Obsessing and some pictures

It's hard to drink coffee when your hands are shaking. Easy to spill. Just saying. Either I've had too much or too little. Sadly, or something, I think it's too little since this is my second cup today and I've been up since 15:00. Or it could be something else. Like my nerves for example. They get weirder whenever I think of things that are in some way upsetting, exciting or just makes me nervous for no apparent reason.

Took some pictures of my hair again. I'm thinking of making a collage of all the stages in the bleaching process. For documentation, and maybe it could be fun to look back at later in the future. The light in my bathroom sucks, but it's the best place to take pictures during the night. And since 90% of all the time I'm awake is during the dark hours, I don't have else of a choice. With the yellow light it tends to make me look a bit weird on the original pictures. So I do my best to edit them in a simple photo editing program online. Sometimes it's just not enough whatever I do, but it will have to do. Now taking that into consideration, this is basically how I look now:

The left picture gives more justice to the colour. Right, so my "fringe" has broken off a lot and is now hanging annoyingly in my face. It's very damaged right about everywhere so I have to pamper it as much as I can and wait for new and healthy hair to grow out. I keep it in a braid that I redo every day, to protect it. You see how thin the braid is? Yes, that's all what's left of my hair. Then I add conditioner to make it easier to brush and take vitamin supplements especially made for getting healthier hair.

I realise I'm quite a hair nerd, which is kinda fun. I'm not so much for having fake dreads anymore, but more so for different styles and colours. There is no perfect hairstyle for me, the only way I can achieve what is to me perfection is to constantly change it. I'm not saying every style is perfect, rather the opposite and both at the same time. Like a song. No single note is perfect, it is the change that makes it so good. But enough about my damn hair!

Then what should I write about? Hmm... the healing of my chest is going well, I think. The scabs around my nipples are falling off and leave a slightly gooish surface. Don't know if that's good or bad to be perfectly honest. I've regained a little sensation on the left side, so that's a good sign at least. If it gets worse or something I'll contact the district health care centre for a check up. Or I'm going there anyway after three weeks which is the 31st this month, and that's in just four days. So I think it can wait until then I mean. Okay, that's it for now.

Wake up and endure

I think there will be a lot of coffee drinking today. I've been up for three hours but I can't wake up, can't stop yawning and can't focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. I've already had three nicotine gums and put on two patches of the strongest kind. Singing along to up beat songs and having caffeine pills with my coffee. Something just has to work.

God damn, I want to smoke! But it's not the nicotine that I'm craving. I'm over dosing on it, I can't need any more, that would be beyond crazy if I do. Trying to just hold a cigarette and pretend to smoke it (it looks really silly, I can assure you) to see it that can help even remotely. Nope, didn't work, I lit it. Second and last for today... (How the hell I'm supposed to survive this I don't know.)

My psychiatrist said yesterday that she will write in my chart that I'm officially smoke free as of now. I don't know if that should make me feel good or guilty, cause I still smoke. Very little, which I told her, but still. Had three cigarettes yesterday and there will only be two today and one tomorrow. Then I will be smoke free for real the day after tomorrow, on Friday.

Memories and irony

I hate it that when I sleep for a whole day and two nights and I have like 500 unseen posts on tumblr... Somehow I feel smarter and more connected when I've been awake for 24 hours or more. My brain is a bit slow started. So this is what it's become of my circadian rhythm. I'm not sure if I like it, more apathetic about it. Like I don't care that I'm pulling three or four all nighters, and sleep two or three days in a week, every week. I can't even remember for how long this has gone on.

I'm thinking about my eleventh suicide attempt again. I do that quite a lot lately, just that one. When I could have died. Thinking about that if I hadn't gone to the hospital I would have died that night. Thinking what I should have done instead so that I wouldn't have to be here today. Should not have gone back home, should have taken shelter at McDonalds or something, just until I started to doze off, then walked away to die somewhere secluded where there were no people. In the middle of Uppsala, yeah I probably wouldn't have gotten that far. But still.

