In August there were no kettles…there were no cups of tea…but now…this September…the tea is brewed…the tea party is back…LONELINESS BE GONE! IT IS THE RETURN OF THE LONELINESS TEA PARTY
Suicidal
The Mental Health “Spot The Good Things” Challenge
This week, when I sat down to write my blog post, I was determined to try and make it about something positive. Over the past few weeks I have gone on about drowning kidneys, an exploding appendix and suicide, and there is nothing fun to read about there. Admittedly, this is a blog about mental health so things aren’t going to be all fun and games (except for on Wednesdays when we play snakes and ladders…I say we…it is just me…talking to the green snake on the board…nobody else ever wants to play…not that I mind…*Sobs in a corner whilst rolling dice pathetically*).
Still, I have lovely people reading my blog, and as much as I want to talk about all that deep important stuff, I would like to think that people enjoy reading it a little bit, and enjoyment is seldom found when one is talking about exploding organs.
Therefore, determined to write a chirpier post, I sat down today, opened my laptop, placed my fingers upon the keyboard…and wrote nothing. I so desperately wanted to say something happy, but when you have depression that is quite the challenge, and suddenly, as the word challenge arose in my marbleless brain, I became even more determined to succeed. If there is one thing I love nearly as much as penguins and Helena Bonham Carter, it is a challenge (as long as I win of course), and so it was that an idea came to me for a challenge that I would like to invite you all to join me in today (it is a team challenge so we can all win don’t worry.)
I think one of the most frustrating things about living with depression isn’t just the suffocating sadness and inability to feel positive emotions, it is the fact that those things feel so infinite and you cannot imagine an alternative.
If we knew our suffering was temporary, depression would be an easier ride, get through the storm to reach the nice happy place kind of thing, but depression doesn’t let you think that, it tells you that it is here forever and that because you cannot feel or appreciate good things, those good things do not exist. This, as recently proved by an intense and vigorous lie detector test on the embodiment of depression itself, is a lie.
Just because you have no apples left in the fruit bowl, it does not mean that all the apple trees in the world have perished, and even if those apples are incredibly difficult to find and maybe you can’t even taste them when you find them, they are growing somewhere.
In Harry Potter, the Dementors that guard Azkaban/suck people’s souls out/generally float around in shapeless black sheets that Gok Wan would surely improve by accessorising with a nice belt, make you feel like you will never be happy again, much like depression, and the only way to get them to go away is to whip your wand out and throw animals at them made of good things (J.K.Rowling explains it better but that is the gist). It was this that gave me the idea for this challenge, the challenge being to write a list every day of at least three good things to look at as a reminder that good things do exist when depression is sucking the life out of you.
Now you may be thinking “Katie, this is not an original idea, I have seen people make lists of things that they are grateful for or things that make them happy and it doesn’t work.” Well no, in my opinion those lists often don’t work, but this is not one of those lists.
I myself used to keep a list of three things I was grateful for every day and it has been an activity suggested to me many times over the years in my battle with depression. However, as great as it is to feel grateful about things (and believe me when I say I really am), I found that writing those things down sometimes made me feel worse. For example if you are having a really bad day and then you write that you are grateful to live in a house with running water, you can be pleased about that yet then become frustrated and angry at yourself for being so lucky as to live in such conditions yet STILL not be happy. It is like when people say things like “I know you are sad but just be grateful that you don’t live in North Korea”, and of course I am grateful that I don’t live in North Korea (I hear the weather is terrible), but reminding someone of another person’s pain doesn’t take their pain away and is more likely to make their pain worse by making them feel guilty about complaining.
Similarly, I have struggled with the “three things that made me happy today lists” because when you have depression, a lot of the time you simply CANNOT feel happy, even if you know you should. Someone can give you a hug and you can mentally register that that person is a lovely person who is showing you kindness and that it should make you happy, but the logical identification of “this is good” never reaches the emotional sensors that are being held captive by depression, so you never FEEL that good. You could watch a film that you know is your favourite and feel totally numb, hear a joke that is funny yet be unable to laugh, and writing down things you should feel happy about but don’t is yet another miserable and fairly disheartening activity.
This list involved in this challenge however, is not a list of things that you should be grateful for or that you should feel happy or any other emotion about. It is not subjective or about feelings at all, so you can do it even when you are as numb as an anaesthetised turnip, because you are writing down the things that are objectively good, not to make you feel better, but just to remind you that they can exist.
