00:02 – Truth be known, I’m struggling… a lot

[Warning - there is a graphic description of sexual violence in this post]

Since my last post in the early hours of Friday morning I have been quite busy but also, if I’m honest, struggling. On Friday afternoon I went to see my Mum for a little while and to see best friend. We were all going out on the Saturday night for best friend’s birthday and I was trying on my outfit I was planning to wear out up at Mum’s. Seeing their eyes quickly scanning the extent of the scarring on my body felt horrible but then they both started telling me how proud of me they were that I was now being trusted with a month of medication again and how proud they were that I’d stayed out of hospital for so long. They were nice about the scars but I felt utterly hideous and very uncomfortable with them on show so quickly got covered up again.

Saturday night we all went out. All the girls had short tight dresses on – I on the other hand had my legs fully covered and my arms fully covered. I felt a bit out of place so took just a couple of diazepam whilst we were all getting ready at best friend’s house followed by at least four pretty strong vodkas. By the time we got to the first pub around 10.30pm I was feeling a little tipsy… by the time we left the last pub and began to head home at 2am I was very drunk. But it was a strange kind of drunk, I just couldn’t seem to relax properly all night. I couldn’t get hyper-alert-suspicious-paranoid-brain to shut up. I didn’t join in on the dancefloor, I didn’t let a single person buy me a drink, every guy who got within a couple of feet of me I quickly walked away from. I tried to join in with the laughs but my head was somewhere else all night and all I seemed to do was watch the clock and count down the minutes until I could get the hell out of there and back to my safe little house.

Sunday I felt absolutely awful all day. It seems I’m at that age where hangovers don’t feel too bad when you first wake up but as the hours pass you feel worse and worse, not any better. So yeah, Sunday was pretty much spent lazing around doing nothing. I know alcohol is a depressant but this weird state of mind has been on the go since Wednesday when lovely GP decided to trust me with a month’s worth of medication. Every time I open my cupboard door I hear ‘male voice’ telling me I’ve got them there for a reason and it’s not to prove how responsible I can be with them. But then I hear Mum and best friend in my head, telling me how proud they are of me and I hate myself for even giving the tiniest bit of attention to ‘male voice’.

But ‘male voice’ has been very much present over the past week mostly being insulting telling me things like I’m a dirty whore who deserves to be raped again… a stream of laughter by him every time someone said I looked nice on Saturday night… telling me it would be a good idea to take all of those Diazepam and just fucking knock myself out… telling me me I’ve not made my body ugly enough for him yet and to get a blade back to my skin. He’s angry with me that I walked past the DIY store today and didn’t go in and replace my empty box of blades and it is all I keep hearing from him tonight that I WILL go buy more tomorrow or else I’m going to make him so mad that he will have me [insert warning here to very graphic horrible instructions] “cut my tits off” or his other favourite is “someone’s gonna rape you [between the legs] with the sharpest knife I can find” . Pretty fucked up I know but that is the way he speaks, that’s his vocabulary, that’s his way of showing me he is in control, not me. He is particularly violent in his threats and comments and I am not a violent person, but he says things in ways that flash images in front of my eyes of either me mutilating my body badly or hurting someone else. I’ve never really hurt someone else, I’ve had a few bitch fights, hair pulling and that kinda shit… I’ve punched a couple of people in anger… but I’ve never really properly hurt someone to the point where I could do them permanent damage. And I can’t imagine me ever doing something like that but the things he is saying to me scare me, I can’t deny it.

So with all this going on in my head and his voice talking far too much I haven’t been able to sleep again. I stayed up all of Sunday night, all day yesterday until I finally took a handful (not an overdose) of diazepam this morning around 11am and at finally around 1pm I fell asleep until 4pm. I had promised best friend and her kids that I would go out and see them today now they are back from their dad’s, I promised Mum I would go for a walk with the dogs with her and maybe go for some lunch or coffee or something. Neither of those things happened and other than going out a few times today with the dogs I have done absolutely nothing.

