KuriGohan&Kamehameha
想死不能 - 想活不能
- Nov 23, 2020
- 1,744
I feel like it makes a mockery of everything I've had to endure for years to chalk it up to, "oh you're just a little depressed." What even??
The main reason why I became long-term suicidal is due to chronic physical health problems that have been ongoing for years and baffle everyone around me, including those who are meant to be experts. Anyone who knows me very well knows that this is the main source of my day to day misery, ever since I was a teenager I had chronic fatigue syndrome and the symptoms have really spiraled out of control the past few years.
That's not to say that I don't have other issues contributing to this deep seated pain, I certainly do, but I would say my poor health is the biggest driver of it. To understand how much it hurts, I think one has to truly comprehend the sort of person I was before I became so ill. Due to my abusive upbringing and growing up in a shithole location where there were absolutely scant opportunities, I was incredibly determined to flip my lot in life and escape the desolate environment that I grew up in.
I was doing pretty well at it too, for a short while. When I was about to turn 16 I went to live with a foster family and was able to start going to school again, I put my best efforts into studying and took the most difficult courses possible to try and make up for lost time. Even then, I had no energy and was over medicated, didn't get enough to eat at home or at school, and couldn't do any after school activities because I was just so, so tired, but I was very determined to change the outcome of my life at that point.
I faced a lot of bullying and even harassment from teachers for being autistic and unable to make eye contact with them. Any time I made a mistake they thought it was purposeful and I would sometimes be taken into a spare room with teachers and yelled at, insulted, and told that I should give up studying and learn the trades despite me being a small, physically weak girl with no coordination. Some of my teachers were friends with the student who molested me several years before that and I think they held a grudge towards me because I reported him.
Yet, I still didn't give up. It all came crashing down a year and a half or so later though, when I got back to back viral infections and ended up with chronic fatigue so bad all I could do was lay under a blanket of permanent exhaustion. I lost my job (which I needed because I was still a minor at this point and no one was supporting me) and people began to regard me as a lazy, unmotivated faker. This also made me very sensitive and anxious to the point where I could no longer tolerate how I was treated at school and requested to do my work at home on a medical leave for the last month, but none of the staff at my school cared and I was made out to be lazy and mentally ill as a pejorative.
Despite this, I managed to cope enough to get back on track a couple years later and go back to studying after escaping an abusive relationship. My body could not handle physically intensive jobs even as a teenager and the cracks were beginning to show, so it felt like if I didn't get back into education I was going to buckle and end up homeless if I couldn't do these jobs. I was treated for severe vitamin deficiencies that had gone undiagnosed for years, but nothing really improved. At age 19 or so it was apparent that I was developing some sort of peripheral neuropathy, and the chronic fatigue really dug it's claws into me.
I was on vitamin regimines, prescribed stimulants and everything else under the sun, but nothing improved. My blood tests would ping pong back and forth between showing some autoimmune issue, and showing nothing, so I could never get any sort of treatment and my PTSD prevented me from being able to keep engaging with the healthcare system to the extent that a "normal person" would because doctors had absolutely no tact about the fact that I suffered SA from a doctor at a young age and didn't respect me at all. I'm autistic and go mute or freeze in states of high overwhelm, so advocating for myself is difficult if not impossible sometimes.
I spent years in different therapies for my PTSD that did nothing at best, and psychologically harmed me at worst. I have been on pretty much every psychiatric drug you can think of too, save for lithium and antipsychotics. I also tried pretty much every single psychedelic drug, despite this people would continually tell me that I just didn't want to get better, didn't want to recover and somehow my physical health problems were manifestations of trauma that I somehow wasn't addressing. Not having this support from others has really taken a toll on me in the long run, and I can't come back from it, I feel like.
Eventually it was revealed that I had a 13 cm tumor in my reproductive organs alongside several smaller tumors and cysts after I spent months with agonizing constipation and GI issues. It was so difficult to get a scan and I had to pay out of pocket for it because the most commonly used (because it is cheaper) scan involves vaginal penetration which I obviously cannot do, I can't even insert a tampon, and the healthcare staff just acted as if I am a petulant child over this. There was also scar tissue and blood everywhere in the abdomen, so basically a ticking time bomb. Yet after surgery, I felt no better overall, except my constipation is now more mild compared to the hell I went through then. Still there, but at least not horror movie levels of it.
