Acceptance of Mental Health and never, ever giving up.

One of the toughest things about almost all mental illnesses is that they are a constant.  Every night the pain you fall asleep with is the one you wake up with – and this routine continues, sometimes for years, with no control. Its tiring, repetitive, exhausting, and can take massive control over your life.
I spent years being given false diagnoses, believing that my issues were just my personality. That it was just what I was like, rather than there being a separation between who I am and what my illness is. It is taking a long time but I am slowly coming to accept that there is the person I am, and there is the Borderline Personality Disorder that I have, and that I am going to beat. I accept my disorder, and I accept that it’s going to make me feel like giving up on a daily basis, but I also accept that I deserve better than that and one day I will be better. I don’t always believe this, in fact I rarely do, but if I write it down now then perhaps I will remember it when I can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Another tough thing is never, ever giving up. I sometimes feel like I give up on a daily basis; I break down, I cry, I sit staring at walls unable to move or speak. Yet that isn’t giving up; that is my brain doing everything it can to not give up. Sometimes that means turning all my emotions off so that I am unable to do anything, anything but be safe. I may have tried therapy, group therapy, CBT, psychotherapy, counselling, and 7 different medications, but until I have tried it all, I won’t give up.
Currently I am trying lots and lots of vitamins (you never know), a STEPPS programme, solo therapy, mood plotting, and working out how my friends can support me in the way that I need it right now.

Never giving up isn’t necessarily about the therapy, or the medication. Sometimes never giving up is in every morning, giving yourself a chance to enjoy the small good things in your day, and reminding yourself that they exist. Because however small, it is those tiny jewels of hope and love which are going to give us the strength to fight our minds shattering around us. For me it’s often a single caring text, an outfit I feel confident in, or seeing something unexpectedly beautiful which allows me to hold onto hope for another tomorrow. That’s what life is; just a series of tomorrows. 

Scared of my own suicide

For the last 6 years I have been plagued by suicidal thoughts, and for about 3 years prior to that it was an array of other self-destructive thoughts. I dislike the term ‘suicidal thoughts’, because they have never just been thoughts. They are an overwhelming feeling, a sense of power, control and belonging, and feel like a look at the future rather than just an idea. When I think of suicide, it is not me considering it. The time for considering suicide was 6 years ago, and now it is a constant battle between the part of me which strongly knows that it wants to kill me, has to kill me, and the part of me which wants to beat this and live a full life.
I have good days and bad days. On a bad day, 90% of me is suicidal and 10% of me doesn’t know how to fight it, on very good days it’s the other way around, but those are rare. Very occasionally I get to come up for air and feel 100% able to survive, but this only tends to last for about 5 minutes and happens once every month or so. When that happens it feels like after years of being suffocated, the hands have been lifted from my throat. Yet I know that the hands will return, I know that I haven’t yet beaten this.

Suicide is a fear, an incredibly deep seated and slow yet terrifying fear. Some people describe their mental illness as an animal, holding onto them, walking near them. Suicide feels like an ink which has been injected into my bloodstream. People talk about recovery yet I have no idea how to remove this ink without bleeding out. People often tell me that I can’t commit suicide because it will hurt the people left behind. I’ve been told it will leave them angry, heartbroken, and an array of other negative emotions. Yet I struggle to make this a reason to not kill myself, because for me it is not as simple as ‘kill yourself or don’t kill yourself’, it is purely a question of how long I can hold on before I do inevitably die by suicide. That pain, anger and heartbreak will always happen; to me that part is not up for question. The only question is whether by the time I die, I can get the people I love to understand that when someone is killed whose heart is already black with ink; it isn’t actually a loss at all.

The fear comes from the knowledge that I don’t want to die. I don’t want to hurt the people I love, and I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want my life to end in my early 20s, and I don’t want a funeral before I get that chance to have a wedding. I want to go abroad on my own, I want to love someone and be loved back, I want to see which of my friends goes wrinkly first, and who is the one to try Botox? I want a life where I can gather more memories, not a life where all I leave is painful memories.

The control over whether I get to do these things doesn’t lie with me. It would be my hand taking my life, but honestly, its not within my power. I can try, and I can fight, but there is a mood which takes over where all I can do is watch from the side-lines as I hurt myself, swallow pills, prepare to hang myself and try to throw myself off a cliff. I get my own special seat ready for the viewing of me ruining my own life, and all I can do is watch.

So if I die by suicide: be angry, be upset, be whatever you want to be, but remember that the biggest loss alongside that you won’t see me again, is also that I won’t see the life I desperately wanted to live. So you might have to live it for me, and feel lucky for every day you go through where you don’t have to watch your own hands take something as important as your life away from you.