I am very very much at crunch time with regards to my part time university course. I have failed the 20% part of the module. The essay part makes up the other 80%. Normally the lowest pass mark of an essay is 40% but because this is only making up 80% the pass mark is 60%. If I was able to spend the remainder of the week studying like crazy there’s a chance I could throw some sort of an essay together but I have an appointment with my rape crisis support worker tomorrow and then it’s best friend’s actual birthday on Thursday. And to be completely honest I have lost all motivation. I’ve lost interest. But then I’ve lost interest in everything over these past few days.

My head feels like it’s going a bit mental again and I am lacking in strength to fight back. All I seem able to do is lie on the sofa or in bed and battle back and forth with the intrusive voices and crazy thoughts. I feel like I have all this invisible pressure around me: be responsible with the medication, prove to them all I can do this, keeping mum and best friend proud of me, keeping ‘male voice’ happy, knowing I’m probably going to be kicked off the uni course and fail at yet another thing.

I am shattered right now. It’s midnight and I pray I can sleep through the night. I need a little bit of energy back, it all feels like it’s been zapped out of me. I am so scared I’m going to let everyone down… things feel slippery yet I don’t know why. I have no plans to take the medication to hurt myself but the self harm urges (cutting) seem to be getting stronger again. If only to shut him up. And not even the remembrance of the major regrets I had after doing it a few weeks ago are enough to keep me certain I won’t do it again… I think in all likeliness I will give in… because I’m weak… pathetic and weak.

Why oh why can life never just be straightforward? Why does it always have to end up mental again in the end?

16:25 – A bit of a messed up day so far

Well I messed up. I had planned to go to Church this morning for the service at 10.30am to say thank you to God for helping me in my prayers and also to see what that Church is like as I go through my “trying to find the right faith for me” thingy.

But last night best friend phoned and asked me if I was going out for some drinks with a little group of them. I went to say no and before I got the chance she said “you promised you would come out this weekend, you’ve not had a night out since like Christmas time”. Then I remembered that I did indeed promise I would go for a night out with her. So I said that I would go.

Everyone went to her house to get ready to go out, there was the usual commotion of clothes and make up everywhere, mirrors propped up on tables, music blaring, the air a mix of hairspray, perfume and cigarette smoke. Oh and a nice big litre bottle of Russian vodka and a bottle of Limoncello (to do shots with) were both sitting on the kitchen worktop waiting to be drunk. Before I’d even got my clothes changed I’d already had 2 shots of Limoncello and a large vodka and coke. When I was doing my make up I knocked back another few shots. When I was straightening my hair another large vodka and coke went down the hatch. And by the time we left to get our lift into town I was a little bit tipsy and looking forward to a good night out.

It was around 11pm when we got to the first pub – the norm here is to get at least a little bit drunk before even going out because the pubs don’t really get busy until around midnight, then they get so busy you can hardly move by the time they close at 2am. So yeah the first pub was shit, it was just full of guys playing pool so we had one drink and one shot and then left.

Pub number two was busier and had some decent music playing so we had quite a few drinks in there and some shots and then onto the obligatory jaeger-bombs. Around 12.30 we left and went onto pub three as everyone (apart from me) wanted to go dancing – I don’t do dancing these days – I hide in corners and drink and keep my eye on everything going on around me. Paranoia? No self confidence? Scared of being ‘spiked’ and hurt again? I think all three are correct. So I stood in my corner and watched them all dance and have fun and I started feeling really out of place, like I just didn’t fit in. So about 1.30am I called it a night and came home to walk the dogs and get into bed. I felt pretty drunk but managed to avoid the usual vomiting that follows any time I drink these days. Then again I suppose that much alcohol combined with all the medications I take makes vomiting a pretty likely scenario!

This morning I didn’t wake up until 11.15am as I’d forgotten to set my alarm to 8am to get up and do Charlie dog’s medication. So I quickly got up and got his first one done, threw some clothes on and took them a short walk. By the time I’d done his third morning medication and given them some food my head was absolutely pounding and my hangover was in full swing.