On top of all this, I started developing back pain a few years ago. Doctors wouldn't help me with that and kept sending me to physiotherapy, who would email me sheets of exercises to do and then get mad when they didn't help me. When I didn't do the exercises a couple weeks after I had surgery, they told me off over it and kept insinuating that my issue is that I'm not active enough despite the fact that I dont have a car and walk everywhere. Once again, had to pay again to get another scan because they insisted my back pain was due to me being LAZY.
Well it turns out I have multiple degenerative discs, scoliosis, and it looks like some kind of inflammation. Maybe even ankloyding spondylolysis, but my bloods have come back negative for the high risk antibody so I'm just screwed on ever getting a useful diagnosis, I think. Even then, the only pain relief offered is just a stronger dose of an ibuprofen analogue that doesn't do shit. When I am in the throes of pain, those things do absolutely nothing. The only thing that's ever helped my pain is small doses of cocadamol but these gatekeepers won't give it to me, so I'm just expected to suffer my entire life if I do too much activity, stand too long, or am forced to sit in a chair all day.
My fatigue has gotten worse and worse over time to the point where some days I can drink a cup of coffee and still fall asleep immediately afterwards. I've been dealing with peripheral neuropathy type stuff for years but I would say over the past couple years it's cranked up significantly, not only do I have the 24/7 numbness and tingling in my limbs but I developed Raynaud's and my circulation is so poor my limbs feel heavy and low-key burning all the time, and I'm very sensitive to temperature. While over time I adjusted to this somewhat, I am not exaggerating when I say I'm uncomfortable 24/7.
Recently I also found out i have a structural abnormality of my brain where my cerebellum descends into the spine slightly known as Chiari malformation. Of course this is yet another problem I have that is not taken seriously whatsoever or I'm told that no doctors know about it and it's impossible to have it fixed surgically unless you have the most severe forms. So I have to live with constant pressure in my head, which sometimes is merely uncomfortable but on other occasions can result in a lot of pain. My vision is fucked up and I've been told it's neurological as opposed to an actual problem with my eye, but they don't really know. I also have permanent tinnitus for over 10 years now.
Hands down the biggest hits that I've taken though are deterioration in my attention span, learning, and memory. I finished my neuroscience degree and did quite well, but I barely managed to complete final year. I was signed up to do a masters course and the entire year I have had to defer every single assignment and have much worse grades. I even failed a module for the first time in my life, and my university has strict policies so they refuse to offer me a resit. I am always the stupid and slow person, who people cannot believe used to be extremely intelligent in childhood.
Here's the thing, throughout all of this nightmare, I have tried to fight it, and have a positive attitude, but there is always another horrible thing that inevitably pops up as a fixture in my life. I don't have any family members left to support me, compounding the struggle. I have PTSD not only from sexual abuse but the sheer amount of death, decay and watching people I care about getting seriously injured that I've had to experience throughout my life. I have nightmares almost every other day, especially involving worse forms of my grandmother falling in front of me, hitting her head, shattering her hip and arm, and hearing her scream for half an hour not knowing if she is going to survive.
I exist in a perpetual state of waiting for the phone call from a hospital to tell me that my grandmother has died, as that will truly mark me being alone in this world with no unconditional love left. My grandmother is the only relative I have left and she is very far away from me and also close to the end of her life. I am stuck in a mutually toxic marriage because as my partner succinctly stated, "few people would want to put up with me." And it is obvious I cannot work to the extent which is necessary to support myself independently.
Every day, I feel like a complete shell of a person and robbed of all the things that make someone feel human like having energy, skills, intelligence, fitness, love from others, creativity, etc. Other people genuinely do not seem to understand the extent to how bad my situation is and won't believe it, with my closest and only friends constantly stating bullshit like, "You just need to appreciate the small things like birds chirping outside and not focus on the negatives." I don't see how I cannot focus on my poor physical condition when it is effecting every single aspect of my life on a daily basis. My dreams are constantly crushed by my limitations and I'm told I should be happy with a mediocre life where all I would do is lay in bed and listen to the birds.
