A new level of nothingness

[Carthraziel]

Hello everyone

I tried to write a post last week but I got about half way through and then realsied that everything I'd written was not what I wanted to say. I've wanted to try to write and explain but something has changed in me.

Firstly I wanted to say thanks to you all for just existing and being on this forum, knowing that I have this resource is helpful.

And secondly I want to try and explain.... although I'm not sure what it is I am explaining.

A month and a week ago at the beginning of August I tried to kill myself. I don't mean I half heartedly attmpted or I attempted but I actually wanted to be helped or saved.... I woke up that morning knowing I did not want to live to the end of the day. And I have never felt more certain about anything.  I epically overdosed and hid all the evidence so that no one wouldn know what I'd taken or how much. I kept my phone next to me in case I panicked and changed my mind. I didn't. I felt no sudden rush of fear, no desire to do anything except die.

I woke up in hospital.

A friend had realised something was wrong and had phoned an ambulence for me.

When my partner got to the hospital in the late morning he told me he'd been phoned by the police and had rushed straight there. Everytime they put a catheter in me to try and help  I had ripped it out. It took four people to hold me down in order for them to completely tape a catheter to my hand. I had refused to cooperate with any of the doctors. I did not want to be touched or rescued. I wanted to end my life and I felt like that right was being taken from me.

As I came around I felt angry and completely resentful that I had been saved.

I spoke with the mental health nurse and my GP who from my point of veiw did not seem to understand what the problem was, from where they were sitting they said I was highly functional, intelligent, pretty.... young  had a partner and a job. They seemed not to know what to do with me.

But I didn't care because I honestly resented the fact that I was alive.

I have the spent the month since then completely unable to come to terms with this fact. And I have felt unable to communicate with anyone about things because no one artound me can understand this. Uusually when people talk to each other there is an unpoken assumption that both of you want to carry on living even though live is hard and shit. Even when I was depressed and wished I was dead I still had this tiny candle of carry on hope inside that knew at some point I could overcome all the shit. It's tiny flame willed me on counter balancing the wish that I was dead.  Now that candle is gone. I litterally feel like an embodiment of nothingness..... "Chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom......" is an understatment. There literally is nothing else left in my head.

I have spent most of my nights dreaming that I am depressed.... like the  dream literally consists of me feeling like lead lying on the floor unable to move and the dream lasts all night, nothing else happens in it and I wake up like.... "well that was pointles...."  Or I've been having nightmares that I keep finding catheters coming out of my hands and arms and I have to rip them out and I wish people would stop trying to help or save me. Sometimes I dream that I just scream and scream and scream and there is nothing..... nothing but me.

I suppose giving credit to the  nurse and my gp I am highly functioning... I have been at work this whole time but to be honest when I have free time I have absolutely nill motivation to do anything. I'm not too tired and it  doesn't feel like too much effort it just feels pointless.  But yes I have been to work and met up with friends and I have managed to maintain composire... no one would know there was anything wrong..... But I have been concealing these feelings....

The interesting thing is.... which is what I've wanted to say the most is that none of these dreams are scary or threatening (apart from the ones with the catheters) I don't feel like I've fallen even further into depression. I don't feel like I'm drowning or suffering. I feel like I've discovered core truths about myself that I can argue with and cover up and pretend they don't exist but really no matter what they are true.

I am living dead.

I feel neutral right now....

Thank you for reading.
 

[Kara.]

I have been at work this whole time but to be honest when I have free time I have absolutely nill motivation to do anything. I'm not too tired and it  doesn't feel like too much effort it just feels pointless.  But yes I have been to work and met up with friends and I have managed to maintain composire... no one would know there was anything wrong..... But I have been concealing these feelings....

This I know very well. Alienation is my tactic to keep going.

Very moving piece of writing Carthraziel. I hear what you say. I do think that suicide is a choice that we all have but I wish that suicide is not how you will end. 

Please accept a warm hug if that holds any meaning for you. Keep writing. 

