The Old Tin Shed

Hey all; well the cycle continues im crashing and fairly hard at that. Physically unwell I caught a stomach bug over christmas and my usuall complaints left me on 4 lots of anti biotics this past week. Im over tired, I am stressed and I have been having thoughts of suicide once again.  Been to the point of planning in my head how I will end it.  What I will leave behind and ultimately what I believe will happen to my body and my soul once I die. It cant be right to be punished this way, I have paid more for my mistakes than any man on earth I am sure.  Tonight I am sitting here sleep not coming like it should.  I have taken the normal med supply will delve into the extra's shortly. So why do I say its a cycle.  Every year since my breakdown I come off a kind of manic high and collapse into a depressed state.  No its worse than that I fall into a place where I no longer care if I wake up tomorrow or not.  Where I no longer care what people thi...

Im not great today, trigger by events from yesterday, im so angry I dont know how to cope.  Im turning the hatred on myself, because it must be my fault, that it happened. After all I am supposed to be the smart on the one people fear in board rooms, where I can dismantle the most complex stories and show the true meaning behind things.  This gift this ability comes from the illness and I pay for it.  I am sick of taking meds, I think after 10 years I get the right to say that, even though they have paved a better way of life for me, there are times I think I would have been better not being treated at all. I quite simply dont want to be here because yet again when I went to get my medications from the drug store they were denied me.  It was a med I can not do without full stop.  I got it in the end at another drug store but it should never have gotten that far.  I am crippled without my meds and now mentally im crippled when I go to get them expecting ...

Hi all, warning this may end up long.   Then again that seems to be theme with me of late.  I was trolling through my past posts and noticed with great pride that my most popular posts were about my struggle with mental illness.   It seems that others have been reading and in the end that is exactly why I bear my soul here. http://theoldtinshed.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/to-see-into-darkness.html  Above is one of my favorite posts and, has been read a lot by others.  Some of the themes in there I wanted to elaborate on today.  You see the darkness I talk about is not a quantitative thing.  To others it would be a nice place.  But to me its a place that scares me, where the insecurities and evil intent live. Its never a nice place to go or to see.  I have stared at myself in the mirror and what I saw churning beneath the blue eyes really scares me.  If I let it run, if I gave in the fight the outcome for me would not be goo...

Its been a tough couple of weeks for me, a lot of things that I don't want to discuss here have had me tied up in knots. In the end it will all be over by the weekend and will allow this end of the world to return to some form of normality.  Im heading to be early tonight with the goal tomorrow of actually cleaning my office and sorting out clothes that fit and those that don't.  5 more sleeps and normality returns to my life for a while.  In the end I know everyone has bad days I just seem to have more than most.  I think I due to the psych later in the week and man are we going to have an interesting discussion. I find people are so cruel to me.  They say all the right words about understanding mental illness but when it comes down to it they don't.  Words like suck it up, get more treatment I got better why cant you yous just lazy.  What pisses me off no end is 9 times out of 10 these are people who think having situational depression is the s...

This is the follow up to the two posts yesterday, which I have just re-read. Today brings a calm, that wasn't here yesterday, today the meds I took in the last 72 hours are having an effect.  Im a little too dopey for my liking but its better than where I came from yesterday.  I still feel the pain and anger that I felt yesterday.  But somehow its not as pointed or sharp as it was.  I didn't have the best sleep but I kept at it, not sure when the last time I awoke was all I know is that it was sometime just after sun up. Im kinda numb right now and that is probably a good thing.  Being numb means being calm, and calm is good, it means that somehow I have wrangled back control from the illness.  Another 24 hours and I will be back in the swing of things for sure. I didn't write yesterday to scare anyone, I didn't write it to gain any sympathy, I just wanted people to see into the illness the blackness that at times envelopes me.  I dont ...

This is not a rant, its not something bad that will bore the crap out of you.  Its just some observations after self evaluation again. I havent been that well the last 10 days have had to take some very major steps to keep myself in check, have been to see the doctor and have taken on some extra support.  But I am dealing with it as its happening.  Everyone around me is amazed at how I am keeping myself in check. But this is more about me, and not the illness its more about the observations I have taken since the trip to Brisbane.  I see myself as two different people.  I see the person I show the world, and the person who lives in my world. The person I show the world is controlled, has insight into his world both emotionally and in a general sense. At times it shows the me underneath but only when it can stay in control of the events.  I try my best to be honest with the world, to show the real me.  It has been something I have kind of...