They also say things like, you are "just depressed" and it isn't the actual issues I'm having that are the problem, but my mindset and reaction to them. This is so deeply offensive to me, because not only is it insulting and downplaying the struggles of people who are clinically depressed, but it assumes that I should just be happy and content with all of these struggles and I am personally failing by not having the "correct mindset" which in their opinion is believing that things will get better no matter what. The latter might have been a fair point in the early stages of my decline, but after 8 years?
One of my friends says suicide is never a logical or rational decision and it is always 100% because you have clinical depression. He keeps pushing this view on me and saying I am only suicidal because I am in denial of being depressed and stubbornly reject the label. This fundamentally makes no sense to me because I have things that I enjoy and want to do but it became harder and harder the enjoy anything the more my health declined, I had a real passion for my subject and really wanted to get involved in medical research, I felt genuine joy when I could accomplish and achieve something, and yet this person (albeit in good faith I suppose) continues to misinterpret my situation and say that I'm just in denial of having depression??
It's like when I say I have brain fog people will say I'm in denial of having anxiety, when I don't really panic about anything, I don't have social anxiety, and I don't experience fear unless I'm having a PTSD episode, but surely I am completely unaware of how my own body and mind feels and some stranger knows better.
I'm so sick of people fundamentally misunderstanding what the actual problems are here. There's also the added context that for many years I would complain about physical health concerns only to be fobbed off and told that I'm mentally ill instead. Whenever I couldn't go to the bathroom for months and had to take horrible medication and enemas that made me wake up several times a night and left me in awful pain, I was told that my constipation must have been me making bad lifestyle choices or I'm having a mental illness. Then it was actually caused by a tumor. So I'm incredibly sick of this logic where anything that someone doesn't understand automatically gets called a mental illness with no justification.
I wish suicide was easier for me. While I do fear death somewhat and all of the inherent unknowns, what I hate the most about the entire process is knowing that where I am now, every time there is a suicide it gets investigated and the person's entire life gets put on public display for others to read, tarnishing whatever privacy they had beforehand. Inevitably, my problems would get chalked up to some abstract concept of mental illness as well and not the horrific life I have lived for the past 25 years. I just want to be left alone and die in peace.
The main reason why I became long-term suicidal is due to chronic physical health problems that have been ongoing for years and baffle everyone around me, including those who are meant to be experts. Anyone who knows me very well knows that this is the main source of my day to day misery, ever since I was a teenager I had chronic fatigue syndrome and the symptoms have really spiraled out of control the past few years.
That's not to say that I don't have other issues contributing to this deep seated pain, I certainly do, but I would say my poor health is the biggest driver of it. To understand how much it hurts, I think one has to truly comprehend the sort of person I was before I became so ill. Due to my abusive upbringing and growing up in a shithole location where there were absolutely scant opportunities, I was incredibly determined to flip my lot in life and escape the desolate environment that I grew up in.
I was doing pretty well at it too, for a short while. When I was about to turn 16 I went to live with a foster family and was able to start going to school again, I put my best efforts into studying and took the most difficult courses possible to try and make up for lost time. Even then, I had no energy and was over medicated, didn't get enough to eat at home or at school, and couldn't do any after school activities because I was just so, so tired, but I was very determined to change the outcome of my life at that point.
I faced a lot of bullying and even harassment from teachers for being autistic and unable to make eye contact with them. Any time I made a mistake they thought it was purposeful and I would sometimes be taken into a spare room with teachers and yelled at, insulted, and told that I should give up studying and learn the trades despite me being a small, physically weak girl with no coordination. Some of my teachers were friends with the student who molested me several years before that and I think they held a grudge towards me because I reported him.
Yet, I still didn't give up. It all came crashing down a year and a half or so later though, when I got back to back viral infections and ended up with chronic fatigue so bad all I could do was lay under a blanket of permanent exhaustion. I lost my job (which I needed because I was still a minor at this point and no one was supporting me) and people began to regard me as a lazy, unmotivated faker. This also made me very sensitive and anxious to the point where I could no longer tolerate how I was treated at school and requested to do my work at home on a medical leave for the last month, but none of the staff at my school cared and I was made out to be lazy and mentally ill as a pejorative.
