I haven’t been this totally bi-polar since I was a teenager. Mood swings are one thing, but this is getting out of hand. Luckily, in a way, my manic is suppressed enough that I don’t literally tear down walls or quit jobs in it, and my depression isn’t suppressive enough that it can break my intensely conditioned rut of a routine life. Which is somewhat to say; I’ve carefully crafted a life, selected a job, where I can be totally non-present mentally and still semi-functional, and I’ve got myself so well trained that I don’t even show up late for work when I’m in the middle of a suicide, I just mosey on in and do my job all the while. Heck, while I didn’t exactly “hit my goals” for the day, neither did anyone else, and aside from the one employee I know isn’t actually doing the job right, I’m the only one who even came close on Sunday by about 33%. To re-iterate, and clarify: while in the process of actively killing myself, while so dead and low and depressed that I couldn’t find a reason to stay alive (Sara didn’t help – she just said no again), I still did about a third more work on Sunday than the other people who were there. The people who weren’t experiencing hyponatremia or major depression. Because it’s rote, it’s repetitive, and I can practically do it in my sleep.
I can’t get myself to shave or shower or brush my teeth or even eat or masturbate (two things I enjoy quite a bit) on any continuous schedule. The “Eat Only/Whenever You’re Hungry Diet” I am a proponent of, I thought up because it is somewhere between “don’t eat unconsciously or as something to do when bored” and “don’t forget to eat because you’re too depressed / manic”. I have trouble remembering to do my laundry, water the trees, whatever. But work. Work I can show up to on time, consistently. Or school, which was just another job. Repetitive. Familiar.
It’s pretty easy, actually, for me to show up to (nearly) every Write-In for NaNo. it’s almost as easy as work. I can even go when I’m depressed, when I’m feeling terrible, suicidal, happy, horny, whatever, it’s a repetitive, set schedule, out of my hands, it’s easy to show up. I don’t really understand why. When I set a meeting time with someone else, that’s easier to show up to than just making plans for myself; perhaps it’s my overblown sense of responsibility. When I say I’m going to meet a writing group at Willow House (or wherever) twice a week, every week, to write and work on writing, that’s easy — Heck, it’s hard to stop, even with good reason. When I tell myself I’ll work on writing at least 8 hours a week, or when I tell myself I’ll go to the Willow House (or wherever) once a week or twice a week or twice a month (that’s harder than ever week, for me, btw), and force myself to sit down and work — I peter out, quickly. Sometimes before the first time I go. If there were even just one other person I was meeting, I wouldn’t miss it. I’d probably be early.
Which brings me around, perhaps, to why suicide seems like an option right now: I don’t feel like I’m particularly responsible to anyone right now. There’s an increasingly un-respected, vague and distant set of financial institutions that own the next several years’ worth of my life, but aside from that, I’ve extricated myself (mostly long ago) from any situations of responsibility. No one needs me, not really. At my job, they just hired two new people and simultaneously introduced a new “checklist” procedure to try to reduce errors. Turns out, the checklist is thorough enough that a single sheet of paper can practically train someone to do the bulk of my job in an hour or less. “Just follow the checklist” and when they get the hang of that, it’s just the occasional question about the various deviations on unusual bookings… F_ck. I just had to remove my “ex” from my LJ friends list because seeing her posting about cuddling with other people was too emotionally difficult for me; and it ties right into this not being needed, not being responsible to anyone or anything, being easily replaceable if, for example, my brain swells up and crushes itself against the inside of my skull because I drank too much water… Actually, about 4, maybe 8 more glasses of water should have done it. I was thinking of going on not saying anything to anyone, but f_ck, do I hate secrets, even when there really isn’t anyone I’m keeping them from.
The closest things to “reasons to live” on Sunday were things like if I dropped dead at work on a Sunday, there would be no one to ‘close’ and run reports, and the bookings would sit on the list all night and management wouldn’t know how much money they made until Monday morning. Or … if I finished killing myself, I wouldn’t have any proper chances to see if I could get some illegal prescription drugs to a friend who called me in the middle of the day about it; turns out I probably don’t have easy access to klonopin, but I couldn’t be sure while at work, since I can’t make personal phone calls or use the internet…
And that’s almost as bad as last week when the reason I didn’t slice open my arms and bleed to death Wednesday night was that I was too tired/lethergic/depressed to get out of bed and walk all the way to the kitchen to get a knife. Seriously. Actually, I didn’t have the drive to turn 90 degrees or get fully into bed; I just lay where I collapsed from standing that night, my legs mostly off the bed.