After my post about suicide, I received such lovely comments reaching out to me with hope and kindness, and though it didn’t cure my depression, it served as a reassuring and helpful reminder that that hope and kindness is there. People told me how they or friends and family had been in similar situations but had made it through and though I may not be able to see or believe that possibility for myself right now, it shows that that possibility DOES exist, and for me, that was a very good thing. When I went to sleep that night I still had no apples in my tummy, but I knew that somewhere there was an apple tree growing, and right now, knowing that is enough.
Now, as someone who has been doing this challenge for a week now, I will admit that it is incredibly hard (hence the word challenge) because depression is so good at the whole black and white worldview that “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE”, and finding good things on some days has taken me hours. Some days I have even written my list and thought screw it I don’t even care about those good things, and a lot of the time you won’t, but again it doesn’t matter if you care or not or even if you hate all those good things, this is not a list about how you feel, this is simply a reminder to the objective factual part of you devoid of any emotions.
Things on this list don’t have to be big at all, you don’t have to win the lottery or suddenly gain the ability to fly, it can be ANYTHING that is objectively good even if it doesn’t affect you.
For example one day I was out shopping and saw that a popular shower gel was half price. I do not buy that shower gel so the half price offer was going to have no impact on my life, but I knew that objectively that offer was good for someone and I liked to think that someone who used that shower gel would come into the shop later, appreciate that good thing and maybe even make more good things by spending the money they saved on a hot chocolate to take home.
Maybe you were so depressed that you weren’t able to leave the house that day, or week or month, maybe you couldn’t even leave your bed, but still the key is to force yourself to think of something good even if you have to kind of make it up or get really creative. Even if you were under a duvet and didn’t see the outside world, you can be pretty sure that the sun rose that day and objectively that is good because somewhere a nice hedgerow enjoyed an afternoon of photosynthesis (unless it rained and was cloudy…which is also good because then the hedge had a drink…).
One day, one of my positives was the fact that after taking one of my medications that is absolutely vile, I only wretched uncontrollably over a bowl four times. Why is that good? Because the previous day I had wretched at least five times, and today I already know that one of my positives is that I did a big sneeze (I flipping love sneezing).
Admittedly a lot of the time during this challenge you are going to feel like you are sieving for gold and only finding dirt which you are then painting to fool yourself is gold and maybe that is true, but I still think it is important because even little bits of dirt painted like gold are somewhat of an argument and challenge to the overriding emotion that EVERYTHING is dirt.
So that is my challenge to you if you struggle with depression or indeed if you are reading this blog at all. If you can think of three things that actually made you feel happy then do that, but if that is a bit of a stretch right now as it is for me, just write three things that are scientifically objectively good, even if you feel absolutely nothing positive about them whatsoever. Then at the end of the week when you are feeling useless and like you have just wasted another seven days staring into the abyss, you will have 21 tiny examples that things DO exist outside of that abyss. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe them now, the main thing is that you see them, acknowledge them and simply know that they are out there. Seeing good things isn’t as good as feeling them, but if seeing is believing, then my dears, we are at least a step along the way.
Thank you so much to everyone who has been sending me endless and wonderful support at this really rough time. You are all of my good things and I hope that this week, this hopefully less morbid post/challenge can partly repay you for all of that kindness and be a little support and help for you too.
Take care everyone x
Is Suicide Selfish?
Whenever the topic of suicide is discussed, several adjectives will magically appear depending on the speaker’s opinion on the issue. Over the years I have heard it described as “tragic”, an act of “desperation”, something “incomprehensible” to those surrounding the victim, something “unexpected”, and all of these are valid words to use. One of the adjectives that I hear come up that I strongly disagree with however, is the idea that suicide, and thus the people who “commit” suicide, are selfish.
Obviously I cannot speak for everyone who has ever struggled with suicidal thoughts, attempted or committed suicide, but for me, when I am feeling suicidal, it is actually the idea of continuing to live that feels like the selfish option (I am not saying that this idea is right and that therefore people should start killing themselves all over the place…DON’T DO THAT…I am just being honest and saying how it feels.)
Depending on how well you know me, whether you are a casual blog peruser, an online pal or friend/family member in real life, you may or may not be aware that I am currently in what all the professional psychology people around me may call, “in crisis”, although I personally prefer the term “in one hell of a pickle”. “In crisis” might be more professional and accurate a term, but if I am going to be in the state I am currently in, I would at least like the silver lining of naming it something a little less frightening than “in crisis”, and a little more related to the process of preserving some kind of food by anaerobic fermentation in brine or vinegar. As you can see I am all about finding the fun where I can/describing myself in ways that make people think of cheese sandwiches.