So in that sense I guess I kinda want to die. In the sense that I wish that I had died then and there. Still going over it in my memory, replaying every detail. How cold it was, how I sat there on the pier writing suicide notes to my mother, my boyfriend at the time, to my best friend and to the authorities; while eating a sandwich and downing pills with cheap wine, how I lied down and wrapped my leather coat closer to me.

And when that weird domestic worker from where I lived came by and started talking to me. He had a crush on me and wouldn't leave me alone. I lied there dying from suicide and he sat there unknowing, talking to me as if it was just another lovely day. I didn't have the guts to tell him to fuck off. He had just a few days earlier tried to kiss me, and I thought he must be very lonely, that not many people wanted to talk to him. He a was kind man of African heritage in his 50's or so, though I could only understand a few words of what he said with a broad accent. Can't even remember if we talked in Swedish or English. Can't remember what we said at all. You could say I had other things on my mind at the time. Though he was quite peculiar and I couldn't understand what he saw in a young androgynous goth with obvious mental problems.

When I think about that day, I think of a few parts of that memory more at one point, and other parts at another point. It's seldom I think about the whole day and following night. I don't remember at what time I went down to that pier, but I think it was around 6 or 7 pm. And I don't remember when I ended up in the hospital, but they were done at 3 am. So yeah, it was more a night than a day. Mostly I try to remember what I blacked out. The ride in the ambulance, what they said in the hospital, things like that. If I try hard, I can remember when they arrived at the apartment I lived in, and when they helped me down the stairs. But I must have passed out somewhere around there, cause the next thing I remember I'm on a gurney in the intensive care unit, and my memories from there on are very vague.

Why do I keep going on about this particular memory? It holds a certain significance, like the first time I was actually close to dying, so close that some days I even think that I actually did die that day. And I'm just a ghost now. Cause it feels like I am just a ghost and I've been so ever since then. And I can't let go.

So maybe that's why my twelfth suicide attempt doesn't bother me that much, cause of course I couldn't die, I'm already dead. Silly, really, cause I know that I'm still alive. Don't I...? No, I still doubt. There was a risk, but not so high, that I could have died that time too. When you stop breathing by your own hand, like I did, you pass out and let go of the grip, your body automatically starts breathing again. But it's not a 100% chance of it doing so. So that's what I mean, I could have died, but it wasn't likely, and I knew that. I knew that when I took that choice of trying it anyway. So I was more desperate to do it as soon as possible, and thought I'd give it a shot, even though I knew it wasn't likely going to work.

And maybe that is also why I don't think so much about that attempt. It was deadly, but my intentions were a bit wacky and so was my choice. It wasn't even thought through, but alas, my choices were a bit limited because I was in a mental institution.

My opinions about that ward sank a bit after that night. I mean come on, a patient of theirs tries to kill themselves and what do they do? They didn't even notice. I had a huge fucking wound across my neck and spoke with a sore voice that barely held and they didn't say anything. I eventually told them and what did they do? Nothing. So it wasn't so strange that I tried it again the next night. And again the night after that. And again. Four times all and all, until I just gave up on that. I'm just glad I didn't have a room mate!

So I never think about that, huh? I obviously do. But I don't even know half the stuff I'm thinking about, so I guess it just slipped my mind or something. It's so weird though, the psych wards just seem to get worse and worse. "Back in the day" when I was admitted as a minor in 2005 it was really good. They took good care of me and they noticed whenever I was upset, had cut myself or cried. In 2011 I was admitted thrice and they were from bad to worse, but at least they noticed if something was terribly wrong with me. This time... I had to become mute for them to even notice, but nothing bothered them. Not my muteness, not my self harm or my four suicide attempts.

I'm not trying to seek attention. Well, I do, but in the sense that I seek medical attention. That wasn't fake, anything that I did or that happened to me there. It was all real. And after all that had happened I wanted their attention so they could help me. But they couldn't. I hate that damn place, and I see no reason going back there. Everything is out of their jurisdiction and all they can do is talk and change my meds. I already have a psychiatrist, a shrink and a supportive mother, so what can they offer me that I don't already have? I was in for being suicidal, and I was very suicidal, and they couldn't even be on suicide watch. Couldn't help but wonder how many patients there had killed themselves. In that ward, in that room where I slept. It's not like in the movies, you should know.

