My Grade 1 teacher was the only adult who was nice to me at St Thomas Mores, my second primary school which I spent half of prep and half of grade 1 at. Her name was Mrs Warner. I was always late as my family only had one car which my dad took to work so my mum would have to walk me and the pram containing my baby sister up the hill to school each morning. It was a real struggle but Mrs Warner was always glad to see us and told the school that I was a good kid when they were all demonising me as a child of Satan. After I left St Thomas Mores I wrote Mrs Warner letters but that eventually fizzled out. I wish I could talk to her again. Tell her how my life has turned out and perhaps connect the dots of my past. I know 6-year-old me still lives on inside me, would like to see her again and continues to search for a kind figure like her amidst all the abuse, scapegoating, social exile and hate. She doesn’t know it is 2024 now and that the world has moved on. Continue reading “Reflecting on primary school”
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”
“You build me up, you break me down. My heart it pounds, yeah you got me. With my hands up, you got me now, you got that sound, yeah you got me.” Ke$ha – TiK ToK
It is the first time I’ve been able to blog since my last post a week or so ago. It’s felt like the longest week of my life. I feel like I could write a whole book on this week alone. The disturbing saga continues, without resolution, like a piano with endless keys which just get lower and lower.
The psych ward only gave me two nights, even though I asked for longer. They wanted to dump me in a facility called PARC, a non-clinical mental health facility, which people stay in for a week as a “step down” from hospital, or a “step up” from home to prevent a hospital admission. But there were questions about my medical stability. I was barely eating and the hospital wanted to do a blood sugar level test which involves pricking your finger but I was scared of the test so refused it. The nurses said they’d come back in half an hour. I then got in the shower when they came to the door to avoid getting the test done. I was so traumatised in general- by life, by the way they just wanted me out when I was acutely unwell- that I became mute. I am still speculating on what is causing my muteness, which I will discuss later, but whatever it was, I just couldn’t will myself to speak. The day of my discharge one of the doctors came in and told me PARC wouldn’t take me if I wouldn’t speak. I felt like she thought I was being manipulative and could blackmail me into talking. I brought up The Shutdown Dissociation Scale research paper on my phone and showed it to her. One of the symptoms is muteness. There is some more great information about the different responses to trauma on this page.
“We don’t follow that here,” the doctor said.
She said if I didn’t go to PARC they’d just be sending me home. I couldn’t believe it.
“So you’re just going to send me home in this state?” I wrote to her, with gestures of disbelief. “This is discrimination against people with disabilities.”
Becoming non-verbal is common in autism when we become overwhelmed, as is shown in the series Heartbreak High, with one of the autistic characters, Quinni, becoming mute for a while after her horrible girlfriend put her through hell.
“I’ll get your discharge papers ready,” the doctor told me. “Have a good day!” Continue reading “Negligent hospitals, mute, trauma, autistic burn out and the fight for freedom”
It’s been a bit over a week since I was discharged from hospital, and I’ve found myself on a bit of a slippery slope. I’m stuck in some bad patterns, particularly with my sleep which is all over the shop. As much as I want to sleep at night, I feel a compulsion to sit up. I’ve been awake many nights working on various creative projects: a new site for my photography, a new video for my YouTube channel, and even designing some sexy clothes such as onesies, singlets and underwear to sell with slogans such as “I am the hot in psychotic”, and “cute but psycho”. When I do go to bed earlier, I find I lie there and all these painful feelings which I usually block out hit me. I’ve still been feeling very touch starved, as I mentioned in my last post. I started searching the internet for “professional cuddlers”, and wrote a personal essay to one of them telling them all about my deprivation, my distress, my kundalini awakening and the buzzing sensation on my head. I haven’t heard back.
