Namaste, Bitches

I've been taking 50mg of Zoloft, about 12 hours apart, mainly because it upsets my stomach.

I don't think it's enough. I've been having some very dark nights lately.

I just feel like I'm a waste of resources, and I can't figure out how to make myself feel worthwhile, or feel less like a complete failure. I'm just a warm body, taking up space on a crowded planet. I try not to dwell on it, but the thoughts are insidious and they creep back in, especially at 4am, when I'm up alone w/few distractions. I'm just glad there are no pain-free methods for me to try out. All I've got is sharp pointy things and things that go boom. And I worry more about failing than I do about succeeding. Which I suppose is the sentiment behind 'whatever gets you through the night'.

I'm going to try something different tonight. I took my morning dose, and when I get up I'm going to take 2 (an additional 50mg) and see how I feel. Then I'll try that until my pshrink appts. next week and talk it over w/both my prescribing psych & my therapist.

Huh. There are suicide hotline chats available.

At one point, after receiving my degree and failing miserably at a job that was in my career path, and having to return to a former employer, I began having very strong urges to kill myself. Obviously, I didn't or this blog would be exceedingly creepy right now. I've had failed attempts in the past, and the onus of yet another failed attempt is about the only thing that stopped me. Even without making another attempt, I couldn't get my head to shut up about it. Suicide became a cyclical solution to every situation, no matter how big or small.

Me: "I don't want to go to work tonight" 
My brain: "You could kill yourself, then you won't have to go".

Me: I don't want to get up.
My brain: You could kill yourself instead.

Me: I don't really want salmon for dinner.
My brain: Kill yourself. No more salmon. Problem solved.

I went to a therapist, a couple of them, as a matter of fact. I tried a couple of antidepressants, and Wellbutrin finally shut the OCD suicide voice up (I had to stop taking the Wellbutrin because along with stopping the suicidal ideation, it also made all sleeping stop).  I'm still depressed, still have occasional suicidal ideation, but it's not a constant backbeat to the rhythm of my days.

This article is interesting to me mainly because of the first point about how failure is a strong indicator of suicide. I may have a poor resilience to failure. My life has not been greatly successful. I have a decent job, a decent home, but I'm not a raving success at anything I do. You'd think that when I do fail, I'd be used to it... but I think it's a matter of degree. Getting my puny little Associates was a struggle. Just sticking with it, not quitting before I failed miserably (which was my prediction - starting school only to be stymied by math classes or social anxieties or lack of funds or any of the other things that could have stopped me from completing my degree), it took a huge toll on my emotions and when I finally got my degree it was such a relief to be done with it. And I was working in the IT field, which was also a battle. I got the job hoping to learn and advance, but apparently my boss didn't hire me for IT work, she hired me to be an office assistant... One thing led to another and I ended up quitting & going back into night audit.

It was a huge failure for me. The one job I thought I'd be good at, the one thing I thought I could succeed at - nope. Failed. And I took it extremely hard. Thinking about it now it's just one more failure in the long line of previous failures - time, experience and perspective puts a buffer on things like that. It seems kind of stupid to kill yourself over a job, or not being able to work in your degree field. Millions of people out there right now experienced the same thing I did, or are experiencing the same thing I did, and they go on living. What should make me any different?

No one reads this thing anyway, but if suicide and depression and death bug you, close your browser.

Been thinking about death a lot lately. Some of it is no doubt related to the return of the ol' black dog with Summer. I don't understand why my depression gets worse this time of year. Obviously, I don't have SADS, or if I do it's some fucked up version thereof.

I noticed something that annoyed me today. I visit PostSecret every Sunday when they do their updates, and towards the bottom is a testimonial from someone who decided to not commit suicide. Wonderful for them, I'm glad they made it through the night. But one line just sticks out & pokes me in the eye every time I see it:

This past Friday night I found myself in a black hole of depression...

I wonder what it must be like to just suddenly find yourself in a black hole of depression. Or in the deepest depths of depression, or a bleak pit of despair. I mean, for me, this hole seems to be my emotional home. I never get out of it. I'm so deep in this hole that I cannot see the light for the curvature of the earth above me. Sometimes it rains & my pit fills with water and I float for awhile, but mostly I sit here at the bottom, among the bat dung and cave spiders and broken bones of those who tripped and fell in on top of me. I'm so tired all the time, and changing jobs back to the Excalibur has alleviated a great deal of background anxiety, but now that I don't have as much to think about, I think a lot more about just getting it the Hel over with already.