I'm slightly obsessed with suicide I realise, especially my own futile attempts. This day disappeared too, it's dark for so long and so much these days. I went up at 8:00 after I had slept for 30 or so hours again. I don't remember when I went to bed, nor do I care. Around midnight to the 10th I think. I didn't really want to get up, but I couldn't sleep any longer and I thought that if I was gonna get up, I wanted it to be daylight. So I did get all daylight that I could today, yet it wasn't enough. I'm tired of all the darkness. Do you realise just how much darkness it is when you're awake around the clock and you only get 5 or 6 hours of light a day? Most of my time I write, listen to music, surf on the web, eat, drink coffee, embroider and so on in darkness. I barely turn off the lights before I have to turn them back on again.

Just made myself this insanely strong cup of coffee. I've had like two gulps and I feel dizzy. I bought these kind of powder cappuccinos you mix with hot water. Alright I took one of those in a smaller cup, and mixed in two spoons of regular instant coffee, more sugar and more cream. Like four cups in one! Now that oughta keep me up tonight.

I realise that I really like German as of lately, or for a few months or so now, and especially in music. Many nice industrial bands seem to have a few songs in German, so I whipped up a playlist for that on Spotify. I really do make playlists for everything, don't I? Well, every mood deserves its own music. And I still have many moods.

Maybe it's not so strange that I suddenly like German, cause that's the kind of language I like, in general I mean. Now "that kind of language" is a pretty loose concept when it comes to me. What I mean is hard consonants, powerful and a little complicated in a way. Like Russian, German or Czech. Not those generally considered "beautiful" languages like French or Spanish, that I can't say I like much at all, and I certainly don't find them to be beautiful. Just another thing people consider me to be weird because of. To me it isn't weird, merely uncommon perhaps.

Now I've written nearly half a novel for a blog entry, but I can't seem to write anything productive lately. My inspiration is on hold, but I know it will come back to me. It always does. Still I can't help but wonder why that is, why I've suddenly lost my inspiration. I wrote and created things before, when I was a wreck this summer, so it can't be that, or can it?

I'm more stable now, my mood is stabilised due to medication and oh, how damn much medication I take for my mood swings... 300 mg Lamotrigin and 200 mg Tergretol a day. So how stable am I really? Taking half a drug store every day just to keep me from going from super depressive to manic to agressive to scared shitless anxious fifty times a day. I'm still feeling a lot, not at all zombified and lethargic. I mean, I could even up the dosage further without reaching that state. Not that I need to though. Even I need to feel something every once in a while. And wow do I feel! But just that now my emotions are controllable, except from my undying love for my crush and my fear of sleep that is. How can I even feel so damn much anxiety every night with all that medication in my blood stream?!

However, even though I'm stabilised mood wise, I do doubt that I'm completely in my right mind now. I'm staying up for days in a row, then sleep for an entire day and so it goes on. I get super anxious every night because of a phobia of sleep. I cut every day (except when I sleep for a whole day that is) and deeper and more severe than ever so I'm constantly on a slight blood loss, smoke like a chimney and don't even care about quitting any more, live on microwave meals and don't care about eating healthy, I've stopped taking daily walks and I'm a caffeine addict.

So yeah... I'm medicated enough to appear more stable and together and all, while I'm actually breaking apart piece by piece. It's like my subconscious or something still knows I'm a wreck and will do any wacky thing I can come up with to simply stay alive. This is so ironic I don't even know where to begin. In order to stay alive I do every possibly damaging thing I can think of, or at least if you would sum up this whole last six months or so, that would really be the case. I've tried every possible dangerous, and even deadly thing I can think of really, and then I complain of why it's so hard to survive? I mean what the fuck is wrong with me?! The definition of crazy: can't think straight, like ever.