I’ve been feeling as emotional and sensitive as I do when I have PMS, but my period has just passed. I think maybe the sleep deprivation is messing with me. I’m having ginormous reactions to things most people would be able to get over. I had a break down over a carrot. Yes, a carrot. I was in the kitchen making some juice. My dad had just got home and I didn’t want to be around anyone, so I was trying to finish it as quickly as possible so I could return to my solitary life. I pulled out a carrot from the juicing carrot packet I bought. It was such a funny looking carrot. It was two carrots attached to the one. It looked like two sexy legs, with a wide hip and then narrow ankles. I wished I had of kept it or taken a photo of it for social media, but I was hyper focused on the task, cut it up and blended it. I immediately regretted it, and felt overwhelming sadness as I had given it human qualities. This triggered a break down in me, and while I usually implode quietly behind closed doors, it all came out in front of my dad. I cried and hit things and told him I couldn’t stand my life. My dad said it was just my autism. I get obsessed with the task before me, like he is obsessed with doing up his friend’s house right now so it can be put on the market, and I don’t like to be interrupted. Still, I couldn’t get over it. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “I feel like rubbish!” I screamed. I shut the door of my bedroom and took 10mg of diazepam and 10mg of olanzapine. I then called Lifeline as I felt like I might overdose again. While I’ve found most people at Lifeline to be great, I didn’t feel this lady really cared or got me. When I told her about my touch starvation she told me to hug a toy. She kept asking me to do something I enjoy, like painting. Quite frankly I was beyond it and it felt belittling of the crisis I was in. I started looking for some strong, codeine-containing painkillers. At this point she decided to end the call and hung up on me, leaving me very unsafe. Perhaps fortunately, I couldn’t find the medication I was after. My OCD kicked in and my focus quickly shifted from the carrot to finding the medication. I then had a break down over this. I got more and more agitated and felt like I was going to pass out. I couldn’t stand my life. The house is a mess and I never have it in me to clean it up. I couldn’t stand constantly losing things. I move and put things down mindlessly all the time. There was a thread about this in a dissociation group I’m part of and the person called it “micro losses of time”. A lot of people in the group had been misdiagnosed with ADD when really it was dissociation causing them to forget where they put things.
I finally found the medication under a pile of clothes on my floor. My dad suggested going to the beach to take my mind off the carrot, so at midnight we went to the beach. Nothing could make me feel better. As soon as we got there, I said I wanted to go home. I was feeling a bit sedated from all the medication I had taken. I went to bed when we got home and slept until 4:30pm the next day. When I woke up I felt depressed as shit, like I’d been run over by a truck.
I saw my disability worker yesterday and we went back to the beach. It took me a while to get going as I hadn’t sleep that night either. I was totally fucked. When we got to the beach I realised I’d picked up the wrong bag and didn’t have my sunscreen. The sun was strong and I could feel myself burning. My disability worker went to the shops over the road to buy some more, while I hid under a towel as seagulls swarmed on me, after the food I had bought. I was so tired I felt I could have a nap on the sand. It was a beautiful day at the beach. The water was still, clear and not too cold. No body was ruining the tranquility with music, as people often do. We didn’t have enough time there though. My disability worker told me I only had three minutes to swim before we had to leave. I should have told him to leave me there and caught a taxi home, but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t make any decisions. I was teary the entire trip home. It’s super annoying being dependent on other people to do things. I have very bad driving anxiety and am not able to drive to the beach myself.
I continued to forget things, leaving my dinner in the oven. I went to bed at 8pm last night fully clothed and then woke up at midnight. I then got up and sat on the computer for the rest of the night. Someone online told me I should kill myself. I have been bullied my entire life, and it seems like I will always be a target. I went back to bed at around 4am. I felt strangely relaxed and started slipping deeper and deeper. That is when I had another one of my terrifying, trippy dreams where I am not able to wake up. I was trapped in my subconscious mind, and though I was dead or stuck in some kind of purgatory. I was screaming at the top of my lungs but no sound made it through. In the dream I was struggling to hear too. I didn’t know if my dad was a hero or a villain. I didn’t feel my age in the dream, I felt like a child, and I was screaming “stop it daddy, please daddy, stop it”. But at the same time I was trying to make it to his end of the house so he could help me. Trying to alert him to something really bad that was happening. The atmosphere was incredibly dark, like always. It reminds me of the way I take photos and then edit them to make them monochrome, which completely changes the mood. No body could reach me and I couldn’t reach anyone. I was stuck in my bed. I tried to reach for my phone to call 000 but I couldn’t move or feel it and had no voice anyway. I was stuck behind a veil where I could see my familiar surroundings but I couldn’t interact with them. It was the loneliest, most awful feeling ever. “Help me, help me, help me”, like I was locked inside a cave and my echo was the only voice coming back. It was just like the night I took some strong marijuana oil and went psychotic, as I wrote about here. I think the marijuana oil really brought out the contents of my mind for everyone else to see. All that stuff is still there in my mind.
I found a whole lot of people online here who experience this same thing. They talk about the “false awakenings”, one of the worst parts of the dream. Just when you think you have woken up and are back in your normal surroundings, you realise something is off and you are still stuck in the dream. It reminds me of Stranger Things where Dr Brenna got Eleven to go into her trauma at the lab with “One” (Stranger Things 4, Chapter 5: The Nina Project). She couldn’t get away, and just when she thought she had, it all started again. It was a loop that repeated over and over.
Finally I managed to wake up, and I wrote a few emails to my GP and psychotherapist. I read about other people’s experiences of getting stuck in a dream and it seems to happen more often during naps, or when we are sleep deprived. I had also started taking magnesium glycinate yesterday, which I am wondering had something to do with it.
I managed to fall back to sleep and got up at 3:30pm today. I got a call from my mum saying my GP had contacted her and wanted me admitted to a private hospital today to fix my sleep. I appreciate her concern, but I don’t want to go to hospital just yet. I’m still getting over that horrific trip to the public hospital.
