I realized something today:  I’ve lost hope.

I go through the “motions” of living, but I’ve lost hope. I have lost the support of someone I “thought” cared for me – and now I trust people even less. And I want to retreat inside myself even further. The part of me who was starting to feel hopeful – beginning to trust – she feels dead again.

I’m not sleeping and I’m exhausted – I am not the person I was before.

I have lost hope.

I am exhausted from constantly fighting. Who or what am I fighting? Myself? The girls inside me? No amount of excuses seem right – nothing can ease my guilt. I know that I am the one to blame. This is no game – no self-indulgent pity party. This is a bit of fear blooming into a swirl of rage. No amount of time will ease this pain. Pangs of guilt will always reverberate out of my empty, blood-drained heart.

**Tired and angry – angry and tired – it’s never ending.

Tonight I have been overcome by the weary darkening of overwhelming feelings. They pulsate through my veins, taking control... I fight all the frantic thoughts and I'm not sure what's becoming of me.
At times I don't care; I just want to be empty and so I push everyone away and close the doors around me.

I have lost my way. I've been dropped on a desert island and it's just me here, alone with my thoughts. My head has become a war zone.

You see it doesn't matter how you try to escape it, doesn't matter how hard you try to run you'll never run fast enough. For it has no features or feelings, it is flat and lifeless yet it hates me and seeks to ruin me more than anything else could. If I were to die would it be gone to? Its only reason for existence is to wreck me.  There's nowhere to go from here.  

I will leave this life...

You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.

Like it or lump it.

The only constant is change.

Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!

Life isn’t fair!

If life gives you lemons…make lemonade.

I feel trapped. Trapped in this life I don’t want to be in, trapped inside my head, inside this messed up, used up body. Trapped by the conflicting voices that argue and debate constantly…never a minute of peace and quiet! Trapped!!!

I continue to live inside this chaotic crazy world of confusion and I don’t know which way is up anymore. I cancel appointments, I lash out at DT, tell him he isn't helping me and I hate him. I dissociate, to **** the pain, I abuse the drugs that have been prescribed, SI to try to get the bad out of me, I don’t sleep, most weekends I don’t even have the energy to go out of the house…but none of it matters….because “it’s all part of the process”…perhaps DT could provide me with a bullet point of the ‘process’ so I can see where I am now, and how many more bullet points there are to go…so I’ll have all the evidence and be able to make an ‘informed’ decision of whether I have the stamina to do it. Isn’t that part of the ‘discovery’ process?

Nothing gets processed, it never gets better. I don’t think I even understand the concept anymore. I mean I’ve read so much about it…treatment approaches; behavioral, psychodynamic, cognitive, eclectic, holistic, existential, person focused, CBT, DBT, and more! I’ve researched and studied trauma symptoms and what to expect, how to handle them. I’ve read about the long-term effects of childhood abuse…the fear of abandonment, inability to trust or feel safe, inability to self-soothe or regulate emotions, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self injury, suicide ideation, the tendency to ‘repeat the trauma’.… oh, I “understand” it well, from an educational perspective. I have good insight. I can explain it to someone else…but emotionally, and physically…personally, I don’t comprehend it, I can’t apply it to me. It’s all just words, I have no personal connection to them. Just like the terms: mom, dad, safety, trust, intimacy…all words in a dictionary. I understand them, I know the ‘meaning’ of the words but I have no real human connection to them, they have no personal meaning to me. Like reading a physics book…all words and terms and models and notions and things…I sit and observe externally, but none of it is part of my internal world.

That’s my problem right now…(well, one of) is no one listens! *NO ONE HEARS ME!!! Everyone just shoves information at me – techniques, tools, lists, print outs, videos, cds, diary cards, words…and I see them, and hell, I’m pretty sure I could teach them all to anyone with an IQ over 50 – but how does it relate to me, to my life? The stupid exercises in DBT…”practice them” go to class, talk about them…
DBTC says, *“Don’t you feel better/happier/distracted/grounded/soothed now?” And I just pause and take an internal inventory and say, “NO!” I don’t because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.
“Oh, well, then you must be doing something WRONG. You are a failure – you aren’t trying hard enough.” Yes, it’s my entire fault. I will try harder. And I try harder, and it doesn’t work, and then I become more frustrated, like a 1 year old trying to fit a round toy into a square hole. It doesn’t fit! And I try it over and over and over, and it still doesn’t fit. And I become more and more frustrated and feel more and more worthless and stupid…and no one listens because it’s my fault. I’m not trying hard enough! I should be able to do this! I should be able to ‘soothe’ myself and ‘ground’ myself and ‘feel safe’ and make him go away when he comes to me at night, and be happy when I’m sad…and pretend, pretend, pretend, fake it. Shut up and behave yourself, young lady, so everyone can see how much better you're doing...another DBT success story!

Nothing is shifting and I’m still stuck. Read it, live it, apply it, love it! I read the material like it’s a prerequisite class in college. I study it, I learn it, I recite it, I ace the exam, I can tutor others on the material…but like finite math – I’ll never use it, I don’t apply it in my own life. I don’t incorporate it on a personal level – it’s just a class I have to pass to graduate.

Nothing is stable, nothing is safe, there’s nowhere to turn, no one to turn too. There’s no one here – no one listens – no one cares about what I say is working or isn’t working. The echoes of my screams just resonate through the cavernous canyon. I look around for the Verizon network and there’s nothing – no one. No one HEARS ME! DT used to hear me, but not anymore because now you don’t have time. “Sure I do,” says Dear Therapist, “I have a whole hour.” And you can call me until 10pm each and every night, if you need too, and if I’m available and not (enter: in session,  at the hospital working, running…or just plain not wanting to answer the phone) I will listen. In other words, if everything else falls through, then 'maybe'. Gee, I should jump on that.

