I'm mostly alone these days...

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So I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and Schizophrenia when I was 20, (im 26 now), I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder last year. To some degree, I've always been suicidal more or less... I can remember being as young as 5 or 6 and expressing to my mom thoughts like, "I wish I was never born, I don't wanna be alive anymore, I wish I was dead."
I was late to the game when it came to self-harm. didn't know it was even a thing till i was 18, and through no suggestion by the internet, sight of it, mention of it.... It just sort of came to me one day, as I found myself mindlessly burning myself with cigarettes.
I was always a turbulent child, swinging rapidly from extreme love and adoration, to rage spells, over very little things that I viewed as injustices. In 8th grade, for reasons I don't really know why, I refused to talk to anyone in my school. The previous year I was very hyper and always getting into trouble. But that year, I didn't talk to anyone, not the students, not the teachers. I wore the same dark blue jacket everyday, even in the summer. Part of me wanted to talk, I suppose, but I was so very afraid of changing what I had started, that suddenly I "Couldn't" talk. Kids desperately tried to get me to talk, even as far as informing to school counselor about me, (didn't talk to her either...) 9th grade I was hyper again, but I didn't talk to anyone who knew of me from 8th grade, just sort of ignored them entirely. Had some friends that I enjoyed making laugh and such.
When I was 15, I discovered Marijuana. Soon, I spent every weekend with my two closest friends getting high. I sorta over time just kinda withdrew from the social scene, not excluding people from my life, just not really having any interest in anything social aside from smoking pot and playing videogames with my 2 best pals outside of school.

 

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Fast Forward: its august 2008, I'm in college for the first time, and suddenly I have a great difficulty making friends, so I just generally hang out with my roommate and his friends, smoking pot, and now that I could access it, drinking. Now its october, and the loneliness is starting to settle in... I miss home, I miss my two pals, I can't bear being sober, And one night, I start to hear a voice in my head. It's a caring voice, trying to tell me to not smoke so much pot, that I'm ruining my life with it... for a few moments, I think it's the voice of God. I was stunned. Didn't know what to think, but then it sorta sounded like my other roommate (the one that rarely talked, and didn't smoke or drink.) All of the sudden, There are lots of voices in my head, faint but distinct voices, of people I know, people I've seen, people I've talked to. They all seemed to agree that I smoke too much pot, and It's starting to affect my reality. (As pictures of weed cross my mind, one of the older boys voice in my head says, "man this kid really loves weed...")
This all scares me deeply. What was this? Could people actually talk to each other without saying anything? Could people read each others' minds? Was telepathy a thing?
I wasn't all too sure about it, but alas, within days It was 8th grade all over again. I wasn't speaking. To anyone. Not a yes, not a no. I wanted to talk. With everything I was I desperately wanted to talk... But I couldn't, in a way, what was the point of saying anything if everyone already knew? That didn't stop people from trying to be a friend to me, or trying to get me to talk. They gave me every opportunity to make my voice heard, inviting me to social events, or to go smoke pot with them. One girl even invited me into her apartment one weekend, and I wound up having sex with her a few times, I just wanted to get laid, I imagine she just wanted me to talk for a change, and I could guess that this was a way of her getting me to talk, (I didn't.)
Well, due to my pre-occupation with this notion of telepathy, I was failing school. I wasn't doing the work, I rarely showed up to class, and I flunked out. ended up going back to my hometown to live with my parents in May 2009...

 

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But, everything followed me home. within an hour of being home, my parents, and my two best pals from high school, could easily tell, something was different about me. They couldn't but their finger on it, but regardless spent as much time with me as possible. My first night home, as I am lying down at my friends house trying to fall asleep. The voices. Neighbors I knew, My best pals, even my Parents that lived down the street... They were all talking to me in my head. The rest of the year is a blur, I don't have any recollection of what happened.
One day, I met this girl I knew in high school, who seemed very keen on me then, (I was too shy to make a move, wasn't even sure if I liked her, but looking back, she definitely liked me...) and I can't really explain it, and I didn't know it at the time, but I trusted her, and I think I liked her. I spent every effort I could making her laugh and smile, even asked her to the movies once (she said only as a friend).
See there was something about her presence, and anytime I thought of her, that I didn't hear the voices.... I was myself again. Happy and Jubilant, and spontaneous and full of life. Soon enough, I fall in love with her, (bear in mind, she only wants to be friends, eventually seeing me as her best friend, and though I'm madly in love with her, I never tell her I am...)