I don’t want to freak anyone out or make anyone panic by what I am going to say in this post and I want to reassure everyone that I have a hell of a lot of people on my pickle like case at the moment. Professional people keep phoning me (not that I answer because I am terrified of phones but they try anyway), I am having appointments all over the place, meetings are being held, I am never left alone and my mum has even been sleeping in my bed a lot to keep me safe on the really bad nights where I am really out of control. Therefore whatever I say in this post, please REMAIN CALM AND KEEP YOUR ARMS AND LEGS INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES.
So, I don’t really know what exactly has sparked off my predicament and has caused things to get worse than they already were (it isn’t just the recent appendix thing…I actually wrote this blog post before all that and am editing this bit in now…hello!), but truth be told, a lot of the time I have been feeling like an outsider watching my own life and my actions in it.
You know when you have been reading a book for a really long time, flicking through the pages without really noticing until you suddenly stop and realise that you only have one chapter left. When you read that last chapter it sort of feels different to all the chapters that came before it because you know that this is the end. It doesn’t matter how many cliffhangers or revelations are being whipped out by the author, you are holding the book and you can see there are only a few pages left. It doesn’t matter if there are still mysteries to solve, if the monster hasn’t been vanquished yet, you know it is the end because you can FEEL it and see it just as you can see the handful of pages that is left.
That is how I feel when I look at my life. I feel like a reader on the outside of my story knowing that of all the mental health crises I have had before, this is the last one, the one the story is going to end on. No matter how hard I look, I cannot see any pages past this, any way around it, this time it is all too much, the pain is just too intense. Sometimes when I have been in difficult situations and have been extremely suicidal in the past I have been able to see it as something that I will eventually get through, I might know that it is impossible to feel that any emotion is forever, yet somehow this time it feels different. I feel different.
I am having a dramatic breakdown practically every day and rely on medication most nights just to keep me safe. Being conscious is currently so unbearable and overwhelming that I have been napping for hours each day just to get through them, the small tasks I set myself for the day have mainly been reduced to “just try to keep breathing” rather than anything productive on top of a task that most people take as fairly mandatory. Even that task however is getting harder by the day, and to be blunt, I physically cannot do “this” much longer.
I am putting all of my effort in and trying so hard, but there is only so much effort, only so much that one person can physically take before they crumble. Every time you drive over a bridge there will be a road sign telling you how much weight that bridge can take to warn you that if your vehicle is over that limit you might want to find an alternative route. It isn’t because the bridge gives up or isn’t trying when something that heavy passes over it, it is because it physically can only withstand so much.
Due to all of this, my family, friends and professionals are putting a LOT of effort in to try and help me through it and I appreciate it more than I can say. I can hand on heart say that I would not be here if it weren’t for the insane amount of support I am getting from the people around me, yet that is what is prompting me to think that actually the unselfish thing would be to just get on with it, end things and stop them having to put in so much of their time.
Even if they love me, even if they want to help, in concrete, factual and unemotional terms, it would be a lot easier for everyone if I wasn’t here anymore, and rather than suicide feeling like the selfish option, it is forcing people to carry on putting all their efforts in to keep me alive that feels selfish. When I am struggling with suicidal thoughts and the feeling that that is the only option as I am now, I am not thinking “screw everyone else I am in pain and I am going to end it whether they like it or not”, I am thinking “I really think this is the only option. The best thing to do for ALL of us.”
Like I said I am so incredibly grateful for all of the love and support I have been receiving lately, but at the same time I can’t help but feel incredibly guilty. My parents are constantly on tenterhooks (I don’t know what a tenterhook actually is but they are certainly on them), they are scared to ever leave me in a room by myself and they are called into my room increasingly frequently by me screaming in my sleep due to some nightmare. My therapy team are having to make extra appointments, extra meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page, texting me, phoning me, and generally suffering under an increased work load simply because I am unable to manage right now.
I have amazing and wonderful friends taking the time to visit me at my house when I do not feel able to leave it, they read my texts at 4am, tell me they love me when all I can see is hatred, they send me letters in the post, cards, even parcels containing amazingly wonderful things like books about penguins who have a tendency to worry a lot (if you have never heard of the “Worried Arthur” books then good God you need to look into them because they are FABULOUS), cuddly penguins and a myriad of other wonderful things that I am so grateful for and touched by, that saying thank you doesn’t do justice to what I think.
