My nervous system is on steroids. You don’t know how many times I have Googled that sentence. Not surprisingly, I got another highly sensitive person’s website. But still, I don’t think they quite know the extent of it. People say sensitivity is a wonderful trait, but not sensitivity to this extent. If I could make this go away I would. My nervous system detects threat in everything these days. I have been left with chronic pain radiating down to my fingers from a massage years ago. Recently I started hearing a noise which sounds a bit like an electrical hum or mosquito. I went to the doctor about it a week ago. I wish I didn’t. He poked his instrument in my ears to see if I had an ear infection and my ears have been hurting ever since. Everyone’s confused how such a benign procedure could cause lasting pain. But inserting anything into my body is a huge no I’m realising. My nervous system is totally fucked; it is like having a car alarm that goes off at the slightest touch and doesn’t stop. I have pain receptors everywhere it seems, I can’t sleep, I hear the world ten times louder than most people and am constantly in a fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn state. My physiotherapist tells me to practice mindfulness but I think it’s a bit beyond that now. I hate being alive. I hate being in this body. I hate being in this world. I’m assaulted by noise even in my own home with dogs barking, neighbours waking me with their violently noisy electric leaf blower, hammering, and basketball game. Saturday night party heads. People are annoying as fuck. Feels like I live in a completely different world to everyone else. Today a friend from high school texted me. She told me her younger siblings have all had babies now. The last I remember of them were when they were school kids, my friend’s younger sister an obnoxious teenager who blasted Big Girls Don’t Cry by Fergie from their chunky desktop computer when I came over to visit them at their old house back in the early 2000s. People my age are starting careers, families and having babies, while I am 32 and have never had a relationship as I am always in survival mode around people and can’t let people get close to me. Feels like the world has moved on while I am stuck in this sickness amber. Trauma does emotionally freeze us at the ages it occurred. People are just wandering around with their heads in the clouds while a subset of the population suffer stuff most people couldn’t even fathom. I just want to go live on a deserted island, or even better another planet. But it’s not going to fix the pain and all the damage that’s already been done. I am depressed and distressed every day and can barely do anything. I suffer for a living. I wish I got paid to breathe. Life is like a turbulent plane ride. As I said in my last post, I have no quality of life and at this point life has become about surviving the days and trying to minimise my distress until I finally die. What is the point in living? I seem to exist just to suffer, and perhaps write a book about it, if I survive long enough for it to get published.
“Depression is
Living in a body
That fights to
Survive, with a mind
That tries to die.”
My dad has always said that full moon really knocks him about. He reports a “crash” after full moon. Apparently emergency departments are bursting on full moon. My friend and I definitely felt the recent full moon. We were both extremely depressed.
I have been journalling for a week now, and it’s painting a pretty grim picture of my life. I don’t fall asleep until sunrise and sometimes even later such as 10am. I am distressed pretty much every day and I experience deep, frequent lows where I rate my mood as 1/10 or 0/10. Depression has become normal for me. I have no quality of life and at this point life has become about surviving the days and trying to minimise my distress until I finally die. Continue reading “Full moon”
Last night I had the worst sleep. I woke up all the time, interspersed with dreams about my old psychiatrist dying and the feeling that I was dying, something that has become a common experience for me, especially when I try to sleep. I also dreamt about escaping to the countryside, as well as people my age superseding me career-wise and becoming doctors. I dreamt about a girl I used to know in high school. In my dream she had become a psychiatrist and I was helping her run some kind of retreat in the countryside for kids with mental health issues. I was no good with people, and decided I’d be better off caring for the animals on the farm. Continue reading “Excruciatingly sensitive”
“Everything you say to me
(Takes me one step closer to the edge)
(And I’m about to break)
I need a little room to breathe
(‘Cause I’m one step closer to the edge)
(I’m about to break)”
– Linkin Park, “One Step Closer“
I don’t know if the world has got louder and more overbearing over the course of my life, or something has changed in me, making me less able to deal with it. I’m now in a constant state of overwhelm. At some point I developed hyperacusis, where a person hears the world ten times louder than most people. There is a great news report on it here. We do get to the point where we have to live our lives inside a padded room.
I tried to buy some dinner the other night as I am not able to cook anything myself. I had left my earmuffs at home, though, as I was flustered trying to get out the door before my dad came home. I attempted to go out in public without them, which was, as the hyperacusis news report described, a “landmine filled anxiety ridden trek”. I wrote the following text to my therapist:
“Fucking trains honking. Fucking cars everywhere that can beep at any moment. Fucking kids having a fucking birthday. Fucking balloons. Fucking metal wind charms attached to the fucking restaurant door which deafen you whenever it opens. Fucking dogs barking. Fucking staff calling out “no 83, no 83” while I have a break down in their fish and chip shop. Fucking people staring at me wondering what the fuck is wrong with me. I’ve fled back to my car. I think I’ll just starve.” Continue reading “Social anxiety, overwhelm, no escape”
Yesterday my anxiety escalated into a full blown panic attack. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this level of anxiety.
I was scared shitless. I was scared of just about everyone. I was scared of my dad coming home. I was scared of sleeping. It reminded me of the time I was put on a compulsory hospital order and had police hunting me.
I ended up taking off into the bush with what diazepam I had left and a tshirt and shorts to change into. I was wearing nothing but my dressing gown over my underwear. I’m lucky I didn’t have an accident on the way there. I was dissociating, weak and barely able to feel the car pedals. I felt trapped, suffocated and furious when the traffic banked up at one point. Continue reading “Panic attack”
“How could Maroondah discharge me like this?” I wrote to my therapist at 5:11AM on Sunday. “I was so depressed I couldn’t even shower or get changed. I wore the same clothes the entire 6 days I was there. I tried to kill myself multiple times on the ward. I was suicidal the day they discharged me. I’ve been mute for a month. Now I’m home I’m trying to medicate the lows with ADD stimulants and now my brain is melting out of my fucking ears. I can’t sleep, I can’t look after myself, I sit on the laptop for 15+ hours straight, day and night and I get headaches all the time. I don’t know what the fuck this is but it’s not just a fucked up personality. But that’s all they see, an annoying bpd bitch who shouldn’t be kept in hospital or else she’ll become dependent. No other patient is treated this way. I feel like maybe there’s something really wrong with me medically. Like my nails break all the time now and I get bruises all over my legs and I have no idea what from. I probably have scarring all over my brain from a lifetime of trauma. They should have organised an MRI for me in the hospital, and they should have made sure I got a quiet room rather than leave me behind a pathetic blue curtain where I was going mental having to listen to everyone else’s conversations. I didn’t get much sleep there either as they were waking me up at 8am every morning to offer me a tablet of olanzapine full of shit like talc and does fuck all for me anyway so I refused it every time and asked them to stop waking me but they kept doing it. So I was kinda glad to go, but I’m not ok.” Continue reading “Descent into madness: The Matrix come to life”
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.”
Continue reading “Self-esteem and standing on the edge of loss, again”
Since returning to the city I have been full of rage as scorching as wildfire. I struggle to recall the past week and cannot put it into a coherent narrative, so all I’m going to do is go over some of the texts, emails and things I’ve written which I have copies of. Continue reading “Everything good turns to shit”
hsphaven 