Stuck

The only thing keeping me going right now is Tom’s birthday.

I cannot kill myself right before his birthday and have that anniversary cloud his special day for the rest of his life.

I don’t know what happens after that.

I have set Australia as a goalpost in my mind. I want to be better by then. Not just better, but completely well. Slim, healed, happy. The second proudest mum at the ceremony, after Michelle’s.

It seems impossible right now.

A target that is so far away is not helpful when I can’t see beyond the next week.

I know that small victories are important. I picked up my prescription today without buying paracetamol.

But that doesn’t change how awful I feel right now.

I don’t know what to do or where to turn.

I feel like I’ve lost everyone’s support.

And I don’t know where to get help.

Maybe I should be in a mental hospital, as they suggested.

Maybe I am that messed up.

But I don’t dare call the crisis team again because every time I do, things escalate out of my control.

In the meantime, though, what? I don’t have a date for my next psych appointment. I don’t have anywhere to get help unless I’m willing to have social services on my case again.

I am honestly so lost and so desperate and so scared.

What now?

I want to get better. I really do.

But knowing how to is not easy.

I feel like I’ve exhausted pretty much all of my options.

It leaves me feeling confused.

Why don’t any of the things on offer feel right?

Is it the illness talking, making me push away things that could ultimately be helpful?

I don’t know.

The hour I spent in the psych unit was an all-time low for me, but should I have stuck it out, given it a chance? Might I have found the answer in between the daytime TV and jigsaws?

Should I have kept going with the psychotherapy, even though it felt completely counterproductive?

I don’t know.

I’ve reached a point this weekend, though, where I know I need to do something. Because I want to be well again. I want to be a proper mummy, a proper wife, a proper friend. I want to enjoy things again. I want to feel confident in my ability to work, not terrified that I can’t cope. I want to actively want to do things with the children, and not feel exhausted afterwards. I want to stop feeling so sad, sad, sad all the time. And guilty, worthless, inept, etc etc etc.

I know that I have got to do something about the thoughts that keep dragging me back into the pit. For all that I feel the world would be better off without me, I need to resist those feelings and not give into the temptation to remove myself from it.

It’s hard. And scary. I can’t do it on my own. But there has to be a way, somehow. There has to be a way of recovering from this.

I want to find it. I just don’t know how.

How did it come to this?

I never, ever expected to be this person.

I never expected that I would be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Okay, it was the day unit, and okay, they let me out after half an hour after I fell apart in spectacular fashion at the hideousness of it all and begged them to send me home. But still.

I never expected that a day later, I would be threatened with a section.

Okay, I didn’t get sectioned, but for a little while it was a possibility.

I know it’s all entirely my fault but this week has just been horrendous. I have learned from it – learned never to call the crisis team again, never to tell a mental health professional that I’m having suicidal thoughts, never to refuse a crisis visit – but I can’t ever undo what this week has done to me.

I have crossed the line and become someone I never thought I would be.

The scary thing is that I know in my heart that I *am* that person. I know that there are strong grounds for me being in a psych unit. The whole place was utterly devastating to me, with people doing jigsaws and watching daytime TV and staring into space and rocking in corners, but the professionals who thought I belonged there had a point.

Because it is so difficult to get up every morning.

So difficult to walk the children to school and stand in the playground acting like a normal person.

It’s so difficult not to act on the constant thoughts that I should not be here.

So difficult to keep myself safe when every instinct points me towards self-destruction.

Yes, I can have a shower and put my make-up on and bake a birthday cake and take Katie to her swimming lesson.

But all the time that I’m doing these things, I’m thinking about ways to die.

I have stopped praying for healing and started praying – so, so hard – for God to just take me home.

I know that one more messed up suicide attempt will end up with me being sectioned, after all that has happened this week.

All that says to me is that if or when I try again, it has to work.

There is nowhere to turn any more. Nowhere I can turn, no one I can talk to that won’t end up with things being even more of a mess than they are already.

There is only one way out.

Is this the truth?

It’s really not a good feeling to admit that I am not well enough for ‘proper’ work. Not well enough to do something that millions and millions of people do every single day, without thinking twice about it.

I thought I was. I thought it would be fun, challenging, a new start. A new opportunity to feel like part of the human race again, to feel something more than ‘just a mum.’ A new identity.

I was so wrong.

I can’t even really put my finger on what made it so difficult. A whole great big mess of things, probably. A stupidly early start. Commuting. A long day. The crazy busyness of London. An office that was totally devoid of the atmosphere and water cooler chat that I had expected. 9.15am Skype conferences. Feeling out of my depth. Realising that I am so unused to working under pressure. Queuing in Pret and barely keeping the panic under control. Being stuck at Watford Junction waiting for a train and knowing I should be at home, reading to Katie. Getting home after a 13-hour day and seeing all the emails I then had to answer from my usual freelance work. Realising I was going to have to miss the kids’ harvest service.

It was all just too much. And rather than leaving me feeling inspired, energised, all I felt was complete overwhelming dread at having to do it all again the next day.

Poor Ian. He expected me to come home buzzing about my new London job and how great it was to be a proper journalist again. Instead he got a snivelling wreck of a wife, sobbing on the sofa for three hours.

So I sent an email. I quit. After one day, one whole day of real work in 10 years, I quit.

I am just not up to it. They tried to persuade me otherwise, to give me options that would make it work, but I am not up to it.

It’s pretty soul-destroying to have to accept that I’m not fit for something so commonplace, so everyday as working in an office. That my messed-up mind is too messed up even for that.

And then I start to question myself.

Am I really too ill for work?

Or am I just using it as an excuse?

Am I actually just fundamentally lazy?

What sort of hopeless person am I to turn down a stable £15K a year for two days’ work a week, just because I can’t be bothered to catch a 7.03am train once a week?

From there, it filters on through. Those days where my brain feels like it’s full of fog and I can only do the bare minimum of work – am I just making it up? When I feel too tired to mop the floor – is it because I genuinely can’t do it, or just because I don’t want to? When I struggle to talk to people – am I unwell, or just antisocial? When all I feel up to doing is curling up on my bed – am I just being lazy?

Am I using depression as a handy get-out clause to avoid anything I don’t fancy doing?

I just don’t know any more.

All I know is that I am sick of myself. Whether I’m too ill to work or just too plain idle, I never imagined myself like this.

I couldn’t like myself less right now.