Just want to say a couple of things...

Something that I don't say enough on here.

Thanks. Thank you.

I don't like to be trivial and, sometimes, "thank you" can seem forced. But as I've been coming here more often (although maybe not posting much) I get a bit overwhelmed by the kindness and don't know how to respond.

I don't trust my feelings any longer; that's my way of saying that I don't trust the way that I think of things (I can't separate feelings from thinking although, God knows, that's a basic tenet of psychiatric or shamanic thought of late).

And I'm shamed that I can only rarely begin a sentence that starts with any word except "I." I am so self-focused and don't see that in the messages written by others. I don't know if it's because I tend to only come here when in crisis mode (every day of late) or why I am so "I" focused now. I've come here and made belittling statements to others and I don't understand where in the world that anger is coming from. The "old" me, the "me" that existed before my first unhinging, only resorted to hurting others when I had been hurt. Now it feels as if I become angry over the slightest imperfection knowing, full well, that I am a mass of imperfection and that I survive only because of the mercy that a handful of people have for me.

Yet I feel as if I'm just as stupid and unfeeling as the kids who would yell "stupid retard" at the clumsy kid when he didn't catch a pass. I've become the kind of kid that I used to abuse, that I used to shame, in front of everyone. I don't think that I realized that hurting others – humiliating them in public – wasn't going change anyone.

What I feel now, the anger that I feel daily, even if only for a couple of days, is a rage. A rage that I don't understand, that I've never felt, and I don't know what to feel about it. Well, yes, I DO know WHAT to feel about it – self-rage in return – but that's not dealing with the issue.

I swear, it feels sometimes that I am the most miserable misanthrope who's ever walked the planet. That my isolation is not a genuine fear as much as a distaste and distrust for everyone. And the things that I find distasteful are the very things that I used to pass on, with the idea that people really do want to do their best. That the people who come here in hurt and need deserve more than (I, at least) we can give. I can only hurt others by going into this, so I'll stop.

I'm not in the zone right now. Feeling rather... blue.

I want to thank you – all of you – who have been so kind to me during the time that I've been here.

I need for someone, one person, to understand that I don't know why I'm having these thoughts and feelings. I had them nicely bundled and cataloged but I was wrong about both the strength of the bundle and the catalog summaries.

I'm sorry that I've been so damned selfish. It's not narcissism. I don't feel any sort of vanity (I feel the opposite of vanity; I feel shame rather than any kind of pride). Going down a list that I found listing the traits of those who are narcissistic, the only 'fit' that I saw was the inability to maintain relationships. But there was another list and, out of the "7 deadliest sins of narcissism" was listed shamelessness and the inability to process shame rather than guilt (which I don't really understand – I feel ashamed of things that I've done, but also feel guilty) and on another list is "vulnerability to shame rather than guilt." That seems to be a tick in the "yes, I'm a narcissist" column but, again, I don't understand, maybe, the psychiatric differences between shame and guilt. I always feel guilty about something, but shame is something greater – the lists seem different? If shamelessness is one of the ingredients of being a narcissist, and I feel shame over the way I've acted in the past, wouldn't I also feel guilt? I'm getting into the "I don't understand" area here.

Maybe my narcissism is self-evident. Perhaps what I call selflessness is narcissism. I can't seem to understand things any longer. Even flipping through the DSM5, I was looking for "feeling like you're going crazy..." and it was under Borderline Personality Disorder.

I'd better get the DSM5 back upon the high shelf. I read one symptom that I can relate to and, suddenly, I have a new disorder.

I need to come to a finish. I'm sorry that I've been selfish. I'm sorry for insinuating that some people here are stupid – I don't know a thing about most of you. I'm sorry for the anger and rage that I feel sometimes. And I'm sorry that hatred of myself is reflected back onto others for no other reason, I think, than to make me feel better about myself. To find one reason to want to feel good. I'm aware that you can't "fix" your own self-esteem by destroying others. I can't find that I've any reason to like myself much less love myself, so this self-esteem thing is an obstacle that I'm not willing to take on at this time.

As usual, I've overrun the time limit. I don't think that's anything that I can do much about except recognize it these days.

Thank you.

Congratulations! You are human! So welcome to humanity.... apologies accepted and now move forward... Blessings and tc

I'm not so sure any longer. About being human.

If I could sleep, maybe I would be getting closer. Human's sleep?

That's what I've heard. Now, I don't know. I'm not going upward, downward, sideways, anyways. I've become stuck and I don't know how to become unstuck.

Sitting on my butt isn't going to help. But that's all I can do. All that I can do.



I don't know. I honestly don't know any longer. I wrote the previous message, tried sleep and found that I couldn't. Rats.

I appreciate your non trivial way of postings so the thanks is to you.

Sorry that you're still not getting much sleep, I get sleepless a bit too, it's like my brain's forgotten to switch itself off. I really do hope you'll find a way, please stay safe in your mind, so the sleep may come to you.

How are you this morning?

There are a few things I noted about your post; namely the irritability/aggitation and sleeplessness. For some this is the starting point for a swing into hypomania. Even the need to talk at length. Anyway, that is just my own observation and idea - which could be entrely off base.

Getting involved (ie. volunteering perhaps) might be a way of improving your present state.

Have you taken the Borderline Personality Quiz? I am angry and rageful often....which is not the ONLY sign of BPD but it is a sign of it.

