Day 20

Today is Day 20.

I hardly slept last night. Maybe four hours, maybe four and a half. But despite being awake from 5am this morning, I started another day by having to fight hours of panic and crying attacks and then struggling to get out of bed quarter of an hour after my 7am alarm. 

This morning was a disaster. I picked up straight from last night's desperate low. I hope that much of the down from yesterday and this morning was due to vomiting my medication yesterday morning and that keeping today's pills down would make a measurable improvement. 


I began today at work by updating my Will and considering methods of suicide again. The UK firearm legislation is probably a major component in my continued existence. All of the other options come with drawbacks of being too slow, or lacking in guaranteed effectiveness which have made selection a sufficiently complex process to create delays. While I am considering the options I generally waste enough time to get to a more stable emotional state. This is not a long-term strategy for coping though as each time I get further through the selection process and start the next time from a reduced list of options. At some point my decision will be confirmed and the next serious attack will be a case of execution rather than planning. 

By mid-afternoon I was much improved. I am still unsure if this was due to being back to a stable level of medication, to having had time since last night, or to talking with more people about what happened. I am going to stick with "people" rather than "friends" as one of the important things I have learned over the last few weeks is that true friends are not always the ones you expect. That deserves a blog post unto itself.

Late in the afternoon I finally had some success at work with completion of a project that started almost 6 weeks ago. It came as a pleasant surprise to have finally completed it, but also to have made so much progress in the last week while I have felt like I wasn't really functioning anywhere near my normal level at work.

Having taken a while to consider this I am actually quite impressed at how many of my higher functions I seem to have successfully switched into auto-pilot. Whether this is being caused by the medication or the sleep deprivation is probably up for debate. First thing in the morning, before I take my daily pill, I seem to require an extreme focus to execute even the most simple of tasks. Getting out of bed, showering, dressing, all require a force of will that I would normally have reserved for racing. Meanwhile, activities that should take at least some level of concentration happen without any conscious intervention. My drive to work happens without any active input, I get in the car at home and the next thing I remember is reverse parking at the office. I suspect the driving may not have been the safest journeys of my life, either for myself or for other road users, but I have to assume that the part of my brain that can handle gear-changes, traffic and roundabouts without crashing is also functioning with regards to speed, traffic lights and pedestrians. 

Work in general should also take a significant part of my focus, but this week I have completed as much in my semi-operational state as I would have if I had been fully functional. 

I have previously compared this sensation to being a passenger in my own body, as if I was looking out from behind a sheet of glass. This is no longer an accurate analogy though. Whole sections of memory are being over-written by the flashbacks I was having at the time and my mind is wandering off to other places rather than being just a passenger in my own life.

Today was a day of two very different halves. This morning was a very bad day, this afternoon and evening were almost "normal".