If I had a dollar for everytime someone tells me to stop thinking, I would be on the Forbes Top One Hundred Richest People. It is very annoying because, if I would stop, I would. I just don't know how to turn my brain off and it becomes my own worst enemy.
When my thoughts start racing, I know rationally the thoughts are not making sense. I hate to even share them because they are insane. Obviously, I am off-kilter but I don't know how to get on-kilter. It is the most frustrating part of my existence and one of the most insidious parts of suffering from depression.
Friday night, I had myself worked into a fit of anxiety. I decided I was a failure at life. I had failed at my career, I failed at going overseas to teach, I failed at commiting suicide, I failed at parenting and I was failing at life. I am a failure. In my mind, no one will love me if I am failure, therefore; I am also unloved. It is insane once I write it down. In the space of thirty minutes, I had gone from being a failure to being completely unloved. Who could love me? I tried to leave my kids orphans. Who does that? A very selfish, horrible person. Who rips their family apart like I did? Me. I don't deserve love. I am a selfish bitch. A failure at life. I was seriously ready to just end it again. No one loves me. No one needs me. No one wants me.
Insanity right? Oh yeah. On a grand scale. So, I tried to take a deep breath and focus. Am I unloved? No. The kids love me. My friends like me. My boyfriend adores me and my family loves me. Am I a failure? Well, yeah but who isn't? Everyone fails. No one is perfect. Does my relentless drive to be perfect makes me fail? Well, yes because I have impossible standards for myself. I want to be the fastest runner, the best writer, the best parent, the greatest girlfriend, the best cook and the best teacher. Obviously, I can't. So why can't I let it go? I have no idea. I wish I could.
And that is why people tell me to stop thinking. Well, hell, I don't enjoy working myself into knots. I don't enjoy flagellating myself into self-pitying and self-loathing. I love the song One by U2 and it is because of the line: "It's too late to drag the past into the light." I try to remember that line when I wake at 3 AM thoughts racing. It's not the time to analyze the past. The past is the past. Leave it in the past.
I am still suicidal. It is not my constant companion like it was. My thoughts, though, wander to suicide when I start feeling like a failure. It is like I have opened that gate and now it is easy to enter into it. I have reasons not to do it, though, and that is great comfort. Before, when I tried, I was in so much pain, my thoughts were so crazy that I actually thought not being here would solve everyone's problems. I realize now that is not true. It just creates more problems.
I can't commit suicide again because:
1. I have too much potential. I can't do that to myself.
2. I can't go back to the mental hospital. I loathed it.
3. I can't do it to my children. They may dislike me right now, they may not act like they need me but they do. I am the only parent they have. That counts for something.
4. I can't do that to my family. This act almost destroyed them. The ripples are still there. Our family has suffered alot of loss in the past seven years. People fought hard to stay alive under impossible odds. I can't voluntarily destroy myself and add to those losses.
5. I can't do that to my boyfriend. He loves me. He deserves to be loved in return. He hasn't run from a messy, emotionally complicated situation and I should honor that love, that devotion, that loyalty by working through my problems.
6. I can't because it is not an option. It will never really be an option. Death doesn't really solve anything. How do I know what lies afterwards? How do I know it will solve anything?
7. I have dreams and goals and I love myself enough to meet those goals and dreams. I might fail at them but, at least, I tried.
It is driving me nuts that I ended at seven. It should be ten but I am going to stop there.
My ultimate goal is to love myself more. It is to let myself fall and not worry about failure, about being unloved, about abandonment. I keep trying to get people to save me and I have to save myself. I can't fade into other people. They will not always be there for me. I have to, absolutely have to, meet my own needs.
I won't succeed if I can't. I have to make my own contentness, my own peace.
8. You can't do it to your friends. We would miss you and don't want anything to happen to you. And some of us would obsessively wonder if we should blame ourselves.
ReplyDelete9. You can't do it to your former students, who like you and care about you, even if you don't always think about it. I think every one of us as teachers sometimes forgets that.