Changes

I have a very vivid memory about a lot of aspects of my life, maybe because I have so few life experiences. When I think back, every major change has led to me becoming more unhappy and some other emotion I can’t quite describe. A lot of people hate school or their job but most seem to settle into it; I never have and I always feel an intense desire to be away from those kind of situations. I don’t know if it’s a fear of being trapped or something…

From the first time I went to preschool, when I started school and high school and finally university (the first time I tried..) and work I have always feared the change and always had those fears become “justified”. I can’t help but feel the same thing will happen to me again when I go to uni tomorrow. Reading comments between 2 of my future flatmates has already made me feel uneasy since they seem so alike and I can tell they will more than likely get on well. They are exactly as I had pictured everyone that I will meet at university, there is no way they will like me or want anything to do with me. I think I can handle that but if they dislike me so much that they start to make horrible comments and jokes about me then I don’t thank I will be able to cope.

My mum wanted to spend the evening with me today (she usually goes to her boyfriends house on Saturday nights) I don’t know whether it was wholly to spend some time with me before I go or whether a part of her wanted to check up on me and make sure I didn’t do anything “stupid”. Those fears will not have been unfounded though, I have thoughts of running out and jumping off that bridge going around my head. I’ve managed to get myself into an impossible situation; if I tell anyone, then I won’t be able to go to university and they’ll keep me here. I can’t live with that either so it leaves me with 2 choices: try to bury the fears and suicidal ideas and go to uni pretending everything is fine or sneak out and do it without telling anyone.  If I can’t sleep tonight, I hope for my family’s sake that I can keep these urges under control.

Crisis Team

Just had the visit from 2 crisis team workers that I wrote about earlier. It wasn’t too bad, I said and heard a lot of things that I have done before and now I can’t help but feel I have wasted their time. I could’ve done with talking to them a couple of weeks ago really when I was at my lowest point. It’s probably bad of me, but I held back some of the truth about my suicidal thinking, but then I can’t really describe it properly anyway. I don’t know how everyone else thinks, but for me there is never one consistent mode of thinking or conscious thoughts that can easily be put into words. I don’t sit there and think “I might throw myself off a bridge tonight”, it’s more of an overall feeling that comes in waves.

At the moment I’m not seriously planning anything for the very near future, but those thoughts and feelings are still in the back of my mind. For now I am going to try and last the next week and see how things go at university if I can. It’s probably not knowing how I am going to be received by people that is causing me the most anxiety, after all it is 2 years since I met a new group of people whom I had not spoken to and got to know on the internet first.

How I got on

The appointment was surprisingly short, I spent most of the time there sitting around in a tiny waiting room trying to avoid catching peoples eye. The first doctor I saw was a junior psychiatrist, she asked me the usual questions that I’ve been asked many times before about my anxiety symptoms etc. I asked about diazepam but nothing came of it unfortunately. After talking about my suicidal feelings, she decided to discuss with the consultant and then asked me to come and talk to him. He was very intimidating, I felt like I was being interrogated. This just made me anxiety worse, I stumbled over words and my mind went blank several times but I think I managed to get my point across. There was a particularly painful moment when he asked if I had any close friends or girlfriend, to which I answered truthfully; no, and then he asked “Why not?”. My mind was overcome with all the hatred I have for myself and if I wasn’t so tongue tied with anxiety, I could probably have spent half an hour listing the many reasons why not. Eventually though I had to settle with “probably because I am so weird” which led to further questioning about why I think that, and of course why I think that I look weird which I couldn’t answer because I felt tears coming to my eyes. Thankfully he stopped the interrogation at that point and asked me to wait outside while he talked to the original doctor.

I went back to see her and apparently they are concerned about me, maybe it was the way I answered their questions because I was not feeling actively suicidal like I was the last time I saw my MHP who just sent me on my merry way. The outcome of it all is that I have got to have someone from the crisis team visit me at home today, which I didn’t really want but I couldn’t bring myself to argue with them about that. They also changed my medication to venlafaxine, an SNRI so hopefully that might make a slight difference though I am not expecting miracles.

I had hoped that I could relax slightly after the appointment was done but now I have to worry about this person coming round. Of course I had to tell my mum, but I didn’t say why they were coming exactly because I don’t want her to know how close I was to killing myself. She’s now gone on a mad cleaning spree that usually happens whenever we are expecting visitors. I just hope that she will give me some privacy because I don’t want her listening to me talk about such personal and potential hurtful things.

Scared

Why oh why did I arrange to meet yet another new person? I’m so scared about this, I know the person in question from a social networking site and she doesn’t know that I have SA so this is much scarier to me than meeting other SA sufferers. We’re going to the Tate Modern and generally wandering around London so I’ll be on the train again tomorrow (definitely going to leave plenty of time to get back this time). I am severely doubting my ability to maintain the facade of being a normal, vaguely interesting person for an entire day. If I hadn’t already bought tickets then I’d have backed out of it but I’m committed now.

Ugh, time to dose myself up on sleeping pills and try to get some rest before the ordeal begins.

Alcohol

I meant to write about this a while ago but never got around to it. One thing that worries me more than most about socialising with people is the fact that I don’t (and can’t at the moment) drink alcohol which makes me extremely unusual among people my age. I won’t go into too much detail why I don’t, but it involves several horrible experiences with someone very close to me which I never want to repeat again. I’ve never had a worse day in my life, it left me feeling depersonalised for a week afterwards and I never want to act the way they did. I also don’t want to become reliant on it if I find that it allows me to escape my anxiety around people.

Heading off to university usually involves getting seriously drunk for most people and I am worrying that I will be even more of an outcast because I really don’t want to do that. Partly because of the reasons above and partly because I’m afraid of losing control of myself, that is extremely scary to me. I’ve only been slightly drunk once before and I didn’t like it at all and have no desire to repeat that, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to because of my medication. I don’t know how to explain to people why I don’t drink, telling someone that usually results in the same reaction as saying that you like to torture kittens in your spare time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t look down on people for drinking and I’m not condescending about it at all, but people that have found out so far have had a lot of trouble with it.

I already feel very different from most people my age, I have hardly any life experience and most of the things that I like are considered “boring”. I can just imagine that I am going to be as shunned and made a figure of mockery by people again, just as I always have been.

Reprieve

I managed to explain to my mum what happened, and after calling the student finance people I discovered that I’m not eligible for tuition loan because of my previous college course. Apparently even if I had not taken out a loan (which I had to do to pay for it) I still wouldn’t be eligible because of the subsidised fees back then. So they are retroactively punishing people for taking courses when there was more financial help available, great. 

Luckily for me, my mums boyfriend has offered to lend me the money for the first years worth of tuition so I can still go. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a job over next summer to pay for the second year. It’s hard to describe my feelings about this though. On one hand I’m hugely relieved because I was seriously feeling suicidal before when I thought I’d lost everything. I really can’t go on living how I am at the moment, so sheltered and constantly being subjected to snarky comments and discouragement about changing myself. On the other hand, I feel so guilty about taking that amount of money from someone, especially since I don’t really know him all that well (I’m too anxious to hold a proper conversation with him). 

I really want to thank him for his generosity but it’s so hard for me to talk seriously to people, I think I might write him a letter. Anyway, hopefully I’ve got over the arduous process of application by now, there shouldn’t be any more hurdles to overcome before I actually go there.