After I’d walked the dogs and fed them and sorted medications and all that stuff I realised it was almost noon and I had missed Church. I felt so bad and before the head chitter chatter even kicked off I immediately started to pray and apologised for failing this morning and promised I would do better next week. But that wasn’t enough and by about 1.30pm the chitter chatter was noisy. Very noisy and very unimpressed with me. Told me to try harder, to do better, to prove myself before things would turn very nasty for me. Reminding me of the powers that God has and how they could make him use those powers to cause me complete and utter misery. I tried searching the web to see if there were any churches that do a live streaming service so you can watch/attend it from home and I did find one, a morning service just about to start that was in a church somewhere in America – it was 9am there and 2pm here so I sang the hymns and listened to the readings and turned the laptop volume up full to try and prove to ‘them’ that I was genuinely sorry for not going to a church today.

But they just kept on getting more and more noisy and in the end I was searching the web for all sorts of things – prayers, how to apologise to God properly, more church services to watch, videos on youtube of bible readings, etc. Then I saw a prayer telephone service and started searching for more of them. I could find a couple in America and one in Australia but nothing in the UK. So I phoned the one in America (no idea how much that’s going to cost me as I’ve not got any international call allowance) but anyway a man answered who introduced himself as Jeff and he asked how he could help me today. I was trying to speak slowly and clearly so he could understand my accent but I was getting close to hysterical with all the voices bouncing around my head telling me what I should beg forgiveness for. Jeff said he could hear I was upset and told me it was OK, to take my time, to allow myself to calm down. If only!

Anyway it all came tumbling out about how I’d failed this morning and broken my promise after God being so good to me and answering my prayers for me. I told him I didn’t know yet which faith/religion I wanted to follow but I was definitely a believer that there is ‘a’ God. He said that was OK, that some people who phone them to pray together don’t even believe in God at all, they just want someone to pray for them at a time of crisis. I went on to tell Jeff a little bit about my mental health problems and how all I really wanted in my life was a sense of happiness. If not happiness then contentment would do just fine. I told him what I was hearing inside my head about how God would never forgive me especially not for going out and getting drunk and then missing church. In my head ‘they’ were hissing at me that I was despicable, telling me I should be ashamed of myself for repaying God in this way after he had helped me so much recently. But Jeff told me that was not true, that God would love me and protect me even if I make mistakes along the way. Because life doesn’t come with an instruction manual and we all make mistakes and through those mistakes we learn from them. He just told me to do the best I could in whatever situation I found myself in and so long as I did that then God would be there to protect me.

In the end I was on the phone for about 30 minutes to him and at the end he said a long prayer for me which he made very personal and I began to cry as he spoke. He asked God to watch over me and give me strength, he asked God to watch over my little boy who is up there in Heaven, he asked God to help me find the strength to recover my mental health and to help give me a brighter future. And despite Jeff saying to me that it didn’t matter if I missed Church so long as I prayed at home he could obviously sense how much ‘they’ were tormenting me for not going, so he added in a line about that in the prayer as well.

It’s now around 4pm and I feel a little calmer again. They seem happy with me that I phoned across the world to have someone pray with me and that I have prayed a lot myself today and that I watched the bible reading videos and ‘attended’ the online church service. So I am being rewarded with some peace and quiet at the moment although my hangover seems to be getting worse as the day goes on. Now I remember why I avoid nights out these days. Although it was nice to go out and have a change of scenery it really wasn’t worth feeling this ill for!

I’m going to my parents house for a Sunday roast dinner in an hour so hopefully that will help me to feel less sick and a bit brighter. I don’t know whether to take the dogs with me or not. They love going to see my parents and probably enjoy the change of environment for a couple of hours, but they are going to be in for a shock as they won’t be getting their own little Sunday roast dinner any more, not now that Charlie dog is on specialist food and for the moment that means strictly no human food! Plus they won’t be able to get their usual treat of a few little dog biscuits because it’s not fair to give to one of them and not the other. They probably think I’m being so mean to them at the moment by not giving them little bits of my food or any treats but getting Charlie dog back to good health is the important thing for now. So yeah, I don’t know whether to take them with me or just leave them here for a couple of hours then go for a nice walk when I get back. I think that might be the best thing to do, it also means Charlie won’t start jumping around with manic excitement.