Think of how much effort that is for people to be worrying in the middle of the night, reassuring some lunatic who will only worry about the thing they are being reassured about again in half an hour even after great advice, spending money on presents and letters. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW EXPENSIVE POSTAGE IS? A FIRST CLASS STAMP IS 65p…AND THAT IS JUST FOR A LETTER. For a parcel you are talking £5.70 and again, that is only if the parcel comes from within England! If it is from another country it is even more than that! You can’t just whack a crown on your head, snap a selfie, print it and stick it to a letter pretending to be a stamp, (trust me that doesn’t work…not that I have tried it myself…ahem…*removes crown and smiles sheepishly*), you have to pay if you want the postman to carry your parcel to someone, and that is then more effort for the postal service! I AM FORCING THE GOOD HONEST WORKERS OF THE ROYAL MAIL TO CARRY PARCELS OF PENGUINS TO MY HOUSE. They could be at home with their families! And £5.70 for a parcel stamp? You could get six two litre tubs of vanilla ice cream for that price and you would have 18p left! You could get 1120g of chocolate buttons and still have 30p left jangling in your purse! I AM DEPRIVING PEOPLE OF ICE CREAM AND CHOCOLATE BUTTONS. DEAR GOD I AM A MONSTER.
As you can see then, rightly or wrongly, when suicide is the only option I can see, the only way out of this utter hell of a brain situation, it is not because I am selfish and don’t care about how that might affect other people. Indeed it is the benefit my disappearance would be to everyone, that is actually one of the arguments my mind throws at me in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep and I am too afraid to close my eyes incase I see the things that make me scream.
Like I said, I am not saying in any way that I think it is selfish to not kill yourself and I am NOT ADVOCATING SUICIDE IN ANY WAY AND WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO IS IN A SIMILAR SITUATION TO REACH OUT FOR HELP. If you do not have a therapy team and family around you I will put a link below to some of the charities out there who can help you, I am just writing this post to try to explain to the people who may think that people who commit suicide are selfish how it feels for some people who really are struggling with suicidal thoughts.
If you are one of the people who is currently supporting me I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I am really sorry that I am putting you through all of this stress, worry and effort. I promise I am trying. I promise I am looking for pages that could make a next chapter. I really hope that I find them. I wish I could be better for all of you. You deserve so much more.
I love you all so very much.
Take care everyone x
Phone Helplines:
Samaritans – National freephone number: 116 123. They are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
SANEline – National number is 0300 304 7000. They are open 6pm–11pm, 365 days a year.
The Silver Line – If you are over the age of 55, this service is open 24 hours a day 365 days a year and their number that you can call from anywhere in the UK is 0800 4 70 80 90 (freephone).
CALM – Helpline for men experiencing distressing thoughts and emotions. Their national number is 0800 58 58 58. Open from 5pm–midnight, 365 days a year.
Being Afraid Of Your Own Brain When You Have Mental Health Problems
I feel like there is someone in my brain who is trying to kill me. It feels like I am being stalked by something, like a lion stalks a gazelle, but I can’t see how close or far away they are because when I turn around there is nobody there. Nobody else can see them either, they are in my head and unfortunately my eyes are positioned in a way that I can only see the outside world rather than what is going on internally (sort it out evolution for goodness sake, you gave us opposable thumbs now can you please work on swivelling eyes…And whilst you are at it can you please take this appendix away because it is taking up valuable storage room).
I am scared that this thing in my head is going to succeed in trying to kill me and I am also scared that it will fail. I don’t like being chased and sometimes I just want the thing to catch up and get whatever it is planning over with.
You might be wondering how on earth it is possible for someone to be afraid of their own brain because surely if the brain belongs to me, I am in control of it and what it decides to do. You don’t go round worrying that your own fist is going to punch you in the face because if your fist were to ever get such an idea it is likely you would tell it that you would rather not be punched in the face and could it maybe do something more helpful like make you a cup of tea.
That’s the thing though. I don’t feel in control of my brain and I don’t feel like I know what it is going to do at any given moment anymore. I always thought that if I owned my brain and my brain was me, then I would know my way around it. I would know every lobe, every memory, every thought and every desire because…well…they are supposed to be mine. If I have a secret that I keep from other people I tuck it away in my secret brain cupboard so they won’t be able to find it, but lately it has felt like my brain has a whole separate section where it is keeping its own secrets in its own secret cupboard that I cannot access.
“Maybe it is a nice secret” I hear you cry, “maybe your brain is preparing you a surprise party” but I don’t think that is the case, partly because it doesn’t feel like a nice secret and partly because I know for a fact that my brain hasn’t been balloon shopping recently and as I have said many a time on this blog, one cannot have a party unless there is at least one balloon present. If there is something magical in this secret cupboard, I know that it is not Narnia and is more likely to be a direct doorway to the White Witch.
