Tag: depression

Money is my thirteenth reason.

I think about suicide every day. The past couple of days I have been thinking it might be helpful to write out my suicide notes. Anger is such a huge part of my depression and as much as my suicidal ideation represents an end to all the pain I’m in, I also fantasize about it being the final “gotcha” for everyone by whom I feel so let down. So much of what overwhelms me feels simultaneously insurmountable and avoidable, like I’m stuck in a giant pit that is only getting deeper and deeper. It’s like I can see who is doing the digging and how I got into the pit in the first place but it doesn’t matter because I am here and I’m never getting out. But it does matter. We all just keep participating in this system that is oppressing and hurting people as though that isn’t its intent in the first place. We are throwing people into these pits and then judging them for not being able to get themselves out somehow. And the people in the pits are like crabs in a bucket, pulling anyone back down who has the temerity to try to get out.

Take, for example, my gas bill. National Grid just sent me a bill for $1,200. I have not been able to afford this utility for a while but when I have called to try to get help or go on a payment plant or literally anything I can do to make sure I have heat and am able to cook and shower and all that, I have been told that the company will not accept payment from me over the phone or online because I’ve had trouble paying in the past. So… because I have trouble paying my bill, they’ve opted to punish me by making the payment process even more difficult.

Take, for example, my car. I live in a state that requires our vehicles to have annual inspections. I failed my inspection once because of some damage to my car’s exterior that I sustained several years ago. So, despite having passed previously, I now have a sticker on my windshield indicating a failed inspection. I got a quote to fix my car and it’s going to cost an amount I’ve never seen in my bank account all at once. I also live in a city where I have to park my car on the street outside my house. I have received several parking tickets for being parked on the street with an expired inspection sticker, all of which I have not been able to afford to pay, so they keep adding on interest and late fees that I’ll need to pay in order to renew my vehicle’s registration next year. And the amount keeps going up. This is how we keep in poverty.

Take, for example, my medical bills. In 2021 my depression was so bad, (though not nearly as bad as it is now,) that I asked my doctor about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She referred me to a hospital where I underwent treatment for three months. My depression did not get better and it turns out the hospital was not “in network” with my insurance so now I have $15,000 of medical bills I can’t afford to pay for a traumatic treatment that didn’t help me. And I’m pretty sure supporting me through ECT is one of the reasons my boyfriend broke up with me.

These are just a few of the financial obligations hanging over my head and making me want to end my own life. It’s untenable and there’s no solution. I am unemployed now but say I get a job making even more than I was making before… how long do I have to work and how much do I have to save in order to even make a dent in the debt that’s strangling me right now?

How many people kill themselves because of oppression under late stage capitalism?

It’s not fair. I don’t want to feel this hopeless. I look around and I see happy people going on vacations and falling in love and eating out and experiencing joy. I guess only rich people get that shit.

Now I create my own traumas.

Do you ever wonder what would happen if you just didn’t get out of bed? What would it look like if instead of getting up and showering and getting dressed and walking the dog and getting on the train to go to work, you just didn’t do any of that and stayed in bed all day? Or how about two days? A week? A month?

A couple weeks ago, I was telling my therapist how I tried to kill myself once. It wasn’t necessarily a feeling of depression or hopelessness, though I felt those things. It was the feeling that I didn’t belong, that my friends are better friends with each other, that I’m not one to be chosen for anything by anyone. It was a lot of the feelings I’ve come to recognize in myself as rejection sensitive dysphoria. It’s kind of amazing how being rejected by one person or opportunity can make me feel like I’m unwanted by any one or any thing, how I don’t deserve to be alive or take up space.

I had been out with my friends and when the bar bill came, I didn’t have enough and two of my friends were upset because they each had to put so much in. Remembering it now, it seems like such an innocuous thing. I could have apologized and promised to pay them back. In fact, it seems like I had a lot more options than silently going home and eating an entire bottle of pills. I cried when I told my therapist about swallowing one dry pill after another, not making the decision to end my life once, but over and over again with each swallow. I want to die. Swallow. I want to die. Swallow. I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.

The pain I felt telling this story to my therapist was by far more intense than the pain of actually living it. It’s like I carry around all this pain from living through trauma. I have the poverty, the neglect, the religious indoctrination and subsequent rejection. And now I also have the traumas that I’ve made for myself.

I joined a 12 step program when I was 29. I was sober for 7 years. I went to meetings, and the “meetings after the meetings,” and I did step work and I held nothing back. They kept saying that once you stop drinking, your life gets better. And around me, everyone’s lives were indeed getting better. But not mine. Which meant I was doing something wrong right? Because they say if you quit drinking and do the work, things get better.

A couple years into my sobriety, my depression was so bad that I stopped getting out of bed. I remember that first morning I felt so anxious, going back and forth between feeling like there was no way I could physically extricate myself from the mattress and feeling like the consequences of not getting up would be even worse. I lay there debating with myself until it was too late, wondering if I should get up and go to work after all until the time for work came and went. I spent the rest of the day under the covers, powerless to turn on the TV or distract myself with my phone. I wondered if people at work even noticed I was gone. Night fell and somehow I was able to sleep through the night, even though I’d spent the entire day in bed, and on the second day, it was slightly easier to stay in bed because I had already done it once. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as it were. So I stayed in bed again. And again the next day, and also the day after that, and so on until I hadn’t left my bed for two weeks.

