This wave of despair started on Friday, December 1.  Today is December 31 and I have tried everything I know to alleviate the darkness.  I’ll dig out a few feet and then sink  deeper.  I’m pushing through my third wave of suicidal and self-harm thoughts and plans.  So alone.  So scared.  No one to talk to and even if I had someone, my thoughts and words would make no sense.  My thoughts run away in tangents and even I recognize they are jumbled, contradictory, bordering on madness.  I think that’s what most people don’t understand – even if someone sat next to me and asked me to talk, I’d make no sense.  Opening my mouth would be tangible evidence of my insanity – for me and for anyone listening.

Touch freaks me out.  Innocuous comments send me tumbling.  Desperate to be alone but angry that I am.  Watching others have fun, feeling left out and isolated but unable to join.  Bad mother, bad wife, bad friend … bad.  Just bad.  Disappointing to everyone.  Always have been – my parents wanted a ‘nice girl’ and instead ‘they got me’ – heard that all my life.  Must be true.

Have you seen the commercial where the woman talks about not being able to get out of bed?  I bet many of you think “just get up”.  But it’s not an unwillingness to get up – it’s an INABILITY to.  Do you see the difference?  Unwillingness describes a choice.  My choice is to not feel this way.  My choice is to be normal – not exceptional but just normal.  My body, mind, and soul are not obeying my choices.   I hate myself and I hate everyone around me. 

What if this is the time I find the will power to go through with it?  I know how.  I’ve got everything I need.  What, exactly, is stopping me?  I could stop hurting.  In just a few minutes, with almost no effort, I could be asleep.  My family would no longer have to walk on eggshells.  I would no longer have to fight and claw.  I would no longer have to find normal and then live on pins and needles waiting on the next fall into the pits.

I have no more tools to try.  All my coping techniques are failing me.  Even writing this is not alleviating the pressure in my chest or the clog in my throat or the desire to sleep. 

My husband is in the next room, getting ready to go exercise.  When he leaves, I’ll be alone again.  I’m desperate for him to leave and desperate for him to rescue me.  So, I’m faking it, holding on by my fingernails.  The second he walks out the door, I will collapse into --- tears and then sleep --- an abyss.  He thinks the sleep is good for me – that I’m tired.  I’m exhausted because I’m fighting my impulses with every fiber I have.  Fighting not to eat a gallon of ice cream, fighting not to buy buy buy, fighting not to throw things through the wall, fighting not to say the words that are clogging my throat, fighting not to swallow every single pill in this damn house.  I’m fighting to appear normal.  I’m fighting to do the next thing – anything – productive.  Fighting to make my thoughts coalesce into something linear.  I’m choking on tears so much that the back of my head feels like it will implode from the pressure. 

I want – need – him to leave.  I want – need – to be alone.  But some part of me recognizes that being alone is going to increase the anger, energize the fight, ignite more despair, prove my unworthiness to be with others, validate that everyone is better off without me.  Still, he needs to go.  Soon.

I can’t pull out of the spin.