Well, I guess I had better go and do some more of Charlie’s medicines. Then after I’ve been to the parents house for dinner I must get some studying done, I am still sitting about a full week behind and if I have not completely caught up by this time next week then I have no chance of passing this module as we start getting assessments then and know I wouldn’t be able to pass them. I only have one appointment this week but that’s not til Thursday so I should be able to get a good bit of studying done if I can just find my concentration again. I’m hoping that lovely social worker might get in touch and offer me an appointment sometime next week as even though crappy CPN has now left I’d still like someone to be able to touch base with once a week or something. Anyways, enough rambling from me… I hope you’re all having a happy/contented/peaceful weekend.

20:01 – The plotting and planning continues…

Yesterday I was supposed to go back to A&E to have my stitches removed but I couldn’t face it. I told myself one extra day wouldn’t matter and I would definitely go today as I had an appointment with new CPN this morning and the mental health team is in the same grounds as the hospital.

However I woke up this morning alarm beeping at 8am and just lay there thinking for the next hour or so. My appointment was for 10am and as the clock ticked on I continued just lying there, telling myself I would get up and start getting ready soon, but just like yesterday it didn’t happen. I didn’t go to the appointment and didn’t go to A&E to have the stitches out either. I can’t really see how an extra few days would cause any problems with the healing of the wounds…

To be honest I was thinking of just taking them out myself but they are very tight against the skin and I can’t really get into them properly even with tweezers and just a little blade, so I guess I’m going to have to go and have them taken out at some point.

So what have I done for the last two days? More planning. More plotting. Pretty much every minute I’ve been awake in the last couple of days I’ve either been completely caught up in dealing with voices – comments, instructions, filling up my head with the crazy laughter – and when the voices haven’t been distracting me I’ve still been gathering ideas “just in case”.

I’m supposed to be starting my next two university modules on Monday. I’ve received confirmation that I’m enrolled onto them but I just don’t see how I’m going to manage to do the work. My head is so so busy, fast moving thoughts, disruptions to my thoughts when the chitter chatter starts up… how the fuck am I supposed to find the concentration to study? But at the same time I don’t want to drop out of something again or fail at something again. But I can’t lie, things aren’t good just now. In fact they’re very very hard. And I am struggling a lot.

Sorry for such a negative post, I’m away to see if a couple of bottles of wine are enough to let me escape, at least for this evening. I just can’t help but wonder if this is always going to be it, if I’m just going to be this mess for the rest of my life. The periods of stability vs instability are so unpredictable, I hate never knowing how long a depressive episode is going to last or how many different medications I will need to swallow down to try and have a head free from hearing voices.

I refuse point blank to even consider a hospital admission because it doesn’t provide any form of therapy that might help me to feel better, the shocking lack of compassion of the nurses in our acute psychiatric ward is enough to make anyone go from feeling low to full blown suicidal. And don’t even get me started on the boredom, the fellow patients, the arguments, the way you can walk in voluntarily and told it’s just to keep you safe for a few days then as soon as you want to leave you are suddenly detained under the mental health act.

No. Hospital is a definite no no. Never again. And I can’t even go and have some stitches taken out at the hospital because I’m so convinced they will see right through my lies when I say I’m OK and I don’t trust them not to take control away from me. So I have to just hang on and hang on until I get a moment where I feel like I can paint on a fake smile, breathe calmly and just go in and get the bloody things out.

Hmmz. I’m confused. Very confused. I keep hearing the words “choose this path” and I’m not sure where “that” path will take me. Anyway, I’m sure whatever path I’m destined to walk along will be the one I’ll take. For now I need to drink think long and hard about what direction to start walking in and pray for some strength to get through this or find a way to make it all go away… permanently.

22:44 – Still in a crappy place

I have spent the past two days in a bit of a blur. At the back of my head I’ve had the constant nagging thought that I had to get my essay written so I decided I wouldn’t bother sleeping last night and sat pretty much from 8am yesterday morning until 10pm this evening just writing. Then deleting. Then writing again. When it reached 10pm tonight I almost broke down in exhaustion after being awake for about forty hours straight, the only breaks in between were those to walk the dogs and to go to the shops for half an hour. Anyway, some kind of essay has been written and I have just hit the submit button so it is now hovering around in cyberspace somewhere until one of the course tutors decide to mark it. So that is this module completed now (providing I pass my essay assignment) and somehow I need to keep myself distracted over the next three or four weeks until the next module starts.