January 2010, Me and "Sarah" I will name this girl, are walking through the streets of my neighborhood one night, talking about the finer things in life, and the subject of sex comes up. I start asking her about her experiences with it, and what she felt about it... maybe she had a hint I was in love with her, because she didn't wanna tell me about her sexual experiences. I pressured her into telling me, and she gave. Turns out, she had been around quite a few times since I left for college. She lost her virginity not long after I left for school, and had been with quite a few number of lads since then. I was floored. It was at that moment I felt my heart breaking for the first time. I didn't let it be known then, but I found an excuse to end our walk, and I went home. The tears didn't quite hit me yet, as I didn't understand what I was experiencing. This was a new kind of pain, that transcended all physical pain I had previously felt in my life.
Within the hour, I knew, I oh so truly knew, that I wanted to kill myself. I think I might have headed out for a late night walk, making a few calls as I cried, one of the calls was to Sarah I believe, explaining me love for her, and that I was heartbroken over what she told me earlier that night, and that I desperately wanted to end my life.

 

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The rest of the year, I only have bits and pieces of in my memories, but It was the worst year of my life. Literally every day, there were few things I thought about besides the idea of suicide. I slept all the time, I stopped talking to my pals, even Sarah, I rarely ate. I think I spent most of my time on the back patio, staring into the void, begging whatever God there was to kill me. March came around, and though my mother whom I was living with at the time might have sensed something was wrong, she knew something was terribly wrong when I gave her a deadline. I said something along the lines of, If things don't get better by the end of the month, I'm going to kill myself. She found a therapist, who I went to see, (he wasn't a very good therapist, or maybe I just didn't give him a chance as I didn't say much to him, (all I really remember was him asking me if I was thinking of killing myself, to which I nodded, he added, are you thinking of killing yourself right now?, I nodded, whilst imagining myself engulfed in flames....)
The therapist put me on a strong anti-depressant. I felt rather numb for a few days, then the desire to kill myself came back tenfold stronger, I expressed this to my mother while I was screaming in pain.... the therapist took me off of them.
another gap in my memory, but it was nearing the end of the month, 3 days left till my planned suicide date I believe, when I decided to go to my two best pals and say goodbye. The first one, didn't have much to say, he seemed rather stunned. The second one, immediately burst into tears, he refused to accept that his "brother" wanted to kill himself, seemingly so bad, and didn't appear to listen to any reason. This friend, went to his mom, a retired nurse, with this news that his best friend was only a few days away from ending it all. I was resting in my bed, begging to fall asleep and never wake up, (as was my nightly routine before sleep,) when my friend burst through the door of my room, and told me, "Pack your bags, I'm taking you to the hospital." when I refused, he called all of my parents explaining the situation, and they all showed up in my room, in a few hours, not really giving much of a shit, I agreed to go to the psychiatric hospital. This is where I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, and after telling them of my experience in college, Schizophrenia.
It should be noted here that there was a cardinal rule about the perceived telepathy I experienced, in which if I ever spoke about it to anyone, which I did to my doctors, I would be banished (whatever that meant) and so, from that moment on, I never heard the voices again. Though it never erased the memory of it, and for many years, even not hearing the voices, but feeling that others could still read my mind, put me in a predicament. Social anxiety was a big thing for many years after because of it.
Even after discharge, and another stay in a psych hospital during the summer, really the only thing I ever thought about that year was suicide. Until, October of 2010, where I was at a point of complete apathy, somewhere beyond depression and pain, or even all emotion... the only thought in my head was suicide. So, I took all the medication I had one afternoon, I estimate around 50 grams of seroquel, 25 grams of ativan, and maybe 10 grams of anti-depressants, I decided to take them all. I layed in bed, not a thought in my head.

Not a gap in my memory even, the very next thing I realized from laying in my bed after taking the meds, I was laying in a hospital bed in the ICU of a local hospital, with my mom and dad in the room with me.

 

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I don't remember much of the following years, as I spent most of it smoking pot daily, experimenting with harder drugs, particularly psychedelics like DMT, and hanging with a rough crowd. Never really said much, or anything that had any real substance to it, Social Anxiety had me. I cut a few times, found I enjoyed cigarette burns more, and did that every now and again, not really knowing I was doing it, more or less, "Cause I could." I was in and out of the psychiatric hospital every 6 months or so, either from suicidal ideation, or drug abuse.

sometime in 2014, I was bumming a couch at a friends house, after a year of sticking only to pot, and beer, I had learned to not care if people were reading my mind or not, so my social anxiety was somewhat lifted. There was a night though, after having too many beers, then smoking a bowl with my roommates, a psychosis hit. Id rather not get into the details, as I'm still trying to come to grip with that night, but I do remember be completely severed from reality, truly believing I was gonna be murdered that night, that all of my life was but a reality show for the world, and as it had grown stale, the producers decided to kill me. literally everything could have killed me through my eyes...
but that leads me to the next week, after being once again in a major depression, contemplating suicide. I called a therapist one day, seeking help, explaining my situation. After a few days of thinking about it, she agreed to take me on as a client. She advised me to get sober, and start attending A.A. to do so, so I did. I have several personal issues with A.A., and I will not get into them, choosing instead to just let it be as is, so others may benefit from it if they so choose.