[Carthraziel]

Thank you kindly Kara.

Alienated is definately a more than appropriate word.

 

[Carthraziel]

It's like no state of being I've ever experienced before.... not for any extended period.
I've had minimal to zero appetite... and in addition to this  my sense of taste shifts between distorted and pretty much dead. Everything tastes bland.. or like when you mess around with the colours of something in Photoshop.... it's like the original taste is distorted to taste too salty or too sweet or something that usually tastes bitter does not taste bitter at all. I'm there drinking espresso shots and they have no bitter taste at all....

I've had dulled taste before.... but never this.

I am maintaining my puppet functions. When other people are around my behaviour is fitting to how it normally should be but I have totally diffferent thoughts in my head. When there are no other humans around for me to shape my behaviour around I have  no motivatation at all to do anything.... even my previous escape is dead to me. Gaming used to free me temporarily allowing me to feel and breathe again for a while but now it's just actions with no meaning. The other thing that used to motivate me was practising art. I could teach myself something and get something useful done even when I felt awful.... Now I literally feel empty. The act of drawing feels beyond meaningless....

There is no sadness or distress... I'm not upset... I mainly switch between empty, irritable, hostile, and furious.

At lunch I sit in our staff room staring at my veins absolutely livid that there is blood flowing through them... ...

My compassion, empathy any sentimentality that I had is gone... completely...

I am literally nothingness.

[Kara.]

It sound incredibly scary to me Carth :-(

I also don't know how to find motivation beyond what is structured in terms of employment. I guess that this may have to do with a lack of sense of self. I thought to myself that I wanted to find that life in me. That "zest for life" as they say on online dating. I  don't know what it is but it sounds as if life comes from within themselves and not from outside of them, which is what appears to happens to me. 

I wonder what might have happened to you because you speak as if you had experienced feelings and as if you had access to some motivation and creativity in your art, even though you escaped particular states of mind using gaming. 

I wish I could say something useful but I also try to escape what may be a similar experience to yours. How to overcome such experience? I have the feeling that you are massively dissociated from yourself and the world around you. 

I really hope that there is something to learn and to overcome in your experience. Keep on writing whatever you feel like. Maybe it can help. Meanwhile, hugs to you. 

[Carthraziel]

Thank you for your words Kara

Your responses are useful. So don't worry about it not being I really don't expect anyone else to have answers... it's one of those things where I mostly have to resolve it myself or not at all.
I am seeing my therapost on Monday morning.
But I also have no desire to be helped.... also that all the help given seems irrelivent. Not because it's bad help, it't that it is help given with the assumption that the person wants to survive and overcome their sadness , feel peaceful or accept who they are. 

But I feel more truly me than I have ever felt, like how I feel now is what is really at the centre...... and it doesn't match up with anyone else.

[Kara.]

I had a feeling of having reached the centre few months ago. That was at times a place of nothingness to which I called schizoid, and other times it was of intense shame. It was (and still is) so difficult, but I felt like that that was the real me. Finally me. Whatever it was it was not someone else, as usual, but me. 

The schizoid part, as i call it, was a frozen part that felt no feelings and had no needs at all. This was because when she was very little she had no one to take care of her and the intense needs and fear made her freeze. It was the closest to death I got. This was, and is, the youngest part of me. I was able to start feeling how depressed she was. She started defrosting, very very slowly. This week she was able to use words. I think that that was a great progress but the pain is so immense. The skin of my body feels as if had been ripped off. 

I hear what you're saying about wanting to be seen and heard. At the moment your truth is that you don't want to be helped. You don't seem to need much or even anything at all. It is interesting because yesterday I wrote and deleted stuff a number of times. All of them came from an urge to rescue you but I was not sure if that was my own need or projection or yours (unconscious yours). It just ocurred to me that in my therapy, my T wanted to change my schizoid part, make it better but I wanted only to be seen, to have someone witness that nothingness that i was and which was no more than the expression of a dreadful and nameless pain that could not be felt. I got angry and desperate many times with T because of T's need to change it. I wanted T to stay with me as people stay with a dead body before the funeral as that was how I felt. I was liveless. I was frozen.