Thursday, just numb, busy, and saw a funny movie about suicides. Friday morning pretty good, but by afternoon, bad, and by night I was really, really bad again. Did you see me that night? it was bad. Saturday morning, woke up not great, but was pretty good from about 11AM to 5PM… and then after ~8PM I was collapsed in bed thinking about suicide again, and by 10PM I had gotten together enough drive to get out of bed and start drinking water.
And then yesterday I was bouncing off the walls happy. Carried over to this morning, and then some time this afternoon I sortof crashed again. Not so bad that I’m bleeding all over my keyboard, but … well, Pushing Daisies helped. I love that show. it’s great. Anyway, I’m rollercoastering. And no, I don’t know how i’ll be feeling tomorrow, or tomorrow night, or this weekend. But I’ll be at work tomorrow, and at the write-in tomorrow night, and at the Dentist on Friday, and so on. And on and on, until I finally do die. Or maybe, like Adam, Claire, and Peter, I’ll just keep living. I swear, last time I got to 10 litres, I was intoxicated for three days. Sunday I drank over 11 litres and didn’t even get a buzz… I assume my body just built up an immunity to water, like most of the other poisons I’ve tried. Bleh.
Oh, and I got approved for the November 30th through December 7th resort week in Mesquite, NV (a bit outside Vegas) and the time off for it, so I’m doing that. I wish I had someone to take. ((I tried inviting Amber, but I don’t think she took me seriously.)) I won a free resort week for having perfect attendance and perfect productivity (hit my goals all month, averaged by week) in October — there were a few other names in the hat mine was drawn out of, so it really was a win, so “yay”. I got to choose from a strange list of mostly places I can’t afford to go to or literally can’t go to (because I don’t have a passport, let alone airfare), including the free resort week in India at roughly the same time. I decided that rather than trying to save up $2k+ and get my passport by spring to fly to NZ or such, I’ll just take a week I know I can get to and go to legally.
Ooh, and I almost forgot to talk about NaNo this year. So, I tried to write a fictionalized (highly – I mean, a much more intense exorcism, real dragons, non-linear reincarnation, the destruction of the world, et cetera, et cetera) version of the key storyline I experienced during and in the months following NaNo 2004 for my novel this year. I kept having trouble with it… writing even fictionalized versions of events that are based on real life causes me to think back, to look back at, to try to recreate emotionally the experiences that inspired the new story, and that can be very difficult. So I found ways around it, I wrote out of chronological order, I skipped huge swaths of time, and I was making progress. By Saturday morning, I’d learned from the story’s progress what its new end would be, and I was really happy with how it had begun to come together as a story. It needs a thousand or two more words on the end right now, and a lot of editing, fleshing out, cutting out bits, et cetera, the sorts of things that November is not meant for, but in the end, it is more of a short story or novella than a novel. Its final length will probably be around 20k words, based on what I know about it right now. Luckily, it has some themes and elements in common (I’m lying, I don’t really understand what “themes” are… but certainly it has elements in common, and I can pretend it has themes and you’ll believe me, even if you read it) with the other stories I’ve written for the collection I’ve been doing this year, so I’ll probably put it in there and you can read it next year when that comes out. Which, if I stopped there, would mean that I’d failed NaNo 3 years running.
Not such a big deal, I know, and I keep reminding myself, in light of the literal stack of finished books, books in print, books available online and through book stores everywhere, that I have succeeded at creating. Not such a big deal at all. Especially when you consider I wrote my first NaNo novel in 8 days, and the bulk of UTFBF Book 3 in under 3 days. Which is to say: Tomorrow night, I’ll start a new book for NaNo, and try to get an actual novel out of it this time, instead of just a long short story.
So, that’s the NaNoWriMo update.
Alright, that’s about enough for now. Sorry to take up so much of your time. Hopefully these words are priming the pump for something good. I’m trying to decide for the new novel between:
1) Untrue Tales… Book 4
2) A novel-length suicide note
3) A novel describing 50k words of suicides / suicide attempts, in detail
4) Starting where I left off on the Sin Eater book, my 2005 NaNo failure
5) Starting something random with no planning, from scratch
There could be other options by the end of the day at work… but I have to get up for work in a few hours, so I’m going to sleep.