Despite this, I managed to cope enough to get back on track a couple years later and go back to studying after escaping an abusive relationship. My body could not handle physically intensive jobs even as a teenager and the cracks were beginning to show, so it felt like if I didn't get back into education I was going to buckle and end up homeless if I couldn't do these jobs. I was treated for severe vitamin deficiencies that had gone undiagnosed for years, but nothing really improved. At age 19 or so it was apparent that I was developing some sort of peripheral neuropathy, and the chronic fatigue really dug it's claws into me.
I was on vitamin regimines, prescribed stimulants and everything else under the sun, but nothing improved. My blood tests would ping pong back and forth between showing some autoimmune issue, and showing nothing, so I could never get any sort of treatment and my PTSD prevented me from being able to keep engaging with the healthcare system to the extent that a "normal person" would because doctors had absolutely no tact about the fact that I suffered SA from a doctor at a young age and didn't respect me at all. I'm autistic and go mute or freeze in states of high overwhelm, so advocating for myself is difficult if not impossible sometimes.
I spent years in different therapies for my PTSD that did nothing at best, and psychologically harmed me at worst. I have been on pretty much every psychiatric drug you can think of too, save for lithium and antipsychotics. I also tried pretty much every single psychedelic drug, despite this people would continually tell me that I just didn't want to get better, didn't want to recover and somehow my physical health problems were manifestations of trauma that I somehow wasn't addressing. Not having this support from others has really taken a toll on me in the long run, and I can't come back from it, I feel like.
Eventually it was revealed that I had a 13 cm tumor in my reproductive organs alongside several smaller tumors and cysts after I spent months with agonizing constipation and GI issues. It was so difficult to get a scan and I had to pay out of pocket for it because the most commonly used (because it is cheaper) scan involves vaginal penetration which I obviously cannot do, I can't even insert a tampon, and the healthcare staff just acted as if I am a petulant child over this. There was also scar tissue and blood everywhere in the abdomen, so basically a ticking time bomb. Yet after surgery, I felt no better overall, except my constipation is now more mild compared to the hell I went through then. Still there, but at least not horror movie levels of it.
On top of all this, I started developing back pain a few years ago. Doctors wouldn't help me with that and kept sending me to physiotherapy, who would email me sheets of exercises to do and then get mad when they didn't help me. When I didn't do the exercises a couple weeks after I had surgery, they told me off over it and kept insinuating that my issue is that I'm not active enough despite the fact that I dont have a car and walk everywhere. Once again, had to pay again to get another scan because they insisted my back pain was due to me being LAZY.
Well it turns out I have multiple degenerative discs, scoliosis, and it looks like some kind of inflammation. Maybe even ankloyding spondylolysis, but my bloods have come back negative for the high risk antibody so I'm just screwed on ever getting a useful diagnosis, I think. Even then, the only pain relief offered is just a stronger dose of an ibuprofen analogue that doesn't do shit. When I am in the throes of pain, those things do absolutely nothing. The only thing that's ever helped my pain is small doses of cocadamol but these gatekeepers won't give it to me, so I'm just expected to suffer my entire life if I do too much activity, stand too long, or am forced to sit in a chair all day.
My fatigue has gotten worse and worse over time to the point where some days I can drink a cup of coffee and still fall asleep immediately afterwards. I've been dealing with peripheral neuropathy type stuff for years but I would say over the past couple years it's cranked up significantly, not only do I have the 24/7 numbness and tingling in my limbs but I developed Raynaud's and my circulation is so poor my limbs feel heavy and low-key burning all the time, and I'm very sensitive to temperature. While over time I adjusted to this somewhat, I am not exaggerating when I say I'm uncomfortable 24/7.
Recently I also found out i have a structural abnormality of my brain where my cerebellum descends into the spine slightly known as Chiari malformation. Of course this is yet another problem I have that is not taken seriously whatsoever or I'm told that no doctors know about it and it's impossible to have it fixed surgically unless you have the most severe forms. So I have to live with constant pressure in my head, which sometimes is merely uncomfortable but on other occasions can result in a lot of pain. My vision is fucked up and I've been told it's neurological as opposed to an actual problem with my eye, but they don't really know. I also have permanent tinnitus for over 10 years now.
