Today

Today on the bus back from my psychiatrist appointment I went slowly crazy, but it was OK because I was in my own world with my music turned up loud enough to drown out the rest of the world. By the way, my earbuds don’t leak sound, which is good because I used to fucking hate listening to the hi-hat tch-tch-tch of other people’s bad taste in music. But I was going crazy in my own separate little world, with a desire to slash my arms. And I was thinking how fucking unfair it is that I can’t kill myself, because I’m honestly tired of this bullshit, wanting to hurt myself. And I was looking out for Rebecca, wondering if she’d get on the bus, which is only half as crazy as it sounds, because even though she lives in London, one of her best friends is in the city I live in and I know she visits her sometimes.

But she didn’t get on, and I got off the bus as it started raining and put in my prescription for my very own benzodiazepine at the local pharmacy. And I haven’t slashed my arms although I still kind of want to. I’ve decided that my all new bedtime will be 11:30, which means I can watch the TV show I want to watch tonight and that seems as good a reason as any to make that decision. It’s all going to get slightly fucked up in three weeks or so when the clocks here change, or maybe before.

While I was at my appointment, the psychiatrist asked me if I had suicidal thoughts. Every time I see her she asks me this. And every time I’ve told her yes. And she asks me if I have a plan and I tell her about it, because I’ve had a plan for the last year. A plan and the ropes and the knowledge of knots to carry it out; I’ve run the tests and calculated the chance of success. Every time the same things asked and said.

My psychiatrist and I talked about sleep hygeine. I didn’t tell her that I sleep on my sofa. But the problem has never been my inability to get to sleep. My problem’s being tired at the right times. But I didn’t explain it because what’s the point? Even the sleep specialist I saw last year didn’t really seem to get it. And I told her that yes, I drink caffeine, but usually only in the morning. And she said I should limit it to a cup of coffee during breakfast.

I’ve given up alcohol. I’ve quit smoking. I eat healthily with three servings of oily fish every week for those mood-improving Omega-3’s. I’ve cut down from a couple of litres of Coke a day to maybe four cups of coffee before noon and now I have to give up three of those.

And I still have these scars all over my arms. And it occurs to me that not drinking alcohol means never being able to ask someone out for a drink. Never getting drunk together. And I’ll have to tell them about my scars while I’m stone cold sober.

I don’t want to spend the next few years fighting to get somewhere that badly approximates where I could have been years ago if only my mind worked properly. I don’t want to live as the fifth-generation photocopy of who I could have been. I don’t want to stay in this fucking world where every pleasure seems to have been slowly stripped away from me. And yes: I chose to give up alcohol. I chose not to smoke. And I’m choosing to take the advice about caffeine. But it still feels like they’ve been taken away.

In the pharmacy today, picking up my addictive and tolerance-producing temazepam, I had to stop myself buying some co-codamol. They probably wouldn’t have sold them to me anyway – mixing respiratory depressants is a bad idea, or so I’m told. And I know if I have a bottle of vodka around I’ll go and do something dumb like mixing it with a load of temazepam and codeine, because that’s the kind of thing that seems like such a good idea after half a bottle of vodka.

And you know, there’s a trick to thinking about suicide while convincing yourself that you shouldn’t start smoking again.

So yes, I have my plans. And to be honest, I don’t want to stay in this world. And it’s not even like I can come up with any really good reasons to do so. But I guess I’m going to anyway. Without even a cigarette to get me through.