T doesn't think that i can have a schizoid part but i do believe I can. I also have read stuff that agree with me. 

Carthraziel, i have spoken a lot. I don;t intend to say that my experience is at all like yours. I find your experience very interesting though dreadful. I want to listen to what you have to say.

Hugs.

 

 

[walker]

I have been there - in that place of nothingness - where nothing matters, and there are really no 'needs'

it was in reality a place of deep depression

but it didn't feel like that at the time

it felt like a peaceful place, a place that 'fitted', that although it was barren, was also comfortable and 'right'

a place to finally let go

a place where all those million things that make up our lives and matter and stress us - suddenly seemed to fall away

it felt like simple clarity

 

don't be fooled, it is not what it seems - in that it can lead to a tragic destruction

please print what you describe so well, for your dr to read,  so they get a clear picture of how things are for you

 

although I do think that unless people have been there, they probably do not understand the hold it has, the draw, the longing, and the apparent impossibility it feels to ever get out of it, or even need to

BUT

THERE IS MORE FOR YOU IN THIS WORLD

and just because you cannot see it or feel it right now - does not mean it isn't there

you cannot see tomorrow

but it will come

 

hoping your drs will listen carefully to you and help you through this

xx

[Carthraziel]

Thank you Walker and Kara.

Kara your position sounds indescribaly horrific. Sometimes acknowledgement of suffering is all that is needed to move on. I find that at least....it can be very difficult to see something as 'real' unless someone else sees it too or ackowledges it.

I also appreciate your thoughtful responses, but there is really no need to rescue me.

Another angle of this scenario is; I have been to the deapths of my core and back again... I have literally stood on the cliff overlooking the vortex that is the black hole. I have seen all the images it holds and relived every nightmare it contains multiple times. The summer after I was diagnosed as BPD I had to confront that knowledge that this lonlieness will never ever  go away. There is no medication that makes you feel less lonely, there's nothing that can bring you out of feeling totally isolated. I'd always believed that through therapy it would go away... eventually... even if it took years. But understanding that that would never happen pushed me to the edge. I cried a lot... I felt like Linkin Park 'Castle of Glass literally' described how I felt and the truth of it chilled me so much that I almost ended my life there and then....
Somehow... and I have no idea how... I did not. I decided that whatever happens we may as well try to get on instead of fighting all the time.

The main difference between then and now is that before I have always been separate from the emptiness. It has been a drastic force in my life... a tornado rendering me incapable, friendless and desperate as it tore away everything I had.  The difference now is that I am emptiness. I am not separate from it any longer... we are literally the same person. Heartless... cold...uncaring....angry.... alienated.... isolated. We need nothing, not friend, not sustinance, not comfort. It isn't horrible as it sounds because I so agressively don't care that nothing hurts.

Well... that's a lie.... there is one thing that hurts.

"I am a being from another plane bound in human skin and forced to live as one among them."

I don't hate myself... or feel shame... I absolutely destest this human body, with such passionate revulsion. I feel like I am a fluid lucid being capable to shifting and changing.. but I am so unbelievably stuck in this single form body... it feels like a prison. I hate this prison so fucking much that nothing esle matters. I do not feel free, I feel bound and behind these eyes paces a creature spitting on the floor at all the revolting humans that surround it.... with all their needs and emotions and their breathing.....

I seek no comfort only freedom.

I can tell no one about this because they find it upsetting.
If I was pyschotic I would actually believe this to be true, I'd genuinely believe I wasn't human. But I retain the biological understanding that I am..... and if I died and they cut my body open they'd find standard human components, nothing magical and weird, no ethereal substances nor glow-in-the-dark- blood....
But I feel so strongly that I am not human that this can never resolve itself.