I thought up a plan (and this came up before someone on PostSecret wrote they were going to jump & sparked the whole yellow balloon thing). There are some obvious flaws in my plan. The first being... I don't know how much of a drop it takes to die. You'd think there'd be some statistics available. What kind of a fall is a guaranteed death for a human being? People apparently can trip over their damned shoes & bust their neck on a coffee table - the worst I ever sustain seems to be busted ankles & feet. Not life-altering, just very, very annoying. Some people survive the kind of fall I'm imagining. greenharbor.com is probably the worst site for me to be looking at - full of nothing but survival stories from parachute malfunctions & plane wrecks.

I'm thinking about taking one of those helicopter tours and just jumping out of the chopper while it's over the Grand Canyon (I'd take a cheaper flight over the Strip, but those tours are only 15 - 20 minutes long and relatively low flying - what if I landed on the roof of one of these buildings w/a busted leg or something - and survived?). The second obvious flaw to that is those helicopter tours are insanely expensive. I'm afraid someone would know what was up if I suddenly wanted to spend close to $800 on an aerial tour of a landmark I'm not even remotely interested in seeing by ground. The third flaw is that I don't know how to tactfully ask for a security rundown on the interior of the helicopter. How many seats are in the thing? How many people on the tour, how big is the helicopter, are passengers able to access the doors? In other words, how quickly could I, a huge clumsy oaf, disengage my seatbelt/safety harness, get the door open & be out in the air before someone caught on and grabbed me?

I'm curious about it, a fall like that. I've gone hang-gliding, cliff diving and bungee jumping. Freefall is incredible, but the drops are always too short when you're not intending to die. If I was a mile in the air, would I black out in terror, or would I suddenly change my mind & start flapping my arms, hoping for the mother of all updrafts? Or would I just fall, gracelessly tumbling to my inevitable gory death below? It would definitely fulfill my desire to leave a corpse that looked like a trainwreck.

I've been reading articles about people who choose to jump to their deaths. It's usually people who are determined to die. People have survived jumping off the Golden Gate bridge and the Aurora Bridge in Washington. I know I couldn't jump over water. Instincts would take over & I'd try to dive instead. I can't even bellyflop right because of how much work I threw into learning how to dive without holding my nose when I was a kid. I try to bellyflop & it goes into a jackknife. A study done on survival rates after suicidal jumping showed that in 33% of the survivors, life-long physical debility followed. In other words, they were paralyzed or permanently disabled by their decision. The study also mentioned that surviving a suicide attempt didn't cure anyone of their mental illness. Gee, go figure... I'm just a little leery. I'm a survivor, so it kind of makes me feel weirdly immortal. Not exactly indestructible, but... given the wide array of things I could have died from, I'm still here, roaming around aimlessly. Maybe I'm a zombie.

Well, Rob got bloodwork ordered by the new doc & his results were somewhat startling - his triglycerides are off the charts. 450mg/dll where 150 is the high side of normal. He is what the doctor calls 'pre-diabetic'. No more starchy goodness for him. Of course, it's also up to him to decide on what he wants to do about it, or if he wants to do anything about it at all.

This morning before I went to bed, coming home in the icy chill that is high desert winter, I started thinking about my birth day. I was born early New Year's Eve during a freak snowstorm. It sounds cliche, freak snowstorm, but believe me, any snow in Fontana is best defined as freak snow. Over 18" fell on the San Bernardino Mountains & Victorville got 17" over 3 days or so. The mini-blizzard lasted almost 5 days, ending w/snow flurries in Palm Springs. It's kinda funny because I had a difficult birth, breech & blue. When my dad first took my mother to the hospital, they almost sent her home because she was having 'false labor pains'. The only reason they didn't send her home was because it had started snowing outside & the nurses made the judgment call that it would be better for her to just stay in the hospital over night instead of driving almost 2 hrs home & possibly having to come back to the hospital in the middle of a blizzard. My dad went home after it became apparent that my mother wasn't going to make like a pinata any time soon, and he couldn't get back to the hospital until early on the 2nd of January.

If it hadn't been for the snowstorm, my mother would have gone home & endured a horrible birth, possibly dying in the process. And I wouldn't be here today. So I started wondering to myself, Who is to blame for the storm? And why? Why was either my mother's or my life so important that a snowstorm had to be engineered to ensure my or her survival? It snapped power lines, collapsed roofs & impeded traffic, but no one died... It was just a freak snowstorm. Now, it could all be pure coincidence, but it's one of those things that makes me go, "Hmmm..." And it kinda pisses me off. Sure, a freak snowstorm can be whipped up so I can be born live, but can I ever win Megabucks when it's over $1 million?