My reward for getting it done is a bottle of rosy wine. I am on glass number two and can feel it starting to make me yawn. Alcohol, lack of sleep and a very warm room (the heating is turned up to the max as it’s freezing here in Scotland) are all making me sleepy. I very much hope that when I take my medication I’m going to fall into a nice slightly tipsy sleep and sleep right through to late morning tomorrow.

I still have not showered and really need to do something about that. Well personally I can’t really see what difference it makes but I guess I might not smell too good to be around.

Self harm… well it’s been happening but I’ve been managing to keep it very shallow and not requiring any medical attention, but the urges are far from out of my system and I think there is probably quite a high chance of a bad wound happening when I start losing the plot with the ongoing whispers in my head to “do it, do it“….. “stupid“….. then that fucking giggle again.

Like the title says, I’m not too sure how I am. Right now very tired and the mix of medication, wine and sleeping pills had better knock me out til the morning.

I’ve had enough of being awake now. I’ve pretty much had enough of everything. I want to go back into hibernation mode and hide from the world. I’m getting really tired of feeling so low all the time, just functioning on auto pilot and at the minimum level necessary to scrape through another 24 hours. What is the point to it all? Really… what is the point? We are nearly at the end of another year and I really do not know if I want to let myself enter a new one or if it has finally reached the point of saying I’ve had enough.

11:57 – De-ja-vu of a week ago…

The last post I wrote on here was this time last week when I was getting ready to go to the gym but was completely lacking in motivation. I did go in the end. However I skipped it on Thursday and then spent Friday-Sunday drinking way too much alcohol, eating takeaway pizza, drinking sugary drinks, then out for a meal on Sunday night with family and friends for another plate-load of super high carb foods.

I’m dreading the gym today because I’m not feeling motivated, I feel fat and frumpy from how much I ate over the weekend, I don’t want to see how much I have gained today It was a good weekend and was so much fun, I had a really good birthday, but I well and truly over-indulged.

I’m still behind with my uni work, I just cannot seem to focus and pick up a book and get reading and making notes at the moment. It’s like all concentration has gone. But I must force myself this week to get some chapters read and notes taken. It’s only another couple of weeks until our next assignment.

My head still feels a bit all over the place, racing thoughts are still pretty bad, levels of wanting to self harm have been super high, I’m noticing I’m sliding on a slippery slope and have too many emotions going on inside me that are pulling my moods all over the place. I need my focus and concentration levels to come back and need to get reading. This week and last week have been like the biggest two weeks for reading and gathering information. I have done practically nothing as every time I open a textbook and start to read it just doesn’t sink in. My notes end up just being re-writes of the pages I’m reading. None of it is sinking in at all and I need that to really change this week and get myself back on track or I’m going to end up too far behind.

So it’s almost 12 noon, I have two hours in which to get myself showered, dressed, dogs walked and get to the gym. In fact I could probably do all of that in an hour and read for an hour but I know that isn’t going to happen. Maybe I’ll just go and read some of the uni’s discussion board for this week and see what people are writing about on there, then at least feel like I know something from this week’s work.

Oh, and I meet new CPN on Thursday. I hope she is nice.

 

13:23 – A more positive frame of mind?

The Nitrazepam worked last night. OK, I admit I was a bit bad and took 15mg instead of 10mg but combined with my other meds it did the trick and I got a full six hours of decent sleep. So I woke up in a slightly better mood and feeling that I did the right thing by handing all those tablets over to my GP yesterday.

