20 years. For twenty years I have worked and tried to get along. I took the meds. I went in the hospitals. For 20 years I struggled with coming to terms with how dark my mind could get. How impulsive and scary. Terrifying at times.I could have spared myself all that by making the right choice? Me? I chose this life of hell and pain and now if only I could get it together and do the right thing it might be okay? I would not lose control of my life? I would not be subjected to hospitals and nightmare drug combos. If only I could do the right thing?

I don’t understand. I wish I did. I feel like an idiot that is failing to do the most basic of tasks. Making a choice. Even the most brain damaged amongst us can do that. Sadly it seems I cannot.

I don’t want to live this way. I sure as fuck don’t want to harm everyone around me. Destroy my relationships and demolish intimacy. Why would I chose that?

I don’t see choice. I don’t see free will. I see imprisonment. I see suffering and I experience pain. I struggle beneath depressions deep and dark. Impossibly deep. Is that my choice too? Is this my choice? I’m not depressed or bipolar just masochistic. That these suicidal thoughts are of my creation and choosing. I have moved so far past confused at this point I am not even sure what is up and what is down.

I wrote how I felt in the last blog. I am not asking for your blessings. I am not asking for you to join me or agree with me. I am not asking for any of that. All I ask is you see me for who I am and for what this life has created in me. You are asking me to turn something off I don’t even know where it is located, never mind how to do that. You tell me that I have no control over hospitals and your actions until I turn it off. What if I can’t find it? What if I can’t get it off? The valve is stuck? the problem unfixable? What then? Then I am just at the mercy of this system and your actions? To be medicated, hospitalized, 2 PC’d, brain fried? What next? The stakes are so high. This die has no good sides: life, death, drugs/hospitals.

To accept what you are telling me is to believe that the suicidal thoughts have no connection to the depression or bipolar. That they do not come together. They are not a symptom of the greater illness. Though we both know what is published says otherwise. Am I not depressed? bipolar? How can I guarantee you anything when I cannot even tell you if I will remain stable? I cannot forsee the depressions. I cannot turn off that faucet. The drugs can’t either.

I am lost and feeling utterly stupid if my life and my sense of control is as simple as flipping a switch and turning off those thoughts. They have been here since I was 10 or 12. Not that I can remember because you allowed them to run electricity though my brain. You allowed it. You said it would make me better. Did it? No. You told me to hold tight and let the meds work. Did they? No. I have each time accepted it. I have trusted you. I have stuck by you even when I hated it and did not agree. I kept coming back because I thought you could make me better. I thought you could fix me. Now 20 years later I come to find out all it takes is a choice? How do I trust you now? How am I to believe that.

Am I to just blindly follow and say ok? I will never think like this. I will never, even in the darkest moments of despair after months crushed beneath it’s weight, when your drugs and electricty don’t work ever succumb to the distortions of an exhausted brittle crumbling mind. That I will have the fortitude to or ability to see those distortions. To not buy into the lie that depression sells so well. LIFE WILL NEVER GET BETTER. YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT NOBODY WANTS. THEY ARE BETTER OFF WITHOUT YOU BECAUSE YOU CAN’T EVEN GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY, LET ALONE HELP SOLVE ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS.

Is that voice a choice too? One I beckon when life isn’t tough enough and I’d like to be flogged and beaten further into submission. just a choice. go right or go left. go up or go down. vanilla or chocolate. guess I chose this life and this suffering just as I chose my parents and my upbringing. I chose to be raped and sodomized. guess so since I could have checked out long ago. I didn’t. I’m still here. guess I chose suffering. I chose to stand by you for 20 years waiting for it to magically get better. There is no magic. There is no better. I know now.

I have no more words. I have only the ache left from feeling so lost and confused. The steady panic at realizing I don’t know where I am going. The reality that 20 years of therapy has left me just as I was and that somehow all I have to do is make a choice. It was just that fucking simple all along.