Nick Rambles

That’s bound to happen. I mean, I’m ADHD, possibly autistic, and a small laundry list of other labels that all seem to have one thing in common. Comorbid depression and anxiety, as well as a tendency to lose interest in everything at once.

Once upon a time, I’d apologize for the very fact that I have an issue. I won’t, now. What I will apologize for is the absence’s affect on you, my small band of loyal readers.

So, what has been going on? Let me just warn now that this shan’t be a feel-good, all happy post like my last few. It’s time I delve the darker dwellings of the beings that inhabit the dark garden of my mind. That said, you’ve been warned. This might get dark.

TW: Suicidal Ideation, Depression, Mental Illness, Hallucination, PTSD

First of all, a confession for those who don’t already know it. I have schizoaffective bipolar type. That means that I see and hear things that aren’t always there, and I have a lovely little community of hate inside my mind that, in my darker moments, seems absolutely and undeniably real to me.

Some would call me crazy or touched or damaged. I just call me Nick. I’ve seen things other people don’t my whole life. Honestly, just thought it was what made me anything special for the longest. It wasn’t always such a dark thing… but once it got dark, it stayed there.

There are several… voices? Entities? Things I hear and see that tear me down a lot. It’s like their sole purpose in existing is to try and get me so depressed I accept that I’m not worth anyone’s time and life would be better for everyone if I ceased to exist.

Those are the dark nights.

This story isn’t just about that, though. See, I also have several sources of intense PTSD and C-PTSD. Most recently, an experience in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a small hospital in Tennessee during which I was sedated, placed on a ventilator, and spent 3 weeks straight in the most horrendous fever dreams and vivid horror hallucinations of my life. I even died while I was under, once… Needless to say, it didn’t stick.

Fast forward from that ICU trip to now. I finally got the tracheostomy tube that followed that experience removed last month. Two days ago, I finally got a bipap machine to help me with some persistent struggles breathing in my sleep. I have been pseudo-narcoleptic just from sleep deprivation ever since the surgery to take out my trach tube. The machine was supposed to fix that.

So there’s the scene. Sleep deprived, starting to get depressed, and feeling like every step forward is actually a giant leap back. Enter Alejandro, the Bipap Machine.

Night 1: 45 minutes of sleep followed by 3 hours of flashbacks and panic attack. As far as my broken brain was concerned, my worst nightmare had come true and I was on the ventilator in my own home, my last bastion of safe space.

Night 2: No full blown panic attacks, but my breathing becomes irregular after only 15 minutes with the mask on. The machine isn’t even blowing at full strength yet. I am forced to remove it. I try again on 4 separate occasions. Cannot tolerate. Hands are shaking at this point.

Today will be day three and try three.

I was already struggling to keep my head up on account of sleep deprivation and an inability to take care of my own living space due to pain and fatigue. Now the thing that was supposed to help is doing little more than triggering me and if it doesn’t work, the next step, as far as I understand it, is to go back on the trach tube.

I’m not okay.

I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to keep fighting, I don’t want to keep hurting, and I don’t want to keep failing or watching things fail for me.

Worry not, I wouldn’t say this is suicidal. I have no intention or desire to hurt myself. I just…. want to cease to be. If I ceased to exist, I’d no longer burden anyone; I’d no longer have to fight and hurt and fail. I would exist beyond the realm of concerns like that.

But that way leads to madness… so I remind myself how much the people who love me, or say they do, would hurt if I vanished from this plane of existence. I think on the words they tell me that are meant to encourage or uplift. I focus on their needs, when mine aren’t enough to keep me going.

Sometimes, for folks like me, that’s all we can do.

So I guess the whole point is, if the fact that I can’t leave Chessy with a filthy home and run off into the spiritual night is all that gets me to the next sunrise right now, then so be it. It is enough.

If knowing that I would break hearts if I disappeared and made myself one with the ether is all that sees me through the darkest parts of the night, then so be it. It is enough.

And if the idea of leaving before I remember how to draw is what helps me clamber out of sleep in the morning one more time, then… so be it.

It is enough.

If you’re struggling with these sorts of things, too, please. Find that little thing that will see you to the next sunrise and hold onto it for dear life.

Also, think on this. In a small way, we are guardians of souls. If we give up, they win; the demons, the voices, and the specters. That would be a pity, wouldn’t it? To free them to go out and harass another soul when their task was done with us? To set them loose to try and take another innocent life?

No. I’ll keep my demons and specters for myself and hug them close. Call it aggressive affection. Either I win and find my way out of the dark, or we all sit in the shadows together singing songs of rage in the darkness.