he helped me pick up, or go to places we went together. The memories of him are everywhere. I need his help driving me to places, then realise he’s not around, and getting another worker to take me doesn’t feel right as I don’t want to “replace” him, even though I know it would not bother him at all and he’d be glad to see me rely on other people. It just reminds me of his absence and it hurts. I believe the trauma even goes back generations; my mum was adopted and so was her mother. I feel like a little child being put up for adoption. I feel like Astrid in White Oleander who was passed from foster carer to foster carer, tragedy following her everywhere. A part of me craves a relationship with a caring professional, but another part of me pushes back and tells me it’s best not to get emotionally involved with these people. Maybe use them for practical reasons, such as to drive me places, but do not talk to them and do not form a relationship with any of them. Damien’s organisation arranged for another women, Sofie, who I have seen quite a few times already, to see me on Wednesday. But I cancelled the session as I am in too much grief right now. My mum has been helping me with shopping and meals, dropping off food as I struggle to make it to the shops.

It would be sad if Damien and I could no longer see each other, but my attachment has shifted a bit and I no longer beat myself up. As one of my favourite poets, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, writes in her poem “The Invitation”, “I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself”. I have remained true to myself this entire time. I have expressed myself clearly. I also know I deserve more than bread crumbs of care. As is quoted in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, “We accept the love we think we deserve”. I used to put up with a lot of shit, but I am beginning to see I am worth more than that. I know my worth, and with worth comes anger.

My rage is not abuse, it’s somebody begging for their humanity to be acknowledged.

I once read a quote which said that feminine energy is actually very dark. It’s not all love and light and sweetness. Devine Feminine is this: “Respect me or be destroyed”.

To echo the words of writer Stephanie Bennett-Henry, I am no longer afraid of being honest and raw and downright brutal with how I choose to (or choose not to) hammer words out of my mouth.

I’m no longer afraid to show myself without a designer label, without any coat of sugary bullshit.

I’m no longer afraid of someone telling me I’m not ladylike.

I’m no longer afraid to say fuck you.

I’m no longer afraid to stand up for something I believe in, including myself.

I’m no longer afraid to show my truth to a world that says I can’t be me.

I’m no longer afraid to say, “I will never be anything less than me and if it bothers you, get out of my life”.