Wow, now I've really written half a novel...

It's drowning me

I’m filling up my seventh cup of coffee for today now. A mixed feeling of bitterness and sadness is slowly drowning me, and for the first time in weeks I have to resist the urge to pour myself a drink. Can't remember if I've eaten anything today, that probably means that I haven't. Something shatters inside me when I have to cut more than once a day. Isn't that enough? Why can't that be enough?!

Obviously something is extra tough today. My mood still swings, but to the darker side more. I have no creative energy, just don't wanna do anything at all really. I'm jaded by the thought of sleep constantly on my mind, and how I try so hard to escape it with caffeine, cutting, cigarettes and music. I’m popping the last Lyrica I have with a Sobril. How the hell am I gonna manage this? Soon I’ll be a benzo addict as well, just because my fear of sleep is ripping my insides apart. It's horrible being afraid of something you have to endure every day. You seriously can't imagine it if you haven't experienced it yourself. It ruins everything.

It's worse now, cause now I’m actually trying to sleep at night. I succeeded this night, but it wasn't easy, not easy at all... I took my Mitrazapin and Lergigan at 22:00 as I was supposed to, but resisted the effect without caffeine. Held the jar with caff pills, just wanted them, craved them, but forced myself not to. Around 01:30 I freaked out, cut and swallowed two Sobril and one Imovane, got in the shower and stayed there until I couldn't stand up any longer when the effect had kicked in. I went to bed and lied there for at least an hour, scared as hell. Shifted between trying to close my eyes and go to sleep – and staring at my phone, right into his eyes on the picture on my cell phone screen, with jaded heartbeats, trying to force myself to stay awake. Around 03:30 or so I finally fell asleep, and got up at 09:50 when the crew woke me up.

So now I’m even more scared and stressed out, cause it's nine o'clock and the night is coming slowly closer. I’m fighting with all my strength, but it just doesn't seem to be enough. Will I stay up tonight or will I repeat the last? Don't wanna think about it, but it hurts less than seeing a picture of my love with his girlfriend. Thinking of how far far away he is, imagining him holding me, comforting me without words, just being here. My fantasies are so pointless, I wish I could just fall out of love. I hate my fucking heart! Why do I always have to repeat the same mistake of falling for unobtainable people over and over again? What's the damn fucking point in that?!

I just don't know what to do. What could possibly make me heal and move on when I just keep moving backwards all the time? I’m right where I was three years ago again, right in the same fucking mess. The only difference is that I live hundred miles away from my friends and the person I’m in love with now, and I don't go to school. I wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, wear the same feelings, going through the same addictions. Still can't fucking sleep or eat, I'm still filled to the brim with anxiety and struggling with the psychiatry that doesn't have a shit to give me. So what's the point of it all, what's the god damned point?

I've lived this far, I know I can survive it, but that's not the question. This has got nothing to do with suicide. All I want is to figure out a way to endure it without resorting to another failed suicide attempt. Cause that is also kinda pointless. All a failed suicide attempt brings me is shame, distress, feeling like a failure, apathy and complete, utter hopelessness. It's like even my heathen god laughs at me for being so pathetic. I just don't wanna feel this way, and I wish there was a cure for lovesickness. Cause it's drowning me.

Addictions

You know you have an addictive personality when you've been dependent on alcohol, cutting, caffeine, smoking, painkillers and a lot of other things that aren't even addictive. Now I “just” struggle with cutting, caffeine and cigarettes. Three “c”, what are the odds? I usually only have two or three addictions simultaneously. It's manageable, but not optimal, and as long as I stay away from drugs and alcohol I'm fairly functional. After all, both cigarettes and caffeine are socially acceptable, and cutting is rarely anyone else's business. As long as I don't start bleeding allover the place. First year of gymnasium comes to mind...

I wore short skirts combined with tights back then, and had moved on from cutting my arms to my lower legs. I had less sensation there (well, not anymore cause my arms are basically scar tissue now, and all the cutting has destroyed some nerves) so the gashes ended up deeper and thus they bled more. Often I remember bleeding through those tights, leaving little puddles of blood on the plastic floors in classrooms and corridors. I never got any comments though, I guess they all knew it was self inflicted wounds.