I feel bad sometimes because when people are really down, even to the point of contemplating suicide, I never have any encouraging words to offer them. Never can say, "Hey, life is worth living, you don't know what you'll miss out on." All those things to cheer people up & steer their minds away from the pain & suffering that is every day life. I can bolster a person's sense of self-worth, I can inflate egos, I can instill confidence and self-esteem... but I could never work at a suicide hotline. For me, the people calling would be like a suicide tip line. I could take notes on all the plans, survey their potential success rate, choose a suicide plan that best fit my needs and possibly save 15% or more in the process (snork, I kill me). "Hey, call me back after you try it so I know whether it worked or not!"

We were watching ST: Voyager earlier & it was the episode where the doctor got kidnapped by a medical facility. They had a drug that was being used to prevent arterial aging & it was also used to cure a virus or disease. The arterial aging patients were basically wealthy people whereas the virus was an equal-opportunity infectious agent. The medical facility operated kind of like an insurance-run company where so much of the drug was allotted to each level of patients. Well, the doctor didn't like the fact that the drug was being used freely on the one level w/the wealthy patients & was being withheld from the really sick patients, so he ended up giving the main administrator a dose of the virus to coerce him into changing the allottment policies. I looked up at Rob & said something like, "HMO's suck!" because that's what the episode makes me think of & he replied, "What, Holographic Medical Officers?" It was truly a classic one-liner coming from Rob, & I Rofl'd all over the place.

Last night my coworkers accosted me in the hallway with a tiny little birthday cake & told me I couldn't make a work-related wish. Well, my non-work-related wish came true - it rained!

Sheung Yi, my Capricornian counterpart, went to the Bellagio & picked up these decadent little cakes - coffee layered, fudge mousse, pumpkin & carrot. These little cakes were unbelievable, and pretty, too. She also got me U2's 'How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb', and my current favorite song is 'Peace & Love or Else'. It's funky. Sheung Yi is a New Year's baby, and I can't go all out for her due to timing, but I got her a cupcake cake & a mini-mousse all her own, complete w/birthday candle.

The other day, Maggie called us. She's got a 3-yr old daughter & a new husband, been working security down at the courthouse. I don't think about her much, she was only a 2-time fling. It's weird to get calls like that out of the blue, and goes to show we should change our phone number more often.

Been thinking a lot about the relatively short lifespan of many of my relatives, thinking to myself that at 32 my life is about half over. The first 30 years went by so fast. Thinking about all my attempted suicides and how the easiest one is basically living til you die. It's a slow, painful and painfully dull suicide, but it has a huge success rate.

I have to work tonight, which means navigating traffic & road closures. Still got to cook dinner, wrap Sheung Yi's present, get dressed, etc. & so forth. Shooting to leave at 7:30 or 7:45. I'm having lamb for dinner!

Friday night I was sitting at work when I started thinking about my Ambien prescription, seriously wondering what would happen if I took the whole bottle. Would I puke before it knocked me out? Would my body even try to expel the little white pills or would it accept them as easily as sunflower seeds?

I felt like a 14-year old w/angst. I kind of still do. Knowing that it would only bother one person in my life if I actually did kill myself. (Of course, I had to tell Rob, "You know, you're the only person it would destroy if I offed myself" just because I knew it would upset him. Yes, I am that mean, and I am getting bad Karma for it just for snickering about it while I type). It would be a relatively easy suicide if my guts didn't betray me... Rob is usually afraid to wake me up, even after my alarm goes off. I could probably even run a hot bath & die in the tub & he'd only wonder what happened after 2 - 4 hrs. had gone by w/out eventually hearing the shower. He'd come in & I'd be a pasty white floater.

I'm just really tired right now of the purposelessness of my life. I have no ambitions, no goals, no aims. I go to work, I come home, I care for the house and that's it. There is nothing grander in my world. And my life is going to be like this until I die... so why put it off? Knowing that the next 30 years will be much like the last 30 years isn't a real pleasant concept. I should have stayed a drunk, should have started exploring the 'Doors of Perception', gone off to live in the desert on tequila & the flesh of the gods - at least then my angst would have poetry to it. Without the tequila & the desperation, it's just me whining because I'm bored with the American dream.

But Friday night it swept over me in its usual fashion, a great cold dark wave... Washing away whatever mirth or laughter may have been in my head & replacing it with the hard truth that I am still depressed and still have to fight through it. The wanting to sob is the worst because nothing is there. There is still a grand amount of curiosity mingled with the depression. What would it be like to truly die, to not be yanked back at the last moments. What is it like to choose one's own death, to make the conscious decision to end one's own life? Wondering if Rob will actually let BodyWorlds have me or if my flesh will end up charred to ashes & packed in a little jar somewhere... To know that dissolution of all that is 'me', all that is 'Janelle F., nee Smith', all 31 years, all 240lbs. of me-ness that sits here in this chair, nodding off to the one Ambien I took.

Happy Ostara, everyone, happy First Day of Spring.