On Being Afraid of Myself

Image credit: sn4tch
Image courtesy of Stockvault.

I had a recent conversation with a friend where I talked about how I sometimes I get afraid of myself. Back before my suicide attempts at different times in my life, I had that fear of the unknown that helped keep my mind in check. After my last set of attempts – after I’d done extensive research into the matter – I no longer have that uncertainty. Knowledge truly governs ignorance, and this sort of knowledge isn’t anything I’d be able to forget any time soon.

What happens if I was able to live on my own without anyone watching me?
As terrible as my current living arrangements are, they do me one invaluable service. People are around to keep an eye on me. I don’t know if I’d be writing this if I was able to remain apart from people. There have been quite a few days where having people around at least made me pretend to not be having depressive episodes.

Then again, I do live in an environment where I’m also encountering the things that caused all of these problems in the first place. My barrier to moving on is not being able to move on. If I was able to be around strangers without feeling like I’d run a marathon afterwards, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Eventually something has to give, and there are times when I’m not sure what will happen first – my mind breaking, or my mind healing enough so I can at least pretend to function normally.

Not knowing if my mind is reliable makes me afraid.
Only someone who has had to come to terms with their own mental infirmities can truly empathize with me here. There’s something about finding out that reality can be fiction which makes everything seem less than it used to be. It’s like being told there really are monsters under the bed. They’re just invisible, and they’re only interested in killing you.

The fear has decreased my writing output, of which I’ve blogged intermittently over the last year or so. Each time I look at it, I find a new problem. As of late, I decided that I wanted to write down my thoughts on how my religious upbringing contributed to my mental infirmities. I realized when typing out the title that it needs to have my actual name associated with it.

I realized that was only going to happen posthumously.

This has turned the whole effort into something macabre. Did I have any ulterior motives for writing my thoughts? Was I trying to write the world’s longest suicide note? Should I stop despite feeling like it’s important to tell people that what you do to small humans can break them when they grow into larger ones? None of these questions take me to happy places.

Image found here.

I’m back to where I was when I started this blog.
I need to grow my sense of apathy at everything in my life, though in a constructive and not destructive way. Part of the grotesqueness of depression I think is that the capacity to care about things really can and does get used against me. I start getting distracted at trying to help myself because this part of my mind tells me that eventually someone’s going to misunderstand it, or someone else is going to get pissed off by it.

It’s really not my job to control those people’s thoughts and actions. Remembering that simple thing is difficult, especially when I act out during an episode. Mistakes are going to happen, and I can’t live life without making them. Even though my mistakes can have some scary consequences, I’ll have to work little by little to become less afraid of them – and myself.