not sleeping more than three hours a night

[Glides]

this has been going on for a week now. i haven't had to work. i just grabbed two mugs that me and my ex used to drink out of and threw them against the floor as hard as i could. they shattered into tiny little pieces. i haven't picked up the shards. my mind is not fully functioning. i've been on this fucking forum for six years now. i am in complete and total isolation. i have gotten rid of everyone and everything. there is not very much of me left to break at this point. nothing but my own thoughts. worse than ever. nothing left. it's all gone. too tired to be depressed, too tired to hate myself, just tired. keep on getting sick, keep on having to go to urgent care. i'm just wasting away, no amount of medical attention is helping me. there is a malicious being up there that wants to keep me around to torture me. only reason it won't let me die. i tried to kill myself nine fucking times between five fucking years and not one bit of it took. no point trying again. i have a superpower and my superpower is that i can't die.

i'm just so goddamn tired. it's taking physical effort to type. i have no one else to talk to now. i have scared everyone else away. this is what i deserve because i've hurt so many people because i don't know how to ask for help. people don't want to give it to me now that i have scared everyone away, can you blame them? everything hurts. the pain never stops. it's not even emotional pain, it's physical now. my body is wasting away and i don't know how to stop it. i don't know why my body is broken. nobody knows. is this hell? am i in hell? i've had so little sleep that i can barely think anymore. my head is pounding, my eyes aching. i lie in bed for at least six hours a day awake now. this is hell. this has to be hell. someone please make it stop. anybody. somebody. make it stop.

[Enail]

Glides, so sorry you're having nightmare-level insomnia and it sounds like some other big health thing that you haven't been able to find out what's wrong? I wish I had a solution, but all I've got is scary-and-mysterious-health-problem solidarity, it's awful and it's isolating and I'm sorry.

Do you have a family doctor who knows what you're experiencing and is taking you seriously?

[Glides]

Glides, so sorry you're having nightmare-level insomnia and it sounds like some other big health thing that you haven't been able to find out what's wrong? I wish I had a solution, but all I've got is scary-and-mysterious-health-problem solidarity, it's awful and it's isolating and I'm sorry.

Do you have a family doctor who knows what you're experiencing and is taking you seriously?

I saw a doctor today. They think the treatment I'm on for psoriatic arthritis is no longer working and i've developed a tolerance to it, so my body treats it like a virus and shuts me down so it can fight. I have to do more blood work to confirm this so I can properly switch medications and hopefully get over this. I just cried in my car for a while. I feel very alone.

[Enail]

Oh jeez, that sucks, but I'm really, really glad to hear they know what's going on and there's a plan to fix it. Hopefully you can get that sorted fast and get a med that doesn't make your body try to murder you, and then you'll start to feel better. Keep going, improvement is in sight, you can get through this.

The dubious upside of all this is that it means your immune system is really fucking strong, at least

[Datelessman]

I also encourage you to seek out some careful medical analysis. My mother's long road towards being diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses was chronic fatigue that began by the mid 90's. It can be psychological, but also a symptom of other maladies. Take care of yourself, man.

[Glides]

Update: I'm back to my normal sleep schedule of "just enough to function" so at least I'm not nearly as groggy and delirious as I was. That being said, a lot of my old symptoms are still back, severe anxiety followed by severe depression. Still having at least one panic attack a day, still coming to grips with how much I've isolated myself and how much I tend to unconsciously punish myself. Self-loathing is something I still struggle with, I fixate on the parts of myself I dislike and the bad things that I've done. My (now-former) therapist kept on insisting what I have is OCD since I fixate on intrusive thoughts that will not go away, and I have no control over what I might think at any given point.

There are days where I get into such a fit that I spend the entire day on a feedback loop where I get nothing done because I'm busy beating myself up for something misogynist I said a few years ago. Minor inconvenience happens, I go off the lid for several minutes to hours, then spend the rest of the day miserable going over the time I rejected someone I was really attracted to because "real alpha males don't go for fat chicks." It was a very shitty thing to do, even after discovering the chick already had a boyfriend and was trying to cheat on him, but I still fixated on her weight as if that could eliminate the attraction. It did not. I'm a chubby bastard myself so you can see the hypocrisy in this statement, but eighteen year old me did not.

Therapy largely didn't work because I minimized everything, and so I don't think my therapist ever figured out just how badly I actually was doing, so I only made a fraction of the progress I could have because I hid a lot of things. I actually don't hide that I was a virgin until 20 now, though, that's a pretty big difference. I genuinely don't give a shit anymore about "body count" and reductive shit like that. Being with three people I didn't genuinely care about really teaches you how it's really not that enjoyable if you're going to have an anxiety attack every time (often during) and how angry people tend to get when you panic every time. They can try to be understanding at first but eventually it starts to grate.

I beat myself up for not doing enough with my life and I beat myself up for the entire days spent beating myself up, I fixate on all the bad choices or the opportunities I didn't take. There was a period when I was much calmer but abusive relationship+closest relative violently dying+losing multiple jobs+being horribly sick for several weeks at a time all take their toll on the old mental health. I'm not seeing a therapist anymore because I tried to talk about the gender identity problem and they basically told me I was full of shit (not in those words, that if you don't figure out your identity before puberty you're making it up).

I casually messaged someone on Instagram and that person's response was "where the hell have you been for the last two years?" and suddenly I realized I hadn't said a word to this person in two years, and that's not a good look. I hadn't messaged them the last time we talked because I didn't want to be an inconvenience and look too eager to talk to them and I kept putting it off so I wouldn't be creepy and suddenly two years had gone by.

This is happening as I've been challenging myself to message people and forget how long it's been since I actually talked to them. Most people are responding with confusion and worry.

I think the treatment I received did help, but it didn't help as much as it could have. I've been sabotaging my own treatment. I'm not lying so much as intentionally hiding details that could help more.

[Enail]

Ugh, sorry your therapist was shitty about gender identity stuff. Maybe look for an LGBT+-friendly therapist?

I think everyone sometimes drops contact and then feels like it's been too long and they can't get in touch now, but would actually like to hear from them again, so it's awesome that you're making the move to overcome the "been too long" gap.

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