The thoughts of self harming are still here, they come and go, but they aren’t as intense and I don’t feel like I am going to act on them. I was thinking a lot last night as I was trying to fall asleep about the future, and thinking that surely a time has to come where I get better? Because if I truly believed that there was no future for me then I would have ended it by now… not just made an attempt… but actually done it. So something somewhere in my head is telling me that there is something worth hanging on for. Maybe it’s my uni course, maybe deep in my subconscious I know I will get a career from it one day that I will enjoy and feel fulfilled by. And all morning I have been having these little positive flickers… and then it goes back to the negative ones… that I want to cut again. But I know if I cut again that it will be another bad one, and I know that the consequences of that are going to be that I am seen as unsafe and risk having them take the decisions away from me and put me back in hospital, something I cannot express enough that I really really do not want.

But I do understand that if they think I can’t keep myself safe then they need to take matters into their own hands, I just can’t allow that to happen. So every time my head starts wandering off into those thoughts of “just get a blade and do it” “just make one more cut, only one” I have to keep saying to myself that it isn’t worth it, I will end up in a&e and either they or when I see the psych on Wednesday will say enough is enough and use their powers to detain me because of the level of damage I’m inflicting upon myself.

So today is going to be a good day. I am going to make it be a good day no matter how bloody hard that is. I am going to go and make a nice lunch in a moment, then take the dogs for a long walk no matter how much my leg hurts, I have the option of going out with best friend and a couple of other girls tonight for some drinks but am currently trying to weigh up and pro’s and con’s of that.

The pro’s are: I could have a really nice time, it could be fun, I could enjoy myself, I could have a laugh, it would get me out the house and socialising, I might come home feeling in a good mood.

The con’s are: Alcohol is a depressant, I might not enjoy myself much and end up coming home feeling really bad. That may turn to low thoughts and because I’m a bit drunk I won’t be able to think clearly about not cutting and may end up doing it again. Also, if I drink I cannot take the Nitrazepam tonight. I’m not supposed to drink on any of my medications but occasionally I do have a night out and don’t want to miss a dose so just take them anyway and it hasn’t done me any harm yet. I tend to find the mix of alcohol and my meds makes me more sleepy so I just fall asleep as soon as I get home. But the Nitrazepam clearly states (several times) on the box that it must not be mixed with alcohol and I already take Diazepam, Quetiapine (seroquel) and Mirtazapine so to throw alcohol and nitrazepam into the mix might not be a very smart move.

So I have told best friend that I will get back to her later and let her know what I’m doing. For now I am going to make some lunch, a toasted bagel with ham and creamy chive cheese sounds yummy.

I just keep telling myself take it hour by hour and I’ll get through the day. I’ve been up since 7-ish and it’s now 1.30pm and I’ve made it through until now just by distracting myself, by trying to turn the negative thoughts into positive ones, and so far it is working. Whether I can do it all day and all night or all weekend still remains to be seen but right at this very moment I feel like I have a slightly more positive frame of mind.

09:47 – Officially a student (I think!)

Hmmz methinks I drank a bit too much wine last night. There started off with two bottles of rosy and there is just under half of a bottle left. I have a bit of a sore head but only have myself to blame for that one.

So… good news… I got my letter through this morning confirming I am officially a student I am still waiting to hear back that my fee waiver application has been accepted but I did all the online enrolment stuff I needed to do and have finally chosen to do the course on a part time basis which is 15 hours of study a week as that seems to be an acceptable amount to study and still be able to claim benefits. So it’s going to take me a couple more years to complete but it also means I’ll have more time where I could maybe do a few hours a week on a voluntary placement and get myself some practical experience, it also means I will still have the time to attend all my “mental” appointments and 15 hours is something I can cope with; the full time mode is 30 hours a week and I think I may have struggled a lot to find 30 hours in a week where I was sane enough to sit and study.

It doesn’t feel as scary as it did last week now I know I won’t have to study frantically and barely see my friends and try to arrange appointments around study time… it’s all a lot calmer, I can see it being manageable now.

So I’ve woken up to some good news, I have emailed the college to ask if my fee waiver form has been returned to them yet, I have completed my online enrolment, I have a letter telling me I am now an official student… all good

I’m just waiting for a guy coming to try and fix my shower door, I am far from any kind of tradesman but even I can see the bloody thing is unfixable and needs replacing. But they will do everything they can to avoid paying out for an expensive repair! The guy should be here in the next 15 minutes then I don’t know what I’m going to do with my day. Oh, shower guy has just been, along with who looked like Mr Boss Man of a local plumbing company. They have decided to replace most of it (yay!) but he now has to go to the boss of the housing association I rent my flat through and get final permission for the funding. He said he’d be in touch soon (although soon to them can be 10 minutes or 10 weeks!)

