A follow up to yesterday's post.....far more rational in nature.

Well, here it is, New Year's Eve. I'm sitting in the window of my favorite, local, downtown coffee shop writing this and watching all of the Missoula residents that are out enjoying the First Night activities. My perspective on things this evening are a little different tonight that they were last night. Last night I wrote everything from a very emotional point of view, I just ran with how I was feeling at the time. I spend a great deal of time writing each week in my journal and decided it was time to start putting some of it in my blog as well. One thing I learned about myself when I was at The Center was that writing is very therapeutic for me and I actually enjoy doing it. I usually manage to make it down here to my coffee show three to four times a week and usually spend around two to three hours writing and watching people each time. I try to be as honest as possible in my writings but generally try to keep things positive in nature, unlike yesterday's post.

 There are constantly two different Jon's competing for control of my personality. On the one side you have the very emotional and reactive side of my personality that is very sensitive in nature and is greatly skewed toward focusing on the negative aspects of my life. The other side is what I like to call the clinical side of my personality. This side of my personality is very analytical in nature and does it's best to be as unemotional as possible. As you can imagine, these two sides of me are constantly at war with each other. I try my best to favor the clinical side of my personality and bury all of my emotions as much as possible. Trying to ignore your hurt and emotions is not a healthy practice, even if the emotional side of my personality is completely irrational. Being completely clinical all of the time also has unintended side effects, it makes it very difficult to form bonds with other people and it makes me appear cold in nature about things. As a result, people can mistake me as someone who doesn't care about others. This is far from the truth though, I am a very sensitive person and care a great deal about people that I interact with. I just don't want them to know it for fear of being exploited by them. My clinical side helps me exceed in my job at the hospital lab and I take a great deal of pride in being good at my job. I just work in an environment where effort and excellence aren't recognized or rewarded.

I wish so much that I could just erase the emotional side of my personality and live completely in the realm of reason and logic. That's impossible and very unhealthy though. Emotions are what they are. They are raw. They are powerful and they are rarely logical in nature. Everyone has them, it's what you do with them that often determines how healthy of an individual you are. This is where I run into trouble when it comes to therapy sessions. Getting me to switch out of clinical mode and start feeling raw emotions is very difficult because I hate feeling like I'm not in control and I'm scared to death that I will be punished for expressing them. I feel very guilt about what I wrote last night. Everything I wrote was the truth as I saw it at that moment. My emotional side was in charge at that point in time and I ran with it. As a result, I feel very vulnerable about it today. Obviously my clinical side is back in the driver's seat tonight as everything I'm writing is very analytical in nature.

Why do I feel so guilty about having feelings? I wasn't really allowed to express myself emotionally growing up and was punished for having feelings or showing any kind of vulnerability. This went well beyond just feelings though. I had severe asthma growing up and had little to no control over it. Unfortunately for me, my mother didn't believe in getting me the proper medications to help with my symptoms (keep in mind that we trying not to judge here, it is what it is). What was worse, I had severe allergies to go with the asthma which included things like dogs and cats. We would travel to visit mom's friends in other cities who had pets and I would always get really sick with asthma. Mom always became extremely angry with me whenever this would happen and I would have to do my best to hide just how sick I really was. One time it was so bad that I needed to immediately go to the hospital. It was bad, really bad. I could have died but all I could think about was how mad she would be with me if she found out. Unfortunately I couldn't hide it from her for long and she reacted just as I expected she would. She physically struck me and told me that I always ruin our trips. I still have nightmares about that experience to this day and also refuse to let anyone know when I'm not feeling well.

I learned I couldn't show any weakness growing up so I coped by becoming as unemotional as possible. This was nearly impossible since this was time time that the inner child was silently seething away in unexpressed rage. I lived in a world where I had to be in control of my emotions at all times. Unfortunately I feel I still need to live that way. No one ever cared about my feeling growing up so why should I care about them? This quite possibly saved me sharing a similar fate as my sister as far as alcoholism goes. I absolutely hate being drunk, I abhor it. Why? Because alcohol lowers your inhibitions which means I lose control of my emotions. I never know what is going to come out when I get drunk and it scares the shit out of me. Fortunately for me, I am a happy drunk and tend to be extremely honest with my feelings about people when I am drinking. My ex-wife used to tell me that she loved it when I got drunk because I would actually express real feelings while intoxicated. I shudder just thinking about it right now. I cannot stand being vulnerable in any way, shape or form. Any time I drink more than two beers (it's extremely infrequent for me to drink at all anymore) I wake the next day in a near panic over what I might have said or revealed to people about me. My heart rate has gone up noticeably just writing about it right now.