 

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I met a girl around springtime 2015, and she called me one night saying she had an urge to cut herself, something she had struggled with for years. I talked her out of it, going as far as to be her coach when it came to the subject, and she gave it up, choose to focus on me.... we fell in love eventually, and that was probably the best summer I had since I was a child. I was more or less an empath, and she was a being of hyper-sexuallity. One day I woke up to an, "I'm so sorry..." text from her. When I questioned her about it, She told me that she had cheated on me while I was asleep. While I was initially frustrated, It mostly didn't surprise me. After talking about it for a few days, and seeing how genuinely sorry she felt, how guilty she felt, and seeing that the guilt might potentially destroy her, I decided to forgive her. We argued a lot after that, even going as far as to seek external help for our relationship, (on one of the last nights we ever talked, I was going through a lot, and took up cutting myself and burning myself quite a bit, she found out, and everything I had worked on with her came crumbling down, as she started cutting too...) when the night came that she told me, though she really did love me, she didn't think we could be together, because I couldn't satisfy her needs.

It broke me heart. That night, I <mod edit - methods>

 

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Woke up in a hospital the next day. My parents, tired of dealing with this cycle, sent me to a 6 month long co-occuring rehab facility in another state. I really resent them for that, because I got nothing out of it besides talking to a therapist on a weekly basis, which is something I could have done at home.

Alas, what a friend that therapist was. I learned so much from him. I told him everything about myself, the things I had done, the things I had said, the things I had felt, who I believed myself to be..... and he did everything he could to teach me DBT. To this day, I'm not fond of DBT, and I even expressed to him my dislike of it. But he didn't give up, he catered what he knew about DBT and CBT to my personal needs. (After we talked a while, and being the intuitive thinker I am, I got curious about what he believed my diagnosis to be, based on some of the ideas he was trying to instill in me, and he told me he doesn't really believe in diagnosies, he prefers to more or less treat symptoms, maybe in my case it would help if I knew, so we looked it up in the DSM, and we decided that the diagnosis that fits my life best is Borderline Personality Disorder... as relieved as I felt that I had found a diagnosis that I resonated with, several days of tears followed...)

He taught me a great many lessons, and though I am not a client of his anymore, we still talk occasionally.
After digging through whatever it is my soul is, I found a few things. I've known for a very long time that I would rather spend my life, (if I had to live that is...), helping people. I've found that the only sustainable happiness in my life comes from helping people, and the emotions they express after they've received the help they needed. Naturally, I felt I could best do this by combining my experience with mental illness, and my passion for helping others, by becoming a Therapist. And so, currently I work full-time, and go to school full-time, pursuing a Master's of Social Work, and LCSW, so that I can live my dream job, effectively establishing a "life worth living" that Therapist was talking about. I stumbled a few weeks ago upon 16personalities.com, and found out I'm a Mediator, which was cool to see, as it reflected who I view myself to be, to a rather scary degree. So now, I have a purpose, a desire, a passion, that I spend everyday working towards, so that I may help others that struggle with mental illness... its the only thing I wanna do.

 

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though, a mental illness is an illness for life, and as relatively in control of my life as I feel today, there still rests deep within my mind, a desire to end my life. its not strong, but its there... mostly I just feel a supreme sense of loneliness these days, I don't think anyone truly gets me... my co-workers are nice but I don't shed light on the inner workings on my mind. My parents are very supportive and proud of me, but because they've never experienced mental illness, they don't get it, so I rarely talk to them about it. I hate to say it, but I actually do not have any friends. I scared them all away over the years with the drama of my life, and I'm reluctant to make new ones. I'm also not very good at making new friends. And I rarely go out. So I'm kinda dying in an existential way. I keep everything about myself behind a mask when meeting new people, out of fear that they would leave forever at the first hint of abnormality, so no one ever gets close, they get bored, and end up leaving anyway. I wish there was just one person in my life, that actually could see all the wonderful things that go through my head, the extreme sense of joy and sadness I experience everyday, the child-like imagination, and sense of wonder of the extreme gravity of the human condition, that I have.... I wish someone could see all that is me.... and love me for it. And rather than run away because it is too much, would embrace it, and try to find out more.... I think they would find as a result of their persistence, a fiercely loyal friend or lover, that would do anything to make them happy...

at least I've got time on my side.... FIN.