My Mum text me last night asking if I’d like to go for lunch with her today but I was too drunk to reply. Best friend was asking the same about going for lunch but I didn’t reply to her either. My head wasn’t in a great place last night, I felt really sad, but this morning I’ve picked myself up, dusted myself off and have something else to focus on.

Now, if only the rain would go off today could be a nice day

18:35 – Bye bye kitty

Well Tiff the cat’s stay with me was short and sweet. I took on too much. Right now I am still living in the one room in my flat, my living room/kitchen. It is just too small a space for me, two dogs and a cat. So reluctantly I gave her away yesterday. She has gone to a good home where the girl has a male cat who is quite old and chilled out and the two of them are getting on really well.

It was nearly all a disaster. I had one box with all her stuff in it – bed, litter tray, bag of cat litter, food, etc and best friend had another box with Tiff in it. As we got out the car Tiff jumped out the box – she has never been outside before and ran straight under a (parked) car. We tried to coach her out then she ran for some bushes and hid in there. We called on all the kids who were out playing to come and help us get her out, the bushes were right next to a busy main road and I had horrible visions of her running out right onto it and getting hit by a car. After about half an hour of kids crawling through bushes we found her and I just had to dive in amongst the thorns and grab her so my arms are all cut to bits but at least I caught her safely. I think she was a little bit traumatised by it all and when she got in her new house she just ran straight under the table and wouldn’t come back out, but I went to see how she was settling in today and she is doing just fine.

Tomorrow I am getting my Dad to bring down a set of ladders so I can start painting this place. I hate painting with a passion because I am utterly crap at it but I’m still hoping and praying I will be offered a housing transfer soon and I want the place to be nice and freshly painted for when the council come to do their inspection. The flat still has no flooring but I’m not paying out for carpet or laminate when I’m (hopefully) going to be leaving here soon.

The other joy I am having at the moment is my brand new boiler keeps breaking. I had the workmen out on Friday and they found a fuse had gone in it, they got it working again and then I went to hang up some clothes to dry this afternoon and realised the lights were all off on it again. So that’s another thing that needs done tomorrow. I feel like I have so many things to do before my Uni course starts next month. I know it’s only painting but I have a bedroom, bathroom, hallway, living room and kitchen to do and all the ceilings and my ceilings are like 12 foot high. So there’s actually quite a lot to get done.

Last night best friend was going out drinking and I have no money at all at the moment after having to pay some hefty bills the other day so for the next week I am super skint. So I decided to go round to another friend’s house as she was working today and just having a quiet night in. However when I got there her brother went and bought me a bottle of wine so I ended up drinking that and a few cans of cider and was pretty wasted when I left. I have been feeling quite delicate today but managed to go to the supermarket and take the dogs a big long forestry walk.

Now I really need to go for a shower but I am shattered and just want to lie here in front of the TV for a while. I have really bad stomach cramps and can’t decide if it’s from the drinking last night or because I took the tablets I’m prescribed to give me periods as I don’t have them by myself thanks to the lovely polycystic ovaries and I haven’t taken a course of tablets in months so I think I may be about to have a killer period.

On that happy note I am off to laze in front of the TV until I can motivate myself to go for a nice hot shower!

21:55 – Why so emotional?

I went out last night and got pretty drunk. I tried so hard to relax and have a good time but my stitches were stinging like mad which kept me constantly aware of the damage I’d done to myself. The pubs were busy and I got to see some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, which was nice and yet at the same time it was so depressing when they ask what I’ve been up to lately and as usual I had nothing much to say for myself. Then of course I ask them what they have been up to lately and they all have stories about work or their kids or their relationships – all the things I don’t have. I decided the best move was just to get as shit faced drunk as possible and downed shot after shot until I could barely walk. At one point I saw the drugs nurse out with her friends and threw my arms round her – that’s going to be embarrassing when I see her tomorrow. I don’t have much to say to her, I haven’t taken any drugs not even smoked a cannabis joint in weeks, hence why I haven’t felt the need to carry on with the relapse prevention work – but she likes to ‘check in’ with me every so often. So she is coming here tomorrow at 1pm and bringing a student with her which I reluctantly agreed too.