I have to learn to be vulnerable with people if I'm every going to make long lasting relationships. Like I said previously, I have a lot of anxiety over what I wrote last night. It was very negative in nature and that isn't the person that I want to be. I want so much to be a positive person who has nothing but nice things to say about life in general. Unfortunately I am far too cynical and jaded in nature. Being cynical was a coping mechanism for me growing up, it helped me survive my childhood. If the world was going to reject me, I might as well learn how to make fun of how stupid it all is. Being cynical is just an excuse to not interact or be part of the world. Why put yourself out there on a branch, exposed to the possibility of falling or worse yet, being pushed off by someone else? What's the incentive to try something new when it's far safer to just make fun of it? I have to learn to stop using my cynicism as a defense mechanism and learn to embrace the world and new experiences. I was doing a very good job of this 18 months ago but things have eroded since then.

Being mindful and allowing myself to be vulnerable is at the core of my path toward recovery. I have to be mindful of every word I speak and every thought that I think. I have to ask myself constantly, is this really the truth or is it my programming and negative skewing nature expressing itself? At the same time, I have to learn that it's okay to have feelings and be vulnerable around the right kind of people. I have to find a way out of the isolationist tendencies of my life. There are things that I can change, like attending support groups, and there are things that I can't change, like my work schedule (I work until 10:30 at night most of the time). I have to learn to not hate myself and the feelings that I have been suppressing for so long. This is not going to be a short or easy journey for me though.  It is important to remember that it is a journey that never ends. The most important thing is that I have to try, not just some of the time or part of the time. I have to try all of the time. This means getting out of bed after only eight hours of sleep, no matter how tired I am or how much I don't want to. This means finding a new therapist that will keep me focused, on task and will help pick me up when I stumble along the way. This means learning how to feel and express my feelings without feeling weak or guilty afterwards. This means going to the gym as frequently as possible. This means attending as many support groups a week that my schedule will allow. This means I have to continually look for new ways to meat people, no matter how much it scares the hell out of me. It means that I have to focus and be thankful for what I have and not what I don't have. It means allowing people to care about me and allowing myself to show that I genuinely care about them. This is by now means a complete list of the things that I need to work on. Tonight is the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, it's as good a time as any to get back on the road to proper recovery.

I'm back after a long break....

DISCLAIMER:
This post is very raw in nature. It is extremely negative and bleak. It is also the truth. I am not trolling for attention or sympathy with this post. This is me and what it is to be and think like me. It is not for the faint of heart. This is what mental illness is. It makes zero sense and it is not supposed to make sense. This is where I am right now.



Hello again blog, it's been over six months since I wrote anything here. I'd like to be able to say that the time has been well spent, but it really hasn't. Sigh, it's been so long that I don't even know where to begin. I can say that I feel like a completely different person than I did at this time last year.....and that's not a good thing. I think about how I felt at this time last year and wonder what the hell happened between then and now. Well, I know exactly what happened, I fell down, again. When I came home from my experience from The Center (yes, that's exactly what it is called) in July of 2011 I was armed with something that I had never experienced before, hope. I knew that if I was going to be able to make the changes that I had made from my stay at The Center last, I was going to have to find a support system that would help keep me focused on what's important and mindful of bad thought patterns and behaviors. In my defense, I did really well for about the first eight months. The problem is that I wasn't able to form a support system for myself. At the time, I didn't have any access to any support groups (I do now but lack the courage to start going to them) and I was unable to branch out and meet new people like I needed to. All it took was one Winter and I started falling back into old, unhealthy patterns. It wasn't an overnight occurrence though, it was a very long and gradual process that was somewhat insidious in nature at times.

Like most everything in life, the nature of my disease and it's effects on me are very complex in nature. If I were to sum up my primary obstacle, it would be that I'm far too isolated from the world and it's people. Interpersonal relationships are very difficult for me  many reasons. I don't know how to meet new people and form relationships with them. When you have close to zero self esteem and believe that you are a bad and flawed person, you tend to question why anyone would want to have anything to do with you at all in the first place. This statement is not designed to garner any kind of sympathy or outpouring of comments of how the above isn't true. Barrack Obama could call me up tomorrow and tell me how great of a person I am. He could tell me how likable and lovable I am and I still wouldn't believe it. This is the core of my problems. During my childhood years instead of being loved and nurtured (I'm not placing the blame on anyone here and I'm not angry about the who and what that was involved), I was emotionally abused extensively and physically abused to some extent. There is much that I don't remember about my childhood but I do know that things really started when I was about six years old.

