Sorry, I know, this is an old issue for me - something I really struggled with last year and early this year - the feeling that I should just end myself because of a diagnosis and a history.

Intellectually, of course, I know that it isn't true. If it were true, honestly, I don't know if I would want to live in such a world anyway, because it would mean that millions of us "didn't deserve to live" because of mental health issues - that world existed in Germany 1935-1945, and it was truly a Hell on Earth, abhorrent to any thinking, feeling person. The most vivid example of actual evil in human history, IMHO. Not the sole one by any means, alas.

OK, truth is, I'm having a hard time at work right now, and work was pretty much one of my life preservers during all of this. I'm just not having an easy time getting things done, nor having a lot of motivation, and it is showing. I am getting behind, and things are piling up. My boss is beyond belief, he is such a nice guy, I doubt he would raise his voice to me no matter how badly I effed up, he would just say "fix it". So, he deserves better.

My father always called me worthless, and told me I shouldn't even be alive. I was, he said, after all, the bastard-child of another man (completely untrue, I even look a lot like him), and too stupid, too effeminate, too whatever (also completely untrue) to deserve to exist. And, there were a couple of incidents when I was a teenager when he told me those things at gunpoint. Not some of my happier childhood memories.

These two strands of thought intersected in my mind earlier today. It suddenly dawned on me that my father always told me I was so worthless, I didn't deserve to live, and my inability to be "perfect" made me vulnerable to these thoughts. I can see now how this his programming took hold very deeply as a core belief, yet was simultaneously something I fought against my entire life. I am like that on SO many things - it's like the cliche of the angel on one shoulder, telling me what I know to be true, and the devil on the other, repeating the childhood programming that is false, but which still feels "true" much of the time. Obviously, perfection isn't even possible, but right now, I am falling far from even "good", and that is bad.

So, the dark thoughts creep back in at time. Images of an end game. You know ... the very kind of thing that I admitted to two years ago, which got me into big trouble. I no longer fear them, though, I recognize them for what they are - just a symptom, a twinge of pain - and I no longer consider them dangerous, because I have no desire to act on them. Like a headache or fever, they just need to go away, and they will.

But here is the deal - I am still "hung up" on the whole diagnosis/hospital thing. I make these intellectually based statements that "no one should be ashamed" and "the system has failed us by allow stigma to persist" - and those ARE true. I know that intellectually. The problem is, I'm not that brave, and I don't walk the walk. I don't feel it emotionally. I still feel very insecure about my place in the world, and I also feel like I'm on some foreign planet or in a parallel universe where "nothing is the same" - every hour of every day is flavored with memories of "what happened in 2012". I still feel like I am hiding an enormous, guilty secret. Even though intellectually I know it's no one's business, especially after 2 years.

I guess the bottom line is, I feel so devalued by my experience - it took away my sense of being "as good as everyone else", my sense of being an equal member of society. I want that back. And yet, I know I never lost it, really.