I was able to keep my job thanks to a boss that I didn’t respect but for whom I’m incredibly grateful. But those feelings.

Every day, I wake up with nowhere to go. I wake up regretting that I didn’t die in my sleep. I wake up wishing I could go back to sleep. I’ve been sleeping for 10–12 hours a night and though my body doesn’t need more sleep, I still wake up exhausted and all I want to do is escape consciousness for just a little while longer, and then just a few more minutes, and then just a little more until I’ve slept away my whole life. Every morning I wake up feeling that familiar feeling of anxiety, of being in between, of trying to talk myself into extricating my body from the bed to wash it and dress it and take it somewhere we’ll find meaning, and of knowing that it doesn’t matter, that life will continue on whether I stay in my bed or leave it. Nothing matters.

I can’t help but feel like this is an overreaction. Cue the self-judgment and feelings about feelings. I lost my job in November. People lose jobs all the time. People stop paying their credit card bills all the time. People struggle to buy food, and maintain relationships, and participate in routine self-care. Are all those people also depressed and suicidal, or is it just me? Am I the only one that can’t seem to manage what life throws at them? Am I the only one with the tendency to just crumple when things get hard? If getting laid off can send me into such a tailspin, I’d venture to guess my mental health was pretty tenuous to begin with. Every day is full of opportunities, but instead of making me feel hopeful and optimistic, I’m even more depressed because of all the opportunities I can’t make myself take every single day. And so every day is the same because I don’t ever do anything different. I lie in bed and think about my trauma. I think about the things in my early life I couldn’t control and I think about escaping those patterns but I don’t know how. And I re-live all the depressive episodes I’ve had before, drowning in anxiety with the covers above my head wondering if anyone will notice I’m gone but too afraid to find out.

My therapist asked me last week about my suicidal ideation and asked if maybe it’s time to check myself into a hospital. I told him that wouldn’t help because at least now I’m showing up for my classes three times a week, I’m claiming my unemployment and sending my resume out into the void, I’m feeding and walking my dog and paying my rent. I hate my life and I wish it would be over but sitting in a hospital where they don’t care about my quality of life just that I have one, racking up more medical debt I’ll never be able to pay, and missing school and my other day-to-day responsibilities doesn’t seem like very much of a solution. I have also thought about this at length and I’m not stupid. The people in my life care about me even though I can’t really understand why. I know acting on the SI would be traumatic for them, too. It occurred to me that when someone dies, their birthday is always a hard day for their loved ones, as is the day that they died. If my birthday is already going to be difficult, I am not going to add a second hard day, especially when it might coincide with another day of celebration, so if I were to act on it and make an attempt on my own life, it probably won’t be until the summer. I’m not sure how comforting he found that, but at least he didn’t bring up checking myself into a hospital again.

Not my circus.

“YOU WANT ME TO CALL THE POLICE?” a male voice shouted. I looked around for the source of the commotion from where I stood waiting for my dog to finish sniffing the same spot he’d been sniffing for the past five minutes or so.

Across the street from where I stood, a side street branched off and a man and woman were standing on opposite sides of a car stopped shortly after the intersection. There were other vehicles parked around and I struggled to see what was happening, exactly, as the man continued to yell. The car was running and the driver’s side door was open so I thought perhaps this woman had rear-ended him and thrown him into a rage. I couldn’t make out all of what he was saying but I heard “YOU HAVE YOUR OWN CAR” and then the man started to walk toward the back of the car.

My dog finished smelling and finally decided to add his own urine to the small patch of neighbor’s grass and as we started to continue down the road, I could see that there was only one car parked in the middle of the side-street, engine still running, and exhaust clouding from the tail pipe. The man backed away from the car and I noticed he was holding a messenger back. Suddenly, he started to run away from the car and down the same street and direction my dog and I were walking, but on the opposite site. I think I might have chuckled at the odd sight of this young man, perhaps in his early or mid twenties with short dark curly hair and a mustache dressed in jeans and a camel-colored denim jacket, suddenly break into a run. The woman, a blonde of around the same age bundled in a scarf and winter coat and wearing big-framed glasses, had not said anything this whole time and as the man bolted away from her, she started after him but a much slower pace, perhaps not wanting to stray too far from the running vehicle.

I was openly watching the two at this point. I am kind of always on high alert when there’s potential violence and a perceived power differential and I felt a little rush of panic when the man stopped, spun around, and started running back the way he’d come, straight toward the woman. At first I thought he was running at her and I was ready to drop my dog’s leash and run over to intervene. I could see the woman tense up as well, but the man continued sprinting past her and got into the driver’s seat. As soon as she realized he wasn’t coming toward her, the woman rounded on her heel and got herself into the back seat of the passenger side before he could leave and as she started to close her door, I could hear him screaming “GET OUT” holding out the vowels of “out” in a high-pitched ragged shriek that had the quality of holding nothing back, of expelling extreme emotion. I watched as the car sped away from me down the side-street and I thought I could still hear him yelling even after the car was out of view.

