Posts tagged with "therapy"

Signs Of Senility

I’m exhaust­ed today. I try not to acknowl­edge it, but my body keeps remind­ing me.

How is it doing this?

I just peeled a banana, and with the peel in my hand I threw the banana in the garbage.

My dad did the same thing once with an orange. “The old man’s going senile”, I thought to myself.

Hopefully, it’s not due to some degen­er­a­tive brain dis­ease, but the 12-hours I put in at work until mid­night yes­ter­day.

My new sched­ule involves going to ther­a­py after work on Mondays. Today, I also have to go to my framer to sign my pho­tos and mats after­wards. I was going to pick up a drop cloth and back­ground stand at the pho­tog­ra­phy store in between, but I think I’ll skip that.

We’re in the mid­dle of a serv­er swap at work, so I expect client com­put­ers to be burst­ing into flames today. I’m also orga­niz­ing a pot luck for the com­pa­ny at the end of the week.

My mind feels like it’s going in eight dif­fer­ent direc­tions at once.

But as long as I feel, I know I’m alright.

This Is Not A Cry For Help

I have sui­ci­dal thoughts every now and then.

They don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly come out dur­ing bad times. It’s rather ran­dom. And it’s not like these thoughts involve plan­ing how I’m going to do it, I just think of how much sim­pler things would be if I weren’t liv­ing. A line from Being John Malkovich comes to mind:

[Consciousness] is a ter­ri­ble curse. I think. I feel. I suf­fer.

I think the root of my “suf­fer­ing” is the anx­i­ety I har­bour. Anxiety about social sit­u­a­tions, the state of the world, and oth­er triv­ial details that make life seem com­pli­cat­ed. I don’t want to have these thoughts, but I do. Then life gets even more com­pli­cat­ed, and I get more anx­i­ety. It’s a vicious cir­cle, until it becomes not about the anx­i­ety itself, but anx­i­ety about hav­ing anx­i­ety. I did­n’t real­ly iden­ti­fy it until I was in the car with Julie, feel­ing sick and sick­er until I almost asked her to pull over on the high­way.

All I want to do is stop think­ing. Suicide would be such an easy solu­tion, and as much as I dis­agree with the rea­sons for sui­cide in the first place, I hon­est­ly believe this is true.

It makes me scared that one day I’m going to make a stu­pid mis­take with a per­ma­nent con­se­quence.

I know I have a good life, I know how illog­i­cal these thoughts are, but that does­n’t stop them from reoc­cur­ring on a month­ly basis. I remem­ber hav­ing these thoughts as ear­ly as high school, although they were much more com­mon back then.

More fre­quent­ly, I have thoughts of muti­la­tion, about once a week. Not self-muti­la­tion, because there’s nev­er any­one specif­i­cal­ly doing it to me. It’s just me in black­ness, then a float­ing knife fly­ing into my wind­pipe, or an axe split­ting my head down the mid­dle, or an ice-pick in the back of the neck, or…well, you get the idea.

I’ve nev­er told any­one about this. Not because I’m ashamed of it, but because I did­n’t want any­one to wor­ry. Not even my clos­est friends know.

But har­bour­ing this fear and anx­i­ety, I’m slow­ly real­iz­ing, is dif­fi­cult. It’s pre­vent­ing me from enjoy­ing life. I’ve decid­ed to get some help; my first appoint­ment is in three days.

I’m tired of liv­ing with this.