I found myself today reading over posts I had made on the last version of the forum. I didn’t even know they were still up. A friend linked me an unrelated post there and I looked up mine.
It is almost unbelievable that I am the same person who posted those things and that so much drama went down, it was like a war zone. I regret so much of what I wrote then.
I also found posts around the time of my last psychiatric hospitalization. It really depressed and scared me reading what I had written.
Here is a post I made about I think a month before I totally lost it, had a meltdown, and got involuntarily committed.
The Call of the Abyss
Sometimes I get the desire to throw everything away, to submerge myself in my symptoms and abandon all hope. Maybe it's my schizoaffective rearing up, I don't know. But I want to stop taking meds, quit the clinic, quit school, give up my apartment, and embrace the flood of madness that will come over me. I want to dive into the depths until there is no escape. Till there is nothing left but oblivion.
There is magic and power in madness and I want that back. Be it death or state hospital I long to leave this life I live and vanish. To eradicate me and surrender.
So here I sit, smoking, drinking, and listening to music. Daydreaming of leaving this life I live.
Anyone else get that feeling? The feeling of just wanting to give up and drift away wherever the wind blows them?
This feeling will probably be gone by tomorrow, but it always returns in time.
My stomach hurts reading that. I dread ever going back to how I felt during those times. This sucks and I feel like crap now.
It’s like a night and day difference I know as I too have gone back and read old posts of mine on other forums that I wrote during particularly dark times. I don’t make a habit of going back and reading my old stuff but when I have it IS painful to read. But I had to just shake my head and take from it only the positive which is that I am no longer anywhere near this kind of despair and hopelessness. That’s what the little optimist in me says anyway.
One big thing that’s bothering me is the question, “How far away from that am I?” One, two weeks without meds? All my wonderful ideas and thoughts on recovery, my life, and my very sanity itself all so close to being destroyed. All this progress I’ve made, so fragile.
It’s like suddenly realizing there is a tiger in the bushes near you that you hadn’t noticed. One slip up and it’ll leap.
Yeah I, especially on no sleep, wonder the same thing. I know when I washed up here at the shores of this website that I was experiencing psychotic symptoms again, had begun to drink and become rather delusional again very quickly. It’s scary.
But I see my progress (I have my bumps in the road) over even this past month and that gives me some hope that I might just be figuring out how to keep myself from going back there. I’m thoroughly sick of being sick. I can only have hope that I’ll continue to get better.
The tiger business reminds me of how my dad used to tell me “The wolf is not at the door” and at times I got so sick of hearing this I would scream at him “The wolf is eating me alive!”
No one is promised tomorrow. Life is fragile. You know the tiger is there whereas most don’t. You know what you are fighting for and you are winning that fight.
I’ve gone through phases where the person I was seems strange to me now. I’ll be thinking - “How could I have said that? How could I have done that?” I guess I still have to take responsibility for the way I was back then, but I want people to know there is more to me than that.
It’s like you shouldn’t read a journal back as it’s just random mental anguish that’s better out then in. You needed to vent and we understand that. You could ask yourself what you would of been like if you didn’t vent back then.
I wrote a diary when I was hospitalized. I read it two years later and it made me embarassed and anxious. I deleted the entire diary. I was afraid someone would read it. I’m sorry I did today, because it was a good sign of how far I’ve come. That I’m better now than when everything was a chaos. That chaos was intimidating.
Everyone once in a while, I go back and re-read some of my old journals… what a mistake. It does let me know how far I’ve come… but it is embarrassing and it does make me feel ill.
I also fear relapse… But I think that since I have come so far, if I do start to slide… I’m going to do something about it sooner then later. I’m going to try to get help when I’m starting to sink… long before being completely sunk.