I have been on the verge of tears constantly, lately. My suicidal ideation is through the roof, to where I’m starting to think about which specific date would have the least emotional impact with regard to holidays and the birthdays and anniversaries of my loved ones. Yesterday I was listening to an audiobook and I had to stop it because I started crying during the epilogue because it was set in the fall and I love the fall but when I think about the future and this coming fall, I only see darkness; my unemployment income will have run out by then and between trying to finish school and looking for a full-time job that will presumably be OK with me taking classes in the middle of the day, and between that and the calls I’m getting from my credit card companies because I haven’t paid any of them in months because I’m at the point where I can’t even afford groceries and it’s all just too much. I tried to sit down and write a paper that’s due tomorrow and I couldn’t focus because my mind would not stop distracting me: “How am I going to get dog food for my dog? He’s almost out!”; “My checking account is overdrawn by $500. How much food can I get from the grocery store with the $60 in my pocket and how can I make that last?”; “My roommate/ex is packing a bag… sounds like he’s getting ready for another weekend at his new boyfriend’s… the one he left me for that he started seeing while we were still together… I could ask him but it seems like he’s not talking to me… again… and also it’s going to hurt, no matter what the answer is…”; “Why doesn’t anyone want me?”

But watching this car speed away, I felt lighter. I don’t even know what they were fighting about, if you could call it a fight. I wondered about this woman’s resolve to withstand being screamed at and still get back in the car. I wondered if maybe she’d done something to hurt this man and that’s why he was so upset. It sounded like rage but it also sounded like pain. And I don’t know if it was a sense of camaraderie or schadenfreude but, though things still feel bad, they somehow don’t feel as bad. There’s something stabilizing about seeing someone else lose their shit. idk

I think capitalism is not for me.

I happened to notice this past Sunday that I was free from the “Sunday scaries.” I’ve always experienced: that common anxiety toward the end of the weekend that comes so often with the coming week. Even during periods of my life where work didn’t feel like trauma and pain, where I actually enjoyed showing up somewhere, where I liked seeing the people I saw every day, even then, Sunday evenings have always come with a certain tension, an inability to relax and enjoy myself because of all the tasks I had coming to me in the morning, either real or imagined. On one hand, it’s a little confusing because I don’t feel that same anxiety on any other four weeknights that precede the other workdays. But part of me wonders if it’s just a function of difficulty with transitions in general playing out in the transition of weekend to weekday.

This past Sunday, I looked at my partner and said, “I am actually excited to go to work tomorrow,” and it was the truth. I feel like I’ve finally found a job at a company that values me for who I am and what I’m capable of without me having to “flex” into something else or struggle to be something I am not, which has been my experience throughout my career. The past week and a half have come with a lot of promise and hope, starting a new job that feels like I’ve finally found “the one.” What’s more promising is the people I’m meeting are transparent about their challenges. Even during the interview process, it seemed like they were more nervous about luring me in under false pretenses and really wanted me to know the volume of work I was signing up for by taking this job. It’s a stark contrast from previous roles where the optics were of utmost importance. What the thing was did not matter as much as what the thing looked like and how it was communicated and how it was received, where it seems like here, we are mostly just concerned about the “thing”, what it is, how it functions. It’s ok if it’s a little ugly or unfinished or misunderstood because we can deal with all that later. It feels more tangible to me.

So tell me why I am miserable today for no discernible reason. I feel physically exhausted. I woke up this morning with a sore back, but I’ve woken up that way every morning for the past month or so. I got about as much sleep as I always get. I had too much junk food last night and my body just feels uncomfortable on multiple levels. And while I’m still excited about work and the culture here and the chance to make my own decisions and do the things I want to do and how I want to do them, there’s some creeping doubt telling me I can’t do this.

I can kind of picture how I want things to go. I can conjure an image in my head of what this job might look like a year or two down the road but I have no clear vision of how to get there. I don’t think I can do this. I have been too anxious to go down to where the rest of my team sits and visit with them today because I don’t have anything to say and I’m not sure I can stomach another awkward moment of just standing around staring out the window, not sure if I should be saying something else or walking away. And if I were to walk away, do I say something before I go or do I just leave? I also don’t know if they’re busy and I’m intruding or bothering them. I can’t stop thinking about all the times so far I’ve just stood there for way too long and then eventually walked away awkwardly. They must thing I’m really odd. And I don’t want them to think I’m odd so I won’t go there. But I’m not quite sure what to do with myself and this lack of a clear direction is making me feel useless. I was sitting at my desk almost in tears but I was distracted by IT installing some software on my computer before I could fully break down.

What is wrong with me?

I wanted this job. I want to do this job. I think I can do this job. Most days I want to do this job. Today I just want to sleep.