Now I’m back to my lower arms, cause it's easy access and well... it might sound stupid but it feels good to cut there. But it's getting hard to break through the scar tissue, so I suppose I’ll have to move on to another area again. Skin is the largest human organ, so it shouldn't be so fucking hard to find a “good” spot. First I wanted to go for my chest (since I kinda hate that part of my body) but I do realise that would not be so damn smart considering I’m gonna get operated on right there in the nearest future... think it through, think it through...

Thankfully, my episodes of alcoholism have been brief, for just a few months at a time. I really don't like being a drunk, to be honest. Sure, the rush of being tipsy 24/7 is quite nice, and it has also helps me sleeping and as a medication for my anxiety (and that's why I've been doing it). But in the long run it just harms more than it helps. It's expensive, you get dehydrated, it's complicated when traveling, it's a hell trying to hide it and on top of all you feel really pathetic.

Smoking cigarettes is by far my favourite drug. Easy access (as long as I remember to bring my ID-card, cause I still look like 17), socially acceptable to some degree and it's not as harmful as the other things I’ve listed. Sure it's dangerous, but you can't die from overdosing it. I have slowly increased the amount I consume it over time. When I was eighteen I smoked my very first cigarette and then had around five a month, then it escalated to about a pack a month, then a pack a week. When I was twenty one I learned how to take deep drags which made me physically addicted to nicotine and upped the dosage to about a pack a day. This spring I took it even further as I could finally smoke inside my apartment, and I’m now up at two to three packs a day. Mostly somewhere around 50 cigarettes, or one every fifteen minutes. Which basically means I’m holding a cigarette between my fingers sort of constantly.

My caffeine addiction comes and goes like my alcoholism, and the two are strangely often combined or succeed one another. What often drives me to detox from it, is as simple as that I get tired of, or feel disgusted by coffee all of a sudden. Though, this is my extreme caffeine addiction periods. Come to think of it, I’m always addicted to it. Just that most of the time I settle for tea and or coke. In that sense I haven't been caffeine free since I was 12 or something... but the caffeine addiction I have now is quite more severe, with 10 or up to 20 cups of coffee a day.

Painkillers. That was a short period of roughly four or five months back in late 2010 (at that time I was addicted to everything: alcohol, cutting, caffeine, smoking and painkillers). I had gotten Citodon prescribed for my headache that had gotten vastly more severe than usually, which is not so strange, all things considering. It was one hell of a time in my life. That Citodon didn't help much for the headache, but it sure made the pain funnier, so to say. It was so easy to overdose it, add booze and caffeine and head off to School... I’m still baffled that no one noticed anything. Except for painkillers I did some tripping on the mood stabilising drug Lyrica, about a year later, until the rashes became unbearable. I’ve abused almost every kind of pill I’ve gotten prescribed legally by various doctors over the years. And also over the counter meds that weren't prescribed for me, but legal in its own sense.

Just the act of abusing medicines like that in general, could almost be considered an addiction in itself. I can be kinda freaky like that, overdosing and combining pills wildly without having the slightest clue of what effect that will or won't give me. Mostly I just wake up with a headache the next day though. I still do it, but not in the purpose of killing myself, just for a rush of some, or any sort. What can I say, risk taking and surprises intrigues me. Just in it for the rush!

I feel like a pitiful being, when thinking about all of my addictions and what I’ve done to myself. What extreme lengths I go and have gone to, to achieve some relief from my own mind. When my meds aren't enough, when no meds are enough, when I try to live independently, when the psychiatry leaves me high and dry, when I can't stand living with myself. Maybe my self esteem has hit rock bottom, but I feel kinda pathetic. Like boohoo, I hate myself so much I’m gonna drink myself to death. Or whatever. I just don't know how to live, how does one do? I’m in pieces and instead of patching them up I just cut them into even smaller pieces. And I will probably always be addicted on one thing or another, just have to pick the least dangerous addiction and stick with that.