Without getting into any of the specifics, I "learned" that there was something wrong with me and that was why elements of my family didn't like me and why I was constantly picked on at school. There was no positive reinforcement to tell me that I was a good person or that the things that were happening to me were wrong. When you are young, you don't have the reasoning skills necessary to question things that happen to you or the way people treat you. You are a child and your world revolves around things the way that people treat you. I grew up believing that I am a bad person and my mind still believes that to this day. "Can't you just change the way you think about yourself?", is what I get asked frequently. The answer to that question is yes, but it is not an easy endeavor.

When I was first diagnosed with Complex PTSD, the psychiatrist that was doing the diagnosing told me that I have to learn to speak a new language in my mind. As you can imagine, this is a very difficult thing to try to accomplish. Everything in my life seems to support my current paradigm of thinking, that being that I am an awful person. I have very few friends with whom I am in contact on a regular basis and those few who I do talk to, really don't know anything about my story. This illustrates another fundamental challenge that I face on a daily basis, I don't trust anyone. At. All.

I remember a time when trusting people was a lot easier for me, that was about ten years ago though. Between my divorce (and my ex-wife's subsequent marriage to someone who was in our wedding, I wish them nothing but happiness though) and my last relationship, I have learned that I can't share who I really am with people because they will either misunderstand me completely and leave me or worse, turn my secrets against me in an attempt to destroy me (not exaggerating or kidding on this one, it was that bad).  I seriously don't trust anyone and as a result, most people I encounter in my life don't have a clue as to how I truly am. I don't open up to people because I am desperately afraid of being judged, betrayed or abandoned. People who I work with would argue that they know me pretty well, sadly this isn't the case. The persona I present at work is designed to keep people from seeing who I really am and just how vulnerable and dysfunctional that my life is. Once again, I. Don't. Trust. Anyone. Period..... and that includes myself. Don't take it personally if you are offended by the above statement, it is not meant to be offensive in nature. It is what it is, that being that I don't trust anyone.

I hate my life, I really do. I'm scared, lonely and frequently wonder what the point of continuing on is. Another wonderful trait of my disease is that I suffer from random, intrusive thoughts frequently. It's not uncommon for my mind to tell me that I should kill myself 4-5 times a day. It's very hard to explain this in terms people can understand. I can be having a conversation with someone at work and my mind will suddenly flash to a vivid image of the barrel of a pistol pressed against my temple by my own hand. I realize this is a very disturbing thought for most people but it's a fact of life with me. These thoughts are completely involuntary in nature, that's not to say that I don't actively and willingly think about suicide at least once a week. I am not overly suicidal right now, at least not any more than usual. I have my dogs to think of, they are the one thing that keeps me on this planet at times and I won't abandon them. I am almost completely convinced that I will take my own life some day down the road though. There will come a day when Jack and Carter pass on and then I will be completely alone in this life. So, here's where some people are going to say that I need to be hospitalized or something like similar to it. To this I say NO. I'm not going to kill myself tonight or tomorrow, I'm just saying that I think about it often and wish I had the courage to follow through with it.

I realize this is a terrible, terrible attitude and is very unproductive but I can see the writing on the wall. I am going to struggle with mental illness for the rest of my life, there is no escaping that. Once again, I hate my life. I hate just about every aspect of it. I hate the fact that I don't have a normal family. I hate the fact that I don't have many friends. I hate my job. I hate that I'm fat. I hate my personality. The only time that I feel somewhat happy and free is when I'm asleep and am fortunate enough to be dreaming about a Jon that is surrounded by people, doesn't have problems, and is loved by everyone. I have those dreams and wake up, only to find that I'm back in my tiny apartment, I've slept the last 12 hours and it's time to get ready for work. It's those moments that I hate my life the most, to have been given a taste of happiness only to have it snatched away when my alarm goes off. That's only when I have good dreams though. I have nightmares frequently, these aren't your average nightmares. These dreams are frequently phantoms from the past where I am forced to relive moments of abuse, rejection or abandonment. It's not uncommon for me to wake up shaking violently with my heart pounding in my chest. There are times when I want to scream my head off after these dreams. I feel trapped and helpless, like I'm back in my childhood again. This dreams are visceral and they are very ugly. Sometimes I wake up from one nighmare and lay back down and have another one upon going back to sleep.