I am worried that I am not making any sense and that I am being confusing in this post but if I am I guess that would be an accurate representation as to how things feel with my mental health right now, confusing and making little sense.
The Depression and BPD are still there, the OCD, and anorexia still have their claws in and dictate every one of my actions, yet still it feels like there is something different, something weird going on. I am more out of control than ever and half the time I don’t know who I am or what is going on.
I keep seeing things and I can’t tell if they are real or if I am imagining them. It started off as spiders, not the most pleasant things to imagine crawling around you and I would far rather imagine waddles of penguins approaching if I have to imagine anything, but I don’t think I have much of a choice in the matter. I started seeing spiders out of the corner of my eyes yet I was able to turn to face the place I thought I saw a spider and I could see that there was nothing there. Now though the spiders are bigger and they have tails. They also have fur and have lost four of their legs. They are rats now. Even when I know I am alone in a room I can feel people standing behind the curtains or crouching just outside beyond the window sill. I don’t know what they are doing there and it must be incredibly stuffy wrapped up in a curtain for hours every day (I can confirm this after years of playing hide and seek as a child), but they stand there anyway.
I am scared that I am actually “going mad”. More often than not I have been having to wake my mum up in the middle of the night to come in and sleep in my room because I don’t feel safe from my brain. It is as though, if I close my eyes and go to sleep for a minute, I am leaving myself unguarded and it will be able to sneak an attack in whilst I am busy being unconscious. I don’t understand the logic behind this fear as surely if I am asleep, my brain is asleep too, yet still I feel so disconnected from it these days that I can’t be sure what it is up to when I am not looking. It is clearly doing something underhand during my snoozing of late because I keep waking up screaming and often have no idea why.
I stay awake all night to keep myself safe and I also have stay awake all night to guard the house, because if I go to sleep ,not only will my brain start wreaking havoc but the people outside below the window sill will also find a way in somehow. It is ridiculous, if there ever was an intruder in reality I highly doubt my presence would be the thing to deter them (a point my psychologist pointed out last week…I think she was trying to be helpful but to be honest I took it as rather rude because clearly rather than assuring me of my safety she is actually implying that I don’t look as terrifyingly strong and powerful as I clearly am and I take the insinuation that I could not intimidate a burglar very offensively.) Still, logical or not, sense or nonsense aside, the feeling that I must guard the house is always there.
It is just a difficult situation to be in because I know that I should be responsible for my own mental health and therefore should be responsible and keep myself safe. I am 25 years old, certainly old enough by society’s standards to look after myself but I don’t feel responsible or in control and consequently I don’t feel certain I can keep myself safe. I have been disassociating for days on end (I will do a post soon explaining exactly what that is because it is an important mental health topic I somehow haven’t discussed yet…FOR SHAME!), but basically it means that there are a lot of days where I am not really “present” and therefore I have a lot of blank spots in my memory. It is all so frustrating I could scream, yet I don’t think that would make any difference. All that would mean was I was scared and could hear myself screaming and I would rather have the former without the latter if I have to have the former at all.
Like I said before, I am worried that this post won’t make any sense as I am not sure I understand it either, but still I wanted to write about how this feels. To try and explain or raise awareness of this side of mental health problems, the side where your brain is so mixed up all over the place that you are frightened of it, just incase there is anyone else out there experiencing the same thing and feeling as scared and alone as I do right now. Sometimes my mental health problems involve being depressed, being suicidal, or self harming. A lot of the time they focus on being afraid of germs, being afraid of food, and now, apparently they involve being afraid of myself.
Take care everyone x
Mental Health Problems In The LGBTQ+ Community
This is just a little note to say that this post mentions incidents involving self harm so if that would trigger you, I thank you very much for joining us today but maybe go and treat yourself to a good cup of tea and biscuits instead. Safety first pals!
I once had a psychologist who, during a talk about my mental health and how broken my brain is, asked me if I thought any of my issues “were because of being gay”. I was appalled.
“How dare you!” I replied. “What homophobic nonsense is this? I am deeply offended! You think people who are gay must also be mad because nobody with common sense would be queer? For-shame! A plague unto you and your ancestors! Watch me flounce out of this room waving my rainbow flag in a fury! Watch me flounce I say!” (please note that this was what I replied in my head…in reality I think I just squinted my eyes a bit and formed a quizzical expression).
