Firstly, I have decided to leave the blog nameless, because my original plan was to call it Sex and Suicide, but I was concerned it may attract readers who were seeking something, well, a little different, shall we say. I have already had it pointed out to me that pinkpalaceangel.com sounds like a porn site. I can’t help it if I am hopelessly naive! I still feel that says more about the person who made the comment than it does about me. And the Messy Girls agreed (knowing me in all my childish, ditsy glory as they do!)

I then briefly considered a title along the lines of, Don’t Know if I Want to Fuck or Die, but felt that was perhaps a little too full-on. Or rude. Or triggering. So nameless blog it shall remain.

Hopefully you may have caught my gist a little from the introductory discussion though. I seem to be going through a period of extremely severe and rapid mood swings again. I don’t have a ‘normal’ day at all. When things seem to be levelling out a bit, I quickly discover that what I was experiencing was a point of ‘somewhere in between’ a high and a low, or vice versa, and is just a brief glimpse of ‘what I call normal’ on another journey to an extreme. Incidentally, that second option for a title came from a rather frank conversation I had with my psychiatrist in December. He asked me to describe my extremes of mood. I said, that in its simplest form it went something like this; If I wake up, and my immediate overriding thought is, “I want to die.” I know it is not going to be a good day. On the other hand, if I wake up and my immediate overriding thought is, “I need a fuck.” I know its not going to be a good day either.

I don’t generally enjoy my highs. They are more agitated and distressing than elated. My behaviour tends to be rather out of character, apart from the obvious hyper-sexuality, there is the over-spending, the reckless and risky activity, talking too fast and too much, laughing inappropriately, inability to relax or sit still, drinking too much and frenzied busyness. The hyper-sexuality, along with the spending sprees that accompany it are, if I’m honest, the overwhelming feature of my high moods.

Can I just say, whole days of sexual arousal may sound delightful, and given a different contextual background they possibly could be, but in my current circumstances they are nothing more than frustrating, exhausting and cause me to make some really crap decisions. I hear things in a conversation that were not meant as I have interpreted them. Because, rather unusually, when high, I believe myself to be all-but irresistible to the male population. I spend endless energies pursuing the impossible. Not that it ever seems impossible at the time. With hindsight, it always seems downright ridiculous and embarrassing. The related spending, on an array of wonderful adult gadgets, potions and attire, are at best laughable and at worst rather shameful. No matter how much I try and logic that I am an adult, I am not hurting anyone else and so on, I can’t get away from, that before this episode of illness I wouldn’t have dreamt of buying such things. And I was a grown woman then, experiencing the same frustrations of being long-term ‘without-partner’ as I am now. Something has changed. It troubles me.

Sometimes, the extremes of mood can last a few days, sometimes a few hours. Yesterday I woke up feeling low, then spiked a high mid-afternoon, only to crash to the depths of suicidality by the evening. I cannot even begin to express how exhausted the range of soaring and plummeting emotions leave me. It is like hell on earth. It is all-consuming. Such intense waves of feeling are utterly overwhelming. DBT may advise me to ‘ride the wave’ but I’m no surfer. In fact, I’m not even that good a swimmer, and upon finding myself in the water at such turbulent times, I risk not only being overcome but potentially drowned. It’s not a life. It’s a terrifyingly seemingly unending existence and I want out.

I have considered many various ways of ending my life during the last month. I even considered setting my home alight, with me in it, obviously. Or driving my car high speed into a Iarge solid object. Or jumping in front of a train, or off a motorway bridge or from the top of a car park or taking tablets, or tablets with alcohol, or severing an artery when in the bath. The list goes on. The longer I try to fight the urge to act on these thoughts, the more they seem to increase, and mutate like a deadly virus in my mind. Faster and faster they multiply, leaving no space in my head for logic, positivity, even distraction. I fear one day I will succumb completely to the fatal infection. It appears there is no cure in sight. The medication is not touching it. The disease continues on its rampage, destroying everything in its path, confidence, self-esteem, memory and cognitive ability, strength, energy, even hope. Depression sucks. It has been stealing away days at a time from my life recently. Around half of the last week I didn’t even make it out of bed. The black dog has me well and truly under his paw.

I am feeling increasingly helpless. Even asking for support feels too much like hard work. I cannot keep up the fight anymore. It is futile. I am incapable of surviving an attack of such extremes. If I am not taken by the seas, or snuffed out by the virus, I still have to fight the dog, and he’s a hungry, savage beast. The odds are not in my favour, in fact they are stacked against me. Anyone care to place a bet?

Thanks for reading.