I hate my life, I hate myself. Oh how I hate myself. I am jealous of my sister, she's at peace (or at least I choose to believe that). Carly saw the writing on the wall, she knew that there was nothing that she could do that was going make her well or happy. I actually think that Carly was the smarter and braver of the two of us. She was brave enough to end her suffering. I have never once been angry with her for making the decision that she did, if anything, I feel I understand it. She was so miserable at the end, all she wanted was peace. I miss her so much though. She was the only other person in this world who knew what took place while we were growing up. Carly was fabulously intelligent, she just didn't have any common sense. Carly suggested as early as eight years ago that I was a good candidate for having PTSD. She knew. When Carly left us I lost the only other person in the world who had answers to a lot of questions about things I can barely remember. Somewhere in the back of my mind I always thought that we would be close some day when we got older and that we would be able to help each other through our problems. I hate the way I treated Carly those last ten years, I was an idiot. I was angry because she got all of the attention while I suffered in silence. How stupid was that? We were in the same boat together and I couldn't even see it. The only difference between Carly and I is the fact that I'm not an alcoholic. I wanted to be Carly when we were growing up. Everyone loved Carly, she was smart, she was popular, people loved her! I wanted so badly to be her, her life seemed so much easier than mine growing up. The truth is, her life was just as bad as mine was. I guess another difference between her and I was our reaction to the abuse we suffered. Carly did her best to blend in and be liked, so much so that she had no idea who she really was. I think Carly had no idea who she was when she took her own life three and a half years ago. Sigh, it's so sad.

I was different though, I am naturally defiant in nature. I took the abuse but was defiant about it. I silently seethed through my childhood and teenage years. I vowed that I would run away some day. I would run away and become successful. I would find my way and my life away from everyone who had ever wronged me. Then one day, I would return and take revenge on everyone who ever hurt me growing up. It's very important to note that I have never wanted any sort of physical or violent revenge on anyone. Physical violence has never been and never will be an option for me. I would never, ever physically harm another person. I should probably let everyone know that I own no firearms and have no plans on purchasing one....ever. If I had had access to firearms over the last five years, I probably would have killed myself several times over. People want to ban the sale of firearms to mentally ill people (an idea I wholeheartedly support, I would ban all firearms if it were up to me though). I make this statement, I am no danger to anyone other than myself and like I said above, I'm not going to go out and kill myself anytime soon, I have my dogs to think of.

Back to the original line of thought...... To me, the ultimate revenge would be to make my tormentors feel the way that I did. To hate yourself, to question what it was about yourself that makes everyone hate you so much. I was a very angry child growing up, living for revenge makes you that way. It helped me to  survive though, I guess that's all that counts (or does it really?). There is a monster that lives in me that is anything but nice, as a result. We will call him the inner child for this discussion. I've put a great deal of that anger behind me over the last few years but the inner child still raises his head on occasion..... and I hate myself for it. I hate my inner child for what he is and what he represents. I hate this innerlchild who still lives in my head that screams for revenge on those who have harmed me. I hate that child so much. That child has no compassion, he thinks only of revenge. I keep him buried very deep within my psyche under lock and key, blindfolded and gagged so he is blind and deaf to the comings and goings of my life. He is probably the most closely guarded part of my personality, no one has seen him in his fully revealed form and no one will if I have anything to say about it. I try to forget that he's there and for the most part, I keep him under wraps. Every once in a while,  a situation will present itself that smacks of the abuse I suffered as a child. Someone will come along who resembles my abusers too closely, these people are very, very dangerous for me. Having suffered abuse as a child, I am that much more prone to fall victim to the same patterns of abuse as an adult. I avoid contact with these people like the plague,  I have a sixth sense for them almost, I see them from a distance and for the most part, avoid them altogether. Unfortunately one of those kind people has a limited  and unavoidable presence in my life. I'm not going to say who this person is or whether this person is a he or she. There are awful people out there in the world and you can't avoid all of them all the time. I recognize this person for what he/she is and I stay as far away as possible because the child in me can sense these people too. Unfortunately a situation arose last month where this person came into my circle and took a very well placed shot at me. That shot struck through all of my barriers and very nearly freed the inner child from his bonds. The next thing I knew, he was screaming in my mind. "Here's your chance! You can have revenge right here and now! Strike now with the full fury of your hatred! Crush your enemies! This person deserves everything that you give to he/she! You can burn a permanent hole into this person's soul, just like the one that resides in your soul! Think of how good it will feel! This person will never mess with us again after we get through with him/her! You can make him/her feel the way that we do about ourselves! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?"