At the time I didn’t see what being a member of the LGBTQ+ club, had to do with my mental health at all, but after a little bit of discussion, research, and no actual flouncing, I realised that this psychologist was on to something.
Turns out, rainbow folk in general show higher levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts than heterosexuals, so seeing as it is Pride month in the UK this month, I thought I would use this post to think about why that might be. It’s like that old saying, “if you are gay and you have mental health problems, it is your duty to mush those experiences together and write a blog about it.”
In my experience,I wouldn’t say that for me personally, being a member of the LGBTQ+ community has been THE trigger that led to all of my personal mental health problems, although I know that for some people, it can be.
Often I think it can be things like homophobic bullying and external discrimination that are the reason people who are LGBTQ+ might go on to suffer problems, and in that respect, I have been very lucky.
I have never been bullied for my sexuality, my family have always been very accepting (my mum to the point where she is basically a walking gay pride parade all year round and always gets very excited/becomes a fan every time any celebrity comes out as a homosexual), and I live in a country/time period where it is safe for me to be “out” without fearing arrest.
The only discrimination I have ever had has been the odd homophobic slur shouted out of a car window at me as I was walking down the street, but this has never really bothered me as I don’t have that much respect for the opinions of people who shout abuse out of car windows… I might admire their ability to project with their vocal chords out of a moving vehicle, but when it comes to their judgements on who I fall in love with, frankly, I don’t give a damn.
However being LGBTQ+ has certainly affected me because of discrimination, it is just that all of that discrimination came from my own head and in the early days of my queerness, led me to feeling very ashamed.
Nobody in my external surroundings was telling me I was weird or shouldn’t be gay, but my head was, and consequently I was scared to tell anyone about it incase they felt the same. Indeed I decided that rather than tell anyone, I would start a grand “make Katie straight” mission so that nobody would ever have to find out. You may wonder how on earth one goes about “de-gaying themselves” as surely to do so is impossible, and in that assumption, you would be right. Little old me however, was convinced otherwise.
The idea came to me whilst watching a television program which funnily enough, was about a straight woman seeing if she could undergo treatment to turn her gay…Good lord they show some weird things on TV these days…
Anyway, in the program, this woman was told by some mad scientist to use this machine that would give her electric shocks every time she thought something heterosexual in an attempt to recondition the brain to stop thinking those things. The theory was that if your brain experiences an electric shock every time you think about something, it will stop thinking about that thing (either that or your hair will stick out all over the place forevermore and you will run up one hell of an electricity bill).
Unfortunately, I did not have an electric shock machine. I did however, have access to a lot of sharp things around my household, and I think you can guess how things went from there without me providing any more detail. As part of my “make Katie straight” plan, I set about trying to literally cut the gay part away from me, a futile pursuit considering “gayness” is not an extra body part or a long fingernail you can clip away at until it is gone. Unsurprisingly, that plan didn’t work, but it did get me into a cycle of self harm that I couldn’t get away from and still struggle with to this day.
Admittedly, my struggle with self harm is not about being gay anymore, but the whole situation introduced the idea of self harm as a punishment, a coping mechanism to try and remove guilt or shame I was feeling about anything in life.
Rather than being a punishment for being gay, it has become a punishment for things like bad marks on a test at school, or saying something mean in an argument, and I actually used to keep a little notebook in my pocket throughout the day to keep track of my “crimes” so I knew how many “punishments” I deserved later.
At first I was only doing a few things “wrong” a day, but because I was scared to talk to any of my psychologists about it as that would involve telling them how self harm started, and though I was ok with being gay, I didn’t expect everyone else to be. Consequently the notebook of punishments escalated and got so out of hand that after a few months, every action was considered a crime deserving of punishment, from using a “large blob of toothpaste” (which would use up the family tube sooner and lead to money needing to be spent on a new one), to “not smiling well enough at my friend in the corridor at school”.
It wasn’t until my mum found some blood soaked clothing in my bag which I had been trying to smuggle into school to wash in the school sink before she could see it in the laundry, that the whole self harm as punishment thing came out, and even then I wouldn’t tell people how it had started.
