My sleep seems to be getting more and more terrifying and bizarre. I keep getting trapped in other realms/dimensions and am not able to wake up. I call out but I’m stuck behind a veil and no one can hear me. I reach for the light switch beside my bed but no light will turn on. I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep. On Sunday night when it happened again I felt like something was coming for me from the sky outside. I had the choice to die, to go with it or fight it. And while I want to die all the time, when I had death presented to me like this I didn’t want it anymore. All I could think of was how I hadn’t told my dad that I loved him enough. It wasn’t a nice place I was in. It wasn’t a peaceful place. I believe I’m experiencing some kind of demonic, spiritual oppression. I was being led to death. I wondered when my dad would find my dead body as I sleep so late; he probably would have thought I was sleeping, but this time I never get up. I finally managed to snap out of it. I had been hyperventilating and sweating. I then woke up my dad who I live with crying and telling him I’m so scared. Continue reading “Sleep issues, sleep paralysis, terrifying nights, trapped in dreams, demons, dissociation, little space”
This isn’t going to be a long post as it’s 1:10 AM and I need to try and sleep. The past few nights I’ve been sitting up all night shopping online. My shopping addiction has reached an all time low. Only people who have suffered addiction would understand how crazy and out of control you feel. It’s reached a point where what was initially something that made me happy is now destroying my health, destroying my bank account and destroying my life. My eyes were blood shot. I fell asleep around 10 AM today and when I woke up at 3 PM there are no words for how dreadful I felt physically and mentally. On top of all my other issues such as my tremor I was breathless, nauseous, in pain, my eyes were burning and my nerves were buzzing. I knew I had to do everything in my power to turn this around. I just feel so hopeless about all the damage the mental health system and psychiatric drugs have done to me that I just let myself go. It’s now been half a year since my overdose and I’m still suffering. I can’t lie on my right side as my pulse pounds like a ticking clock in my ear. I feel a great deal of sadness about what I did to my body that night. If I could take it all back I would. I really beat myself up over it. But I try to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault. That I can’t help this. That I’m unwell, and the mental health system let me down. The overdose may have been prevented if I had of been admitted to hospital when I presented to the emergency department earlier that week. But unfortunately I have a diagnosis in my file that I wish I’d never received. Once you are diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), you are discriminated against by hospitals and mental health professionals. People don’t want to work with you or give you an admission, even when we have many other co-morbid physical and mental health issues. If you do get an admission they won’t let you stay more than 48 hours. You receive substandard care. This is something that’s been documented in research literature. One study by Gemillion (2003) looked at those with eating disorders. After being marginally, physically stabilized, patients who also had a diagnosis of BPD were removed from the ward in favor of caring for other patients who were seen to be truly sick rather than manipulative. These patients with BPD met all of the same markers for anorexia as other patients, but their anorexia was labeled as a form of acting out for attention, rather than a form of sickness, as it was for other patients. Despite identical physical markers, patients labeled with BPD were then denied care because they weren’t actually sick, even though the diagnosis of anorexia was otherwise made based on physical markers. Patients with BPD must meet standards of illness above other patients. Continue reading “Shopping addiction: rock bottom”
I have to pick my brain apart to remember the last few weeks. All I know is that they have been absolute hell. My sleep, as usual, is messed up. I remember one night sitting up all night bombing my poor GP’s inbox with angry emails. I must have sent her at least twenty emails that night. It was as though a lid had been lifted in me and it was all coming out. I was still going at 8am. The buzzing sensation on my head, which I first noticed when I was given Effexor many years ago, was tormenting me. I told her that if I was still awake at 9am I would be going to the hairdressers to shave my head. I had a few pictures of partially shaved hair cuts saved on my phone to show the hairdressers. I was thinking they could just shave the part where the buzzing is and make it look edgy and trendy. Unfortunately, though, I’m not sure I’d look that great without a fringe because my forehead is big. I told my GP that this makes sense as I’m really an alien. I’m not sure what she made of it all. Continue reading “Sleep issues, nervous system issues, tremor, sick”
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”
I feel like the weather here in Melbourne: all over the place. It is the start of spring and we have had a couple of sunny days, but most of the days are still cold, wet, and overcast. The past two days we have had storms with thunder and lightening. Apparently it even snowed on the mountains.
Sometimes I’ve had the energy to put some effort into my appearance. One night I was watching N3ko Mom’s channel on YouTube. She identifies as an adult baby and also has BPD. Her outfits are art. She pairs cute onesies with beautiful make up. It awakened something in me, and I pulled out the black and white party wig I bought a few months back at the $2 store. I tried it on and it actually suited me. It instantly shifted my mood. I will share a photo of me in the sound-proof box I sleep in wearing the new hair. I am with my clowns, which I bought to nurture my inner child. I had two clowns just like these when I was a toddler. Their names were Coco and Noddy. I took them everywhere with me. I think my mum threw them out, but I managed to find some just like them online (they are now considered vintage). The clowns and I are starting to look alike.
I think a lot of people can relate to wanting to be someone else. If emotions were paint colours, what I’m feeling right now would be a mixture of red hot anger and cool blue sadness, making it purple. I guess you’d call this feeling jealousy. A therapist I saw ten years ago told me that there are no bad emotions and all emotions have a purpose. Jealousy shows us what it is we want. It is like the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, showing us “the most desperate desire of a person’s heart, a vision that has been known to drive men mad.” Continue reading “Something I can never have”
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.
hsphaven 