So there I was, poised to unleash the full fury of years of abuse and hatred on this unsuspecting person who had offended me. Once again, this energy is not physical in nature, brutality is the last resort of the weak and unimaginative. I will physically harm NO ONE. EVER. I do not thirst for that kind of revenge. Emotional scars are far more difficult to heal than physical ones anyway. I wanted so badly to burn a hole in this person's soul, I could taste it's deliciousness on my tongue. The power built and built within me, I knew exactly what I was going to say and how to say it to maximum effect. This person would never, ever forget the verbal assault they were about to witness. This inner child crouched, ready to pounce, ready to finally get his due....... and I walked away.

I turned and walked away with the inner child screaming and howling in righteous anger in my head. He raged and raged while I wrestled him back into his prison, slamming the door on him with an earthshaking thunder. As the dust settled I came to grips with what almost happened in that instance. I almost became like the very same people who made me who I am today..... and I hate myself so much for it. I absolutely cannot let the inner child out, if I do I have failed as a human being and have become a monster. I hate myself so much for what lives in me. I hate myself for what I can become if I ever let my guard down.

I sit here today, writing this extraordinarily long and visceral blog. The inner child is locked away again, counting the days until he can run free and lay waste to other people's psyches to his heart's content. That's what he believes anyway.....and he couldn't be more wrong if he tried. You see, people can only hurt you if you give them power over you. This is why I get hurt so easily, my whole self worth is based upon how other people see me. Thus, many, many people have power over me, it's why I hate myself so much. The person in question who took a very well placed shot at me has figurative and literal power over me, that's why it hurt so badly and was able to nearly unleash the inner child. Here's the thing though, I could have unleashed a verbal assault the likes of which God has never seen on that person and it wouldn't have done a lick of damage. That's because the offending person couldn't care less about what I think about him/her. I would have just ended up looking like a raving lunatic despite all of the energy that I would have unleashed. Carrying anger is just a waste of time and ultimately does more harm to yourself than it does to those you resent. My ultimate weapon is of absolutely zero value to me and actually just weighs me down even further. I have a hard enough time dealing with myself when I almost use it, let alone if I let things fly. I would never forgive myself for such behavior and worse yet, I would more than likely fail to do any damage to the offending party at all. Did I mention that I hate myself? I really do. For being such a smart person, I really am stupid.

I'm a big fucking mess. I'm probably always going to be a big fucking mess. I hate myself, I really hate myself. I don't even want to try to love myself anymore. What's the point? Everything in my life just points to the case that I am an awful person who deserves to be alone his entire life. I wish I had that courage to take my own life but I don't have it....at least right now. I am sick, very sick. There is no cure. I take pills, I have a therapist but he doesn't even know what to say to me. All I get is, "Come back and see me next week.", from him. I'm so full of shit. Even if I were to embrace myself as a person, it would take an incredibly patient and understanding woman to enter into a relationship with me. I'm broken, there is no therapy or medication that is going to make me a whole person. I am always going to struggle.....and I hate that almost as much as I hate myself. I have no hope. There are people in the world with far larger problems than what I have and they still manage to carry on and find happiness somehow....and that just makes me hate myself even more. I'm not writing this for sympathy and I feel badly for those who actually read all of this crap that I wrote. It's long, it's extremely bleak and negative......and it's the truth. This is what it's like to be mentally ill, this is how I feel every single day. I'm throwing this out there for people to see what it's like. I'm not going to end this post on some positive note by saying that I'm going to do my best to change. I don't give a shit anymore. People can judge me all they want, I don't think it's possible for me to hate myself anymore than I do already. I haven't even begun to address just how cynical and jaded I am in this post. I'm not trying to blame anyone in this post for anything, placing blame solves nothing.  I want answers to questions that are unanswerable. I am who I am, there is no denying that, there is no sense in crying over it, what would it solve? I most certainly play a key role in the way I interact with the world and my isolation, I hate that too. My fate is yet to be written, I still stand by my claim that I will take my own life at some point in time. It's funny, I guess I've alway known that in some way. I'm not glamorizing suicide in any way, shape or form. I do feel that it is an acceptable way of ending unendurable suffering. I love my sister very much and miss her every day but I understand why she did what she did and ultimately, I respect her decision despite the fact that we lost a wonderful, intelligent and beautiful human being as result. The world we live in is not fair, to say the least. I realize this, sometimes people are born or made that aren't designed to make it in the world, I feel I am one of those people. For the time being, my dogs keep me here....because I love them too much to leave them.

I probably shouldn't post this but I'm going to do it anyway, I put a lot of effort into it. Mental illness isn't pretty, it doesn't make sense but it most certainly exists. Maybe some day we will be able to better understand it, maybe we won't.