On top of all this, I still have all my nervous system issues. The buzzing sensation on my head continues to torment me, and my body remains rattled from my overdose earlier in the year. My heart races when I change position and I have a tremor, which gets worse when I am anxious and makes it hard to draw. My nails are breaking all the time, probably indicative of my deteriorating health, and I have bruises all over my legs. Overall, life is pretty horrific on all fronts.
It’s been another week from hell. My period finally came, which was a relief as I get terrible PMS. I was getting migraines all the time, felt breathless and weak, and had to cancel things I had on. There was one night I kept having shitty, fucked up dreams as well. In one I was being raped. Then in the dream I was left with stroke-like symptoms, slurred speech, a drooped face, and inability to walk. My dad called an ambulance in the dream but the healthcare system was so bloody negligent they wouldn’t send one, which is something I have sadly experienced in my waking life. No one would see how bad I was. In my dream my glasses came off and disintegrated and my mouth was full of metal bits. I tried to spit them out but I swallowed some. I woke up. Then when I finally managed to fall back to sleep again I had another nightmare. This time I dreamt that someone knocked on my front door at night. My dad went to open it but I told him not to. Continue reading “Back in the psych ward: trigger warning, animal cruelty”
Last night at 5am I returned to my house after spending a week away. Moving and change is something I seem to find very distressing. I was shattered to leave. It felt like being torn away from a lover. I folded up the soft navy blanket which the motel left me. The blanket I’d curl up under when I lay on the garden bench at night, having the whole place to myself. Once I cleaned up the place I lay on the bed under the blanket and listened to meditation music with one clear quartz pyramid at my head and two at my feet. I thought I might fall asleep, but I didn’t. Check out was 10am today, but I didn’t want to get up that early so left last night. Whenever I opened the door to carry more bags to the car I thought someone was waiting there ready to murder me. I feel like I’ve been in a bit of a strange headspace lately, which may have come through in my last post. I feel like I’m having all these intense dreams and thoughts which don’t make sense to anyone else. Continue reading “Unsound”
It is my last day on holiday before I have to go back to my dad’s. I feel like I’m being sent back to hell.
On Sunday and Monday I felt the most crushing depression. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t enjoy anything. There was absolutely nothing I looked forward to. On Sunday night I went to bed early with pills but then woke up again after a bad dream, which I’ve been having a lot of lately. It took me a while to get back to sleep. I woke up at 9am the next day which was extremely early for me. I woke up feeling like my legs were vibrating, as though I was lying next to a generator. It was a distressing feeling and I didn’t know if the vibration was coming from inside of me or outside of me. It reminded me of the mysterious Hum a friend told me about, a noise which torments a small percentage of the population and drives some people to suicide. Yet instead of hearing the noise, I felt it. My life started to feel like a test to see how much pain, suffering, torture, and distress one person can take before they finally die. I felt I had nothing to live for but more misery and very much wanted to make another suicide attempt. Continue reading “This week so far”
I’m not having a great time. I am feeling really off both physically and mentally. Everything gets worse around my period. Last night there was not a single thing that could make me feel better, so I decided to just go to bed early. But I could not sleep and fixated on how fucked up my body is from the overdose. I got up and checked my emails and started a horrible exchange with a UK shop called “void clothing”. I had ordered a black emo dress from them, but changed my mind and asked to cancel my order. I then changed my mind again and sent them another email asking them to ignore my previous email. They still cancelled the order. They said they didn’t get my other email. There was no apology; I was always the one apologising. I said sorry for the confusion but I still wanted the order. The manner of the person I spoke with, who didn’t even provide their name, was extremely rude and unhelpful the entire conversation. They then accused me of wasting their time and Paypal fees and refused to send me the dress or talk to me anymore. Life was already so shit and I was in tears after dealing with them. My suicidal urges returned with a vengeance after being a bit better the last month. I managed to call Lifeline. The first person I got wasn’t very good. He asked me about my dating life and assumed I wanted a boyfriend. Usually I would keep my mouth shut and ignore people’s heteronormativity. He sounded like an older bloke who was yet to catch up to the times. But I was in a foul mood. “Why do you assume that I’m straight?” I asked him. Lifeline should train their counsellors better, especially as the LGBTQIA+ population have a high suicide rate. I think I accidently ended the call early, but I wasn’t too disappointed. I called them back and got someone much better, a younger bloke who was a lot more empathetic and gave me a generous amount of time. He tried to help with my sleep, suggesting I change my bed sheets. When our call ended I managed to change my sheets, which probably hadn’t been changed for half a year, the white no longer white where I lay. I still didn’t sleep well, but I did feel fresher at least. Continue reading “My weekend: suicidal again”
hsphaven 