Truly, I should take it, run with it, put it in the blender with some water, and make lemonade for EVERYONE!

Yes, my world today is so much different now than it was then. The only difference is the scenery.

Everything is still there: the fear, the lack of trust, the lack of safety, the ED, the SI, SIB, the pieces of me, the unfamiliar woman in the mirror looking back at me.

There's no where to run to… no where to hide....from myself. That's what it comes down to in the end, I can't hide from myself, and I can't seem to help myself either.

I’ve been fighting. Fighting, struggling, and lashing out at the faceless, formless thing that chases me ever since I can remember. I’m so very angry now, tonight, all day, – technically a lifetime…whatever. Angry and tired, I sit with my hands on my knees and my head bent, rocking…weak but wishing to be strong; held captive but wishing to be free; alone and afraid, wishing for comfort and courage.

I am sad as hell and I have no one in real life to talk to because no one cares or understands and whatever I know that it’s my “fault” that I don’t have the support system in place when I am in dire need of it…which would be now. I know that I ****. Got. It. I am a bit on the ‘not-lucid’ side tonight and a wishing I was drunk! It is so hard to stay sober and I am starting to doubt the worth of it.

There is a part inside who has been researching how to die…quickly and painlessly. Last Friday it was an overdose of medication (I won’t say what med it was because it is now in the past and I don’t need some well-intended person yelling at me OH MY GOD THAT COULD **** YOU in all caps - sometimes we are still in quite a fragile state.) I write this because I feel like those of you who have been a part of this journey with me should know what’s going on. This is what’s going on: I do not feel better. I do not have a good support in place here. Shame. On. Us. We have not done a good job at getting this done. I have continued to pretend like everything is fine when there everything is so very un-fine. not-fine…so very opposite of fine.

I can’t cope with the frustration and invalidation tonight. I can’t cope with the screaming. I am not coping at all. I’ve tried. I can’t. I am struggling right now, tonight, to make it minute to minute. I’m not sure what I’m doing. I feel like I am fighting a losing battle and I have no coach. And I do not feel better.

I miss my big brother so much I ache. He was the world to me. He cared for me when nobody else was there for me. He taught me things that helped to become who I am today.  I miss our closeness and our days spent just laughing and doing nothing. I miss us talking about everything and nothing. I miss sharing our hopes for the future. I wish I could have some of that back, even for just a moment. He was always supposed to be here, but somebody changed that by taking him away from me forever.

I remember that horrible phone call like it was yesterday. The day that I was told that I would never have you beside me in this journey anymore. I was stunned. How was possible that I would never get to talk to you again?? I spend days in a daze, unbelief, waiting for the phone to ring and hear your voice on the other end. It never happened, and days slowly turned to months and months into years. It has now been over 6 years since I have talked to you in person.

Day by day I think of you, how can all of this be true? I can't believe you're really gone, I still can't accept it, even after so long. Just the thought of you makes me cry, I never even got the chance to say goodbye. I don't know if it will ever get better. You were my brother and I loved you like no other. I would take your place if I had a choice. But now I have to let you rest, although without you my world's a mess. I miss you with all of my heart!

Dear therapist once said, "Once you stop trying to escape yourself, you will have won a big phase of the battle because in reality there is no one you presently have to escape or fear. One, because you are no longer a child, and two, because you have more, much more, personal power and capacities to protect yourself then in the past.”

It was so many years ago when I bought a costume of a confident woman with no history of abuse. I was the only one who knew it was a costume, and when I looked in the mirror, I longed to be that woman, the beautiful, confident woman with nothing to hide, and I never took that costume off. I pushed away the thoughts, the disgust that was of the past, I could do it…it was easy. I just had to stay busy, and not leave time to think about it. But one day that all came to a screeching halt and suddenly my life was so painful, and the pain was so intense…I wanted to be left alone in my pain, I did not want to share the pain I was feeling. I was afraid to explore the darkness that dwelled inside of me, the darkness that I had ignored and pushed away for so many years. I was afraid if the things that lived in my darkness were exposed to light, they would grow out of control, and overcome me, make me weak and afraid, **** me into the darkness until I no longer existed.

But the darkness was not to be ignored, it snuck up on me during the night, it rattled my windows, and wrote ******, bitter graffiti on my walls. There was no escape, I could no longer outrun my past, it had caught up with me, now ran beside me, and I knew it would soon overtake me. I began to have panic attacks, waking in the middle of the night, unable to breathe. I needed a coach, a life coach, and I needed one fast! I needed a coach to teach me to run faster, to escape. So I began to search for a coach and when I found one, but rather than teach to me run faster, he wanted me to slow down, to look…he wanted me to feel. What? Why would I allow myself to feel, it would just hurt, cause me pain. He told me that I could run until I wore myself out but I could not escape my past or my pain. I had to learn to face my past in order to move forward and heal. When I told him I was scared, that I didn't have the strength to face it, he told me that he would 'train me', stay with me, and help me to find the strength within me that he could see. The strength I saw in him was a reflection of the strength I was seeking for myself.

I have been hit time and time again in this process. I have had black eyes, bruised and cut skin, broken bones and a shattered spirit. And when I could not find the strength, he would help me, encourage me and cheer me on. I am moving forward, and I am starting to see my worth.