By the time I did tell people that I was gay, I had already been in therapy for 8 years or so and had been through two admissions to psychiatric hospitals, always keeping that part of my identity hidden. Like I said, being gay has never been a cornerstone in the almighty Jenga tower of my insanity so I don’t think that keeping that part of me a secret severely hindered my treatment. I was still able to talk openly and honestly about the depression, OCD, BPD related problems and anorexia in therapy, yet although it isn’t the source of my mental health problems, when I finally came out to professionals it did serve as some kind of relief. Whether it had been important to OCD or not, I always had to watch what I said in sessions incase I accidentally let a possible clue slip like “I LOVE HELENA BONHAM CARTER AND I WANT TO MARRY HER IN A BIG GAY WEDDING WITH A BIG RAINBOW CAKE BECAUSE I AM A BIG GAY MYSELF”. Being able to talk openly without worrying about that certainly made a difference and made me feel more connected to my therapists, because I think if you are ever keeping a secret from anyone, you are automatically reserved around people even when that secret isn’t being discussed.
As you can see then, compared to some members of the LGBTQ+ community with mental health problems, being queer hasn’t had anywhere near the impact on me that it has on other people. In essence, being gay is the vanilla extract in my giant cake of insanity rather than the flour of which the majority of the cake comprises.
That said there are a lot of LGBTQ+ folk out there who struggle so much with their identity either due to judgement from outside sources or internal judgement on themselves, that being LGBTQ+ can be a direct cause of certain conditions like depression or anxiety and it is for these people that we need to talk more about this kind of thing in the hopes that they will be able to seek help themselves. If shame about your identity leads you to having mental health problems, it is likely that shame will prevent you from seeking help for them, and as we all know that is just going to make things worse.
In this post I do not want to do a shoutout to all the LGBTQ+ people out there who are hiding in the bushes and tell them to run about telling everyone about their identity, because I understand that for some people in certain families or countries, that might not be safe for them.
All I want to say is that if you are struggling and feeling like there is nobody to turn to, you are not alone and I can promise you that there are people out there who understand (I am one of them. Hello, it is nice to meet you. My name is Katie and if you bring me penguins we can be best friends). If being LGBTQ+ is causing mental health problems and it is not safe for you to speak to people around you, there are hundreds of LGBTQ+ mental health charities out there for every country (I will link a page recommending some existing in the UK below), and if you can, I would encourage you to reach out to them for support.
I am not going to demand you just get a rainbow flag and feel proud because it is pride month, as I understand it is not as easy as that, but I do hope to offer some sense of reassurance that being LGBTQ+ is NOT something anyone needs to to be ashamed of or punished for, no matter what that voice in your head tells you.
Take care everyone x
June Loneliness Birthday Tea Party
It is that time again! Prepare the mugs! Boil the kettles!
Also, to gain the full experience of this Loneliness Tea Party, please don a party hat or alternative form of merry headwear. Many thanks…
How To Tackle Suicidal Thoughts And The Fear That Things Will Never Get Better
So, I will be honest, I am currently in a very dark place (my parents haven’t paid the electricity bill and I ate our entire supply of candles because they smelled like Jaffa cakes…Alas they did not taste like Jaffa cakes and I am still picking wax out of my teeth. Life lesson: do not eat scented candles).
Seriously though, mentally, things with me are pretty terrible and I am on the brink of giving up entirely. I am losing hope in the idea that one day things will be better, and recently I have noticed a lot of friends or people online with mental health problems feeling the same.
I think that there have been times in my life where I have just assumed that I am going to get better, just as you grow up assuming you will naturally fall into the stereotypical life of getting married and having a few kids. When I was younger I was always watching Disney films, and when it comes to Cinderella or Snow White, there is never any doubt as to how things are going to end. When you watch Cinderella you don’t sit around worrying that she will be stuck sweeping floorboards for the rest of her life, you know straight away that the girl is going to go to the ball in a big ole pumpkin and that her poor choice of ill fitting footwear is going to result in her marrying the man of her dreams. Naturally then, I assumed that one day I would lose a shoe and automatically fall in love with and marry some Prince Charming, without realising that my mother would never allow me to buy footwear I hadn’t tried on to ensure a perfect fit, or that I was a queer little thing who wasn’t interested in princes no matter how “charming” they may be.
Similarly with mental health problems, I guess I have always assumed that somehow, no matter what happens, one day there will be a fairy godmother with a magic wand and things will get better. I do not know how or when, but I simply couldn’t get my head round the idea that this could be it, that recovery isn’t as automatic and as assumed as I imagined princes to be, that sometimes, people spend their lives as tortured mentally ill souls with no happy ending.
Thinking like this, if I am going be in this state forever, it is easy to ask myself why not just end it now? Why draw it out? Why not rip the plaster off quickly as it were. It sounds incredibly bleak, but mental health problems are incredibly bleak and I am not going to sugar coat them to insinuate otherwise. Recently I have been having suicidal thoughts every minute of everyday, and when you don’t think you are ever going to get better, it is hard to come up with a good argument to fight them.