This morning I woke up feeling extremely hungover, threw up, lay on the sofa crying my eyes out just feeling so emotional and depressed. My male friend appeared down mid afternoon which was probably a good thing as I was very much starting to think about going to the DIY shop and acquiring more blades. Instead I left him to play about on my laptop whilst I went for a shower and calmed my head down.

I went up to give my Dad his Father’s Day card and present and then met up with my best friend for a couple of hours. We went up to the cemetery and took some flowers up for my little man and then went and got dinner (which I subsequently vomited up again) and then I made my excuses to leave and come home. Since I walked through the door all I have done is cry and cry and even raked through the bin bag to find the blade I used yesterday, cleaned it up and for the past hour have just sat here clutching onto it like it’s some sort of safety blanket. And again I am in tears, again I don’t know what I’m crying about, I don’t know why I feel so fucking low but I am scared I am heading into another depressive episode.

My emotions seem to be a hell of a lot of anger (towards myself) and very tearful. I don’t feel as though I am in control of them, I’m scared because I feel so mixed up and I don’t feel as though I can tell anyone how bad I feel. I am seeing my CPN on Tuesday but I might phone tomorrow and ask if she can see me then instead because my head feels seriously fucked up. I think I’m at a real risk of hurting myself again and I can’t put my family through all that when they are going through such serious stuff with the cancer. Everyone is solely concentrating on my Aunt and rightly so, how can I be so selfish to worry my parents about my crazy head at a time like this? The answer is that I can’t. I must deal with this myself and pull myself back out of it before it gets any worse. Maybe it’s already at the ‘worse’ stage as all the thoughts of hurting myself just flow one after the other through my mind. When the doctor in the a&e asked me if I was suicidal I said no. And that was the truth at the time.

Is it still the truth now? I really don’t know.

20:48 – I think I’ve made it

I swore I wouldn’t use any heavy drugs today, I wouldn’t do that on my little one’s special day and I think I’ve made it. I haven’t used anything nor had a drink. I’ve faced the entire day clean and sober and I’ve got through it. I’m proud of myself, there have been many testing moments today and it would have been so easy to go and get completely smashed to block it all out but I didn’t. I made a promise to myself and I stuck to it.

Seeing my ex this morning was bloody hard. He insisted on asking me questions about my life and I, like an idiot, answered him. Inside my head was screaming ‘it’s none of his fucking business!’ but I kept on my fake smile and chatted to him as though none of it bothered me. Afterwards I went to my best friend’s house for a little while then came home around lunch time. I hadn’t taken my meds this morning because I’d been in a rush and I could feel my head crying out for some Quetiapine to calm it down again. I’m only on a low dose as I’ve just restarted it but I tend to find the low doses are the ones which make me quite sleepy so I slept from about 4pm til 7pm.

When I woke up all I could think about was either going to score or going and buying a bottle of vodka or something but I have so far resisted all urges. My Mum is coming early tomorrow to help me clean my flat as I’m having new central heating and a new kitchen fitted over the next couple of weeks so I need to give the place a good clean up.

I feel a bit rubbish because it’s also my brother’s birthday today and I didn’t go up with a card or anything for him because my head was all over the place. Once I got home today I was a bit of an emotional mess for quite a while, until I fell asleep. I feel pretty emotional again just now but won’t let it turn into a crisis. I will not abuse drugs, I will not drink, I will not cut, I will not do anything to harm myself and wake up tomorrow regretting it all. I will let my angel have his special day and apart from some tears not look down on his Mummy destroying herself.

So it’s almost 9pm and I think I’ve made it through the day in one piece. If my mood becomes lower I will follow my crisis plan and make contact with someone, my friend or use someone like the Samaritans for support. I know I don’t need to face this alone but I really just want to be alone with my thoughts and memories tonight…

I miss him so much