Spoons

My parents have asked me to take on a bit of work with their company as someone can no longer do it, and I've done it before. It's not a huge amount.

Today I drove home, which took an hour. Then I went out with my dad to do 1/3 of the work I'll be required to do so he could show me how their new system works. It didn't take long - maybe an hour tops.

I had some lunch at home, and then drove back here - another hour.

I stopped off at the supermarket and bought some food - possibly half an hour.

When I left home I was feeling exhausted and just wanted to cry and go to sleep. As I drove home I managed to distract myself and forget about my feelings. Now I've sat down and rested for a bit, I'm steadily getting lower in mood, energy and motivation. I barely did anything! I don't want to tell my parents that I can't do this work for them, but if I'm doing three times the amount, and on my own so it'll take maybe double the time, I really don't think I'm going to be able to do it. Or I will, but I won't be able to function at all the following day.

Whenever I see my parents it's on a relatively good day depression-wise, or I manage to hide it from them, so they have no idea how bad it is, and if I told them that I couldn't manage I don't think they'd understand. I think they might think I'm just making this up, or being lazy or something.

I can't even get up off the sofa right now. I'm freezing - I could go upstairs and get a jumper, or go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea, but I just can't. I have absolutely no more spoons. Not even to reach over to the other side of the sofa and pull the blanket over me. Moving my hands to type on my laptop is about the extent of what I can do right now, but I just can't tell my parents that I get like this.

Asking for help

Trigger warning for suicidal thought & self harm

Asking for help is very hard.

I thought things were going pretty well 'til I had a really bad episode yesterday, and I didn't know what to do or why to call.

I tried Samaritans, and that helped a bit, in as much as it was helpful to have someone non-judgemental on the end of the line who I could just sob at and was calm throughout and non-judgemental. But I needed so much more than that. I needed someone to hold me and tell me things were ok, that the things my brain was telling me weren't true, that the feeling would pass.

Whichever room I was in, I was very aware of all the things in it that I could use to cause myself damage. I had overwhelming urges just to repeatedly cut, slice & slash my skin open. I retreated to my bed thinking that if I didn't get out of bed then I couldn't hurt myself.

Some people talked to me on facebook, and then later a friend came round to sit with me.

Azariah showed up later, removed the sharps from my room, made me hot milk with baileys and honey in and tucked me into bed. He then told me I wasn't to leave my room except to go to the toilet. After he left I finally managed to get to sleep around 1am.

Azariah has suggested that I set up a support group for when he's not around - maybe something on facebook - which I can post in if I'm in need of help or struggling, and someone could come round.

I feel terrible about the idea that I'd be imposing on people, disrupting their days, that they'd be helping grudgingly or reluctantly because they felt they had to out of obligation, and I'd hate people to feel like that. I don't want anyone to feel obliged to come and spend time with me, that's not a friendship at all.

I'd feel embarrassed about asking for help. Something in me still sees it as a sign of weakness or failure - I should be able to sort my own problems out etc. Logically I can understand the whole 'depression is an illness' thing, but emotionally, I still just think I'm just stupid, pathetic, weak, & worthless & should just get my life together and stop being such a wimpy emotional idiot. Yeah there's still a lot of self-hatred in there.

On the other hand I can see that it's a sensible idea, as Azariah isn't always around, and logically my brain tells me that people wouldn't mind helping me, and they wouldn't offer to if they didn't want to/weren't able to.

I'm just scared. I don't want to need help. I want to be able to fix everything myself.

Communication and the way we're brought up.

The messages we're taught - explicitly, or things we pick up on subconsciously - as a child have a great influence on how we interact with the world when we're older. Growing up as a female I learnt not to raise my voice, not to start or get involved in arguments for fear of what others would do, to let people down gently, not to make people angry or upset, and that whatever the situation was, if you got into an argument with an adult (whether you were right or not) they were right, because they were adults, and were more important than you.

Little girls are called 'bossy' - you don't hear this about boys, because boys are expected to take charge of situations. Boys are expected to be loud, domineering, to get themselves heard, to be more violent (though it's always referred to as boisterous). 

If a boy pushed a girl over, or pulled her hair, people would say he was just being a boy, or that it was obviously because he liked her. Because obviously violence is how people show affection.

Anyway, I got a little sidetracked there. This next bit is my interpretation of some events involving a few of my friends, and I may have got it completely wrong - I can't read minds or intentions, but here's how I see it.

There's been a situation with some of my friends recently, where a female friend had been trying to gently let a male friend down without hurting his feelings. She never explicitly said that she didn't want a relationship with him, she said things like 'I'm not ready for a relationship', 'maybe we can see how things are in six months'.

Now to me, that comes across as 'no, I don't want a relationship with you, but I don't want to hurt your feelings or provoke an argument so I'm trying to let you down gently.'

The guy involved obviously heard this as 'I need a bit of space right now, but some way down the line I'd like to be with you.'

I talked about this situation with Azariah, and he said that because this girl hadn't said no explicitly, it was assumed (and he felt it would be assumed by most people) that this meant that she wanted a relationship of some kind to happen. This really shocked me, because I learnt to avoid confrontations out of fear of what the (generally male) person involved would do. So I'd try say anything possible to avoid an outright no in these kinds of situations, for my own personal safety. The idea that men seem to take anything other than an explicit no as a yes in some form is not only scary, but also shows just how big the gap in the communication methods we learn growing up is.

I'm not sure what else to say at the moment, I know there are lots more thoughts swimming round my head at the moment but they require some more thought to be coherent ideas.