This is going to be one of those meandering posts I have from time to time. I went and saw my psychiatrist today, him and I get on very well.  Our conversations often cross over into mental health theory and treatments.  I recently watched an interview on the ABC about torture and how it effects people.  I ended up coming home with several periodicals and photocopies from reference materials. Its quite funny but i know should he and I ever sit down outside the office we would have the most amazing discussions. So how does this relate to the title of the post.  John made a comment of seeing the damage war and torture do.  We discussed a tipping point, a single event that before that people were normal and after that point are forever damaged.  I made the comment then comes the blackness. For the first time in 4 years I actually started to cry in his office.  Without realizing it I had unsettled myself.  You see...

I was reminded today, of how much we have, how much we take for granted, and the huge cost that it has come at. We in the west have a lifestyle that is unequaled in human history, we live in vast cities, and can travel around the world in hours not days.  We are the most traveled peoples ever. But at what cost? Since the start of the 20th century we were embroiled in conflict after conflict, the first world war saw an old way of life, of royalty and empire thrown against each other.  The huge industrial complexes on each side created a meat grinder when men, flesh and bone were pitted against hot steel.  At the end the west was decimated, the cost in human lives unprecedented in human history.  It carried the catch phrase of the war to end all wars.  Yet it was the peace thrashed out after the first world war, that laid the seeds for a war on a scale we had never seen before. I wont go into the second world war, suffice to say that it was horrific with ent...

So what do you do when someone refuses to forgive you for something you did?  Well im sure there are volumes of psych study that cover this, and the interactions to lead to such situations.  However I will share my experience in the hope others can get something out of it. My father passed away over 2 years ago now, and I miss him every day.  When he was young my grandparents help raise one of my uncles (non blood), after his father left him abandoned.  My uncle Max and my father grew up together and were close for most of their adult lives. As I have stated before during my mental collapse I hurt my parents pretty badly, and with my financial collapse as well my parents lost the way of life that my income provided.  From the outside it looked like I had intentionally made this happen.  Of course we all know now that it was my self destruction that caused the havoc. My parents and my dads sister forgave me, they understood that it wasn't me during t...

Nothing cryptic about this posts heading.  I take this type of medication from time to time, and have found it to be extremely useful.  I have posted before about Xanax, which is the branded name of the medication.  I call it my jagged little pill. There is no doubt it helps me, it pulls me back from the frantic panic, and anxiety that, sometimes enters my life.  It restores order and peace to my mind, I feel while under its grip that I can cope that I can deal with the things that led me to take them.  Its a trick, a chemical trick that works well with me.  I only use them sparingly as resistance to the medication comes around easily. So why the Jagged pill.  One of this medications side effects is memory loss.  Its good in some ways bad in others.  An example today would have been I swore my partner had been home, but that was not the case I simply did not remember the way things were laid out. The good side of the memory loss is t...

Its something that we all experience, and there are multiple types of pain.  For the purposes of this post we are talking about emotional pain. Some years ago now I took a very serious step and tried to end my life.  I drove my car at high speed into a fairly large tree.  I wasnt successful obviously, but I was broken and damaged in ways people could never imagine. We use the word pain a lot in mental health, its used to cover a wide variety of feelings.  I can tell you from experience you never want to feel the pain I felt that night.  Even the pain from the crash didnt come close to the pain and emptiness that had become me. My carers often ask me would I do it again ?  Would I try to harm myself ?  I answer I don't know.  Believe it or not its the truth.  I cant say no I wont, because given that level of pain I might again decide no life is better than a life of never ending suffering.  People find this so hard to deal with, pri...

Warning Heavy Rambling Post but please read The more and more I live with this illness I have begun to understand that you do some extraordinary things to just cope with the things that happen to you.  Some days its just enough to know that tomorrow wont be the same as today. Sunrise another reason to make it through the night To live each moment without having plans for the future.  A future that may never be.  I have spent days inside my own head unable to escape to be part of the world around me.  I have to prick myself to make me bleed so I can break away from the thoughts and the trap I set for myself.  I don't mean self harm I mean I may listen to music or even read something that I know will evoke a mental reaction.  Normally to make me cry. You say your insane why would you intentionally make yourself upset.  Because if I don't I cant break free of the mental stress, the fixation the devastation...

Every now and again, a song comes along that changes the very way you think.  The way you see your world, or even more importantly made you feel something you hadn't before.  In my life I am happy to say there has been many of these songs.  I often relate a place and a time in my life to the discovery of that song. An example of this, though not a song is Fanfare for the Common Man.  To me it goes back to when I was a very small child, when it was the opening music for the ABC news in country Victoria.  I would get excited because it meant that dad was back from milking for the day.  As I grew older my music tastes changed from top 40 to stuff that was far darker.  By my early teens I was heavily into heavy metal music (the devils music according to some).  I look back at this period of my life, and I was searching.  Searching for what I don't know, maybe the real me, the one who wasn't the show child for my parents. The first heavy metal...