Like I said, I am not alone in feeling this, and I have had many conversations with fellow mental health warriors who have lost hope, who don’t think there is any chance of them getting better so why carry on? Maybe you yourself reading this have resigned yourself to the fact that you are a terminal case, perhaps because a professional has given you the label of “chronic” or simply because the weight of your struggles is so heavy that trying to imagine life without them is akin to trying to imagine a penguin without the adorablessness which, as we all know, is impossible (if anyone wants to debate this issue feel free to contact my solicitor and I will happily see you in court).
There is however one thing that I do find comforting, even when I fully believe that I will be like this forever, one argument against the suicidal screaming in my head telling me to jump into oblivion and end the debates/suffering once and for all, an argument that funnily enough, comes in the form of basic mathematics (don’t panic, I hate maths too but this is cool maths I promise and you don’t even need a protractor or a calculator to join in).
If you hark back to your maths lessons at school, you may remember the point where you started learning about things like probability. The lessons get more complex as each year passes, but in the early days of primary school education, the grand complexities of probability and chance are usually explained via some kind of analogy involving a bag filled with balls, for as we all know, in later life it is an incredibly common experience to be confronted with a bag of balls and the need to calculate your chances of picking out a specific kind of ball.
In the lesson, it is likely that the teacher produced a bag to explain things, and would say something like “there are ten balls in the bag, five green, five purple” before waffling on a bit about how if you put your hand in the bag there is an equal chance that the ball you pull out will be purple as there is for it to be green. Then the teacher usually complicated matters (don’t they always), and added say ten more purple balls to the bag. This would then make the chances of picking out a green ball less than they had been previously, and you will spend the next twenty minutes of that lesson calculating chance and ratios surrounding various combinations of coloured balls in a bag.
Now for the purpose of this discussion lets scrap the balls and replace it with a bag of Smarties because let’s be honest, we are not in some official school right now, we can do what we want in this maths lesson and if we want Smarties instead of balls we will damn well have them (I told you this maths would be fun…THERE ARE SMARTIES INVOLVED).
So, picture life as a bag filled with millions upon millions of Smarties (it is a really really big bag and these are really small Smarties).
All the Smarties in this bag are pink. Except for one. One of the Smarties hidden somewhere in that bag is blue. That blue Smartie is the chance of you getting better in a world of pink Smarties telling you that that isn’t going to happen. If you put your hand in the bag you may very well be right, you may get a pink Smartie and be mentally ill and miserable forever. In your mind the chances of you getting better are as rare as that blue Smartie, but the key thing is, as long as you are alive, that blue Smartie is still there, and the only way to guarantee 100% your belief or the professionals’ belief that you will never recover and are going to be miserable forever, is for you to end it all now.
When I have days that are plagued by suicidal thoughts so loud I can barely breathe because I don’t think things will ever be better, I always remind myself that the only way to make sure they don’t get better, is to listen to those thoughts. Killing yourself is basically like pouring all of your Smarties into the ocean so that the colour washes off and they all become white Smarties with that blue Smartie existing only in the realms of myths and legend. If you hang in there, aka you keep plunging your hand into that massive bag, there are no guarantees of you getting better, but by keeping yourself alive, at least you are keeping that chance alive too, however small and insignificant that chance may be.
Now like I said, I am going to be honest in this blog, because if you are someone who reads this blog, then I consider you as a friend and friends tell the truth so I refuse to sugar coat any of this (the only sugar coated contents of this blog are the Smarties).
If you are in a dark place like me right now, and have spent the day contemplating your demise, I am not here to tell you that if you keep fighting through this rubbish it will all work out in the end. I am not a fortune teller, I do not have a crystal ball, and the only conclusion I have ever gleaned from reading tea leaves is that I seem to have run out of tea. If you keep yourself alive and keep fighting maybe you are right, maybe things will stay rubbish and maybe you will keep plunging your hand into that bag and pulling out the pink Smarties. However, no matter how hopeless you feel, if you keep yourself alive, the chance that the blue Smartie will crop up is there. I cannot tell you the probability/ratio of how likely you are to get better, but you must always remember that if you are trying, there is at least a chance. Don’t allow the fear of being mentally ill forever, convince you to do the one thing that ironically does nothing but solidify that conclusion.
Fight back, keep trying, keep safe, and even in the darkest days, no matter what, you have to believe in that blue Smartie.
Take care everyone x
Born without marbles 