Hands down the biggest hits that I've taken though are deterioration in my attention span, learning, and memory. I finished my neuroscience degree and did quite well, but I barely managed to complete final year. I was signed up to do a masters course and the entire year I have had to defer every single assignment and have much worse grades. I even failed a module for the first time in my life, and my university has strict policies so they refuse to offer me a resit. I am always the stupid and slow person, who people cannot believe used to be extremely intelligent in childhood.
Here's the thing, throughout all of this nightmare, I have tried to fight it, and have a positive attitude, but there is always another horrible thing that inevitably pops up as a fixture in my life. I don't have any family members left to support me, compounding the struggle. I have PTSD not only from sexual abuse but the sheer amount of death, decay and watching people I care about getting seriously injured that I've had to experience throughout my life. I have nightmares almost every other day, especially involving worse forms of my grandmother falling in front of me, hitting her head, shattering her hip and arm, and hearing her scream for half an hour not knowing if she is going to survive.
I exist in a perpetual state of waiting for the phone call from a hospital to tell me that my grandmother has died, as that will truly mark me being alone in this world with no unconditional love left. My grandmother is the only relative I have left and she is very far away from me and also close to the end of her life. I am stuck in a mutually toxic marriage because as my partner succinctly stated, "few people would want to put up with me." And it is obvious I cannot work to the extent which is necessary to support myself independently.
Every day, I feel like a complete shell of a person and robbed of all the things that make someone feel human like having energy, skills, intelligence, fitness, love from others, creativity, etc. Other people genuinely do not seem to understand the extent to how bad my situation is and won't believe it, with my closest and only friends constantly stating bullshit like, "You just need to appreciate the small things like birds chirping outside and not focus on the negatives." I don't see how I cannot focus on my poor physical condition when it is effecting every single aspect of my life on a daily basis. My dreams are constantly crushed by my limitations and I'm told I should be happy with a mediocre life where all I would do is lay in bed and listen to the birds.
They also say things like, you are "just depressed" and it isn't the actual issues I'm having that are the problem, but my mindset and reaction to them. This is so deeply offensive to me, because not only is it insulting and downplaying the struggles of people who are clinically depressed, but it assumes that I should just be happy and content with all of these struggles and I am personally failing by not having the "correct mindset" which in their opinion is believing that things will get better no matter what. The latter might have been a fair point in the early stages of my decline, but after 8 years?
One of my friends says suicide is never a logical or rational decision and it is always 100% because you have clinical depression. He keeps pushing this view on me and saying I am only suicidal because I am in denial of being depressed and stubbornly reject the label. This fundamentally makes no sense to me because I have things that I enjoy and want to do but it became harder and harder the enjoy anything the more my health declined, I had a real passion for my subject and really wanted to get involved in medical research, I felt genuine joy when I could accomplish and achieve something, and yet this person (albeit in good faith I suppose) continues to misinterpret my situation and say that I'm just in denial of having depression??
It's like when I say I have brain fog people will say I'm in denial of having anxiety, when I don't really panic about anything, I don't have social anxiety, and I don't experience fear unless I'm having a PTSD episode, but surely I am completely unaware of how my own body and mind feels and some stranger knows better.
I'm so sick of people fundamentally misunderstanding what the actual problems are here. There's also the added context that for many years I would complain about physical health concerns only to be fobbed off and told that I'm mentally ill instead. Whenever I couldn't go to the bathroom for months and had to take horrible medication and enemas that made me wake up several times a night and left me in awful pain, I was told that my constipation must have been me making bad lifestyle choices or I'm having a mental illness. Then it was actually caused by a tumor. So I'm incredibly sick of this logic where anything that someone doesn't understand automatically gets called a mental illness with no justification.
I wish suicide was easier for me. While I do fear death somewhat and all of the inherent unknowns, what I hate the most about the entire process is knowing that where I am now, every time there is a suicide it gets investigated and the person's entire life gets put on public display for others to read, tarnishing whatever privacy they had beforehand. Inevitably, my problems would get chalked up to some abstract concept of mental illness as well and not the horrific life I have lived for the past 25 years. I just want to be left alone and die in peace.