Hallucinations getting worse

I've passed 40 hours now and it feels like something's crawling inside me. I should be prepared for more hallucinations the longer I'm awake, but it's just that I never know what to expect. I’m extra sensitive and the world seems so fragile. The seams between this world and the others are coming apart, like a rift between dimensions. It reminds me of the welsh/british tv-show “Torchwood” when they discovered time rifts, like wounds in this reality opening doors to the past and the future, letting people from the medieval into our present time and people living in present time being sucked into the past or the future.

Such is my reality, but not related to time, just different places, or rather different versions of the same places. If I sit in my apartment and the reality as I know it comes apart, I don't go to another world, I go to a twisted and distorted version of my own apartment. Walls changing colour, bugs which shouldn't be there suddenly appearing from nowhere, pictures distorting and their faces change into other people, dead, decaying or even moving. Hollow eyes, screaming teeth less mouths, grey peeling skin. Lights flickering, shadows flapping. Or everything just becomes fake, like a theater scenery, a stage play. Like it was made for someone else and I ended up in the wrong universe.

My delusions and hallucinations aren't that harmless and cute anymore. There are no horses dancing in my tea, sparkling flowers or caramel tasting cigarettes. Now there are insects, shadows and distorted faces; decay, mold and everything I fear. The darkness within me that I fear colours my unreality, for I didn't fear it before, didn't even know about it. It changes my dreams into nightmares, my vague memories into traumas, my weirdness into insanity. My nightmares are coming true. I may not believe in what I see, but it doesn't change the fact that it scares the hell out of me.

I’m scared that if I look into the mirror I will see a decaying monster in my reflection, that the pictures of my love will distort and show me an entirely different person, that the crawling feeling in my body will show itself as bugs crawling out of my skin, that the next time I feel worms in my eye I will try to dig them out and end up blinding myself, that I will cut myself and see that I have no blood in my body and keep cutting until I bleed again. These aren't irrational fears, I have experienced all of this but in a smaller scale that I’ve been able to handle. Perhaps I will keep being able to handle it, but what if I don't?

Most of all I’m not scared of this, but the consequences if it would lead me to a full blown psychosis and everyone at the psychiatric department would have know about it. But for how long will I be able to keep it a secret? For how long if I'm already getting scared of my hallucinations, instead of just fascinated or annoyed by them?

I’m not just seeing shadows in the corner of my eye, there are real, vivid vision hallucinations. I don't just telepathise with Anna, I talk out loud to various voices in public and I don't even know how many there are of them. At least six of them altogether, but there could be more. How can I tell for sure it isn't real? It feels so very real.

At least I feel safe around Anna, but the other voices can be a little tricky at times. I’ve been threatened, told that I’m gonna die and felt haunted. I never thought me and Anna would become best friends again, but I’m clinging to her, seeking her comfort and sometimes I even think she is the only one I’ve really got. It's not true of course, but in the middle of the night, scared of my fucked up mind's twisted games, she really is the only one I have. And she's not real either. But I’ve known her since childhood, we've been through everything together, I know her and I know when I can trust her and not. And she's always by my side, for better or worse.

Everything is so screwed up and intense I don't know up from down. If this gets any worse I’ll just have to suck it up and start confessing. If I’m not alive for my sex change then how the hell would it be worth it?

I’m still fooling myself that I’m “fine”. I’m not bloody fine! I drink 2 liters of coffee a day, smoke 3 packs of cigarettes and cut my arms as deep as I dare fifteen times a day, I can't sleep and I can't eat. Is that my definition of fine!? Yeah, I’m the picture of health. I won't ever be fit enough for that surgery unless I do something about this first.

They were right all along to rule out psychosis before getting me treatment for my transsexualism. I just had different priorities. I still do, but this is getting out of my hands. I’ll give it a week or two, and then we'll see if I end up in all of three psychiatric departments in Visby: neuro psychiatric, personality disorders and psychosis. Fuck it, fuck my fucking life.