Yes, you've nailed the hypomania. But I'm having such short 'manic' episodes, swinging from a manic high to a can't stop crying spell in less than a couple of hours. Let me find and quote what the DSM5 had to say about one of the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder:

But I'm not only dysphoric in these few how's but also euphoric, hypersexual, spending money again. And each mood "usually last(s) a few hours" only. There's a 15-20 lull in which the new mood overtakes me and - wham - I'm back to something new. The anger - irritability- is so new to me. If it was a healthy kind of anger, it wouldn't bother me. If it were anger towards myself it wouldn't bother me. And they're two distinct feelings: I'm angry that AT&T has been lying to me (or that 7 of their employees have been lying to me). I exhibit my irratibility when I use words to belittle them, not by raising my voice, but in using particular words or sentiments that implies that they are beyond incompetent.

But the lack of ability to sleep, certainly, I think contributes to my episodic, and fleeting, hypomania.

When you write of the need to "talk" at length, do you mean my lengthy writing? I don't think that's an anger/irratibility issue because I've been hypergraphic long before feel this anger and irratibility.

My therapist is saying that this is a new sort of reaction to GAD and panic disorder: maybe he's right. I don't know what to think any longer. I could probably go through the DSM5 and come up with pages of diagnostic criteria but never enough under one disorder to warrant a disorder. That's troubling because I want to know that my diagnoses are X and that I can be treated by Y and Z.

I can't do any sort of volunteer work. Beyond the most obvious (I haven't been trained, yet, to try to us a transfer board from wheelchair to automobile) I have a deathly fear of leaving my apartment. And of having people, other than my caregiver, enter my apartment. At one time, and until recently, I was simply frightened of others, feeling that I was safe here but unsafe around others.

Now it doesn't seem so much like fear as getting irritated with others. Today, for example, I was talking on the phone to FedEx in re a package slated for delivery tomorrow. During my 5 minute conversation, my neighbor called 5 times and left 5 messages with my answering service. Before I checked the messages, I called him back, thinking that his call must be of some importance. He answered and asked what I was doing. I told him that I had been on the phone. With whom? I told him FedEx. Why? Because I needed to verify a package delivery for tomorrow. What was I receiving? I nearly lost it. I told him I would call him back, that I had another call coming in.

Those are the types of things that drive me from irratibility to anger and back to irratibility again and 'cause' me to be rude. He has the type of temper where he gets mad at, for example, at the power company and throws his cell phone to the ground. Destroying it and having to buy a new one.

He stayed angry at me for months and months for not coming up to his (nauseatingly smoke filled) apartment to 'fix' his computer. When the cable guy was here earlier this week to 'fix' his Internet connection, he did what I had been asking Tom to do for months; check to make certain that the computer was plugged into an electrical outlet or a power strip. It wasn't. I don't know if he's just too fat to look under his desk or if he just wants someone else to do everything 'technical' for him. But the FedEx inquiry coming so quickly from the 'power problem of today infuriated me. The only way that I can describe it is to say that I have lost all patience with people who not only put their stupidity and ignorance on display but, such as was the case of my nurse practitioner, lie
rather than admit fault.

It gives me another reason to isolate, really. I don't mean, at all, people who are just uneducated; not in the least. I had a number of friends who barely finished high school, but they were kind and good and honest people. I would never equate those lacking degrees with being stupid… I know too many well-educated people who are stupid. It's when I talk to or read of those who speak of/write of things with suriity and yet who know nothing about the subject or, people like my neighbor, who won't bend over to see if an electrical plug is in an outlet or who thinks that he has to be aware of every minute detail of a package that I'm to receive; it's that type of stupidity that brings out the worst in me.

But I wasn't always this way: this is something new, something within the past year, within the past 8 months, really. I don't like feeling anger or annoyance. It makes me feel just as nauseated as cigarette smoke. A dangerous rather than health self-deprecation.

The daily tears are new, too. I found that my favorite priest, my long-time confessor, will be back for good in May. I cried in pure joy when I heard.

I'm going to close but I'll leave you one image as an example of something that outrages me that I've seen here: usually a first or fourth message in the new members introductions or perhaps the other mental health forums. I know that I am overly empathetic and I don't believe that there's anything good or healthy in that. But when I read a message full of grief and pain and suffering and I see someone post an animated GIF of a fairy spelling out WELCOME with a sparkling wand, I feel something beyond anger; I feel a furious outrage. But, as I've been reminded a couple of times, this site has seen enormous growth in the 20+ years of being online and I suppose that animated fairies can be better than shared grief early on.

I live in a confused state. None ever more than at this time. The only support that I can offer anyone is a kind of over-sentimentalized empathy and that does not seem worth anything. I want to embrace and accept and live as my outer bobbit worm. That's my body-image. How could it be differently? I've always loved the beach and I slither rather than walk.

Some of my disgust with others is, I know, a reflection of the disgust that I feel for myself. That may be true of the anger and annoyance, too. I know that I often use the word stupid to descibe my behavior lately.

My therapist doesn't understand that you can "go crazy" without becoming a raging lunatic. The last time that I went crazy I became silent. It was a progression and there was a 'snap' phase of several days and then I was completely silence. I've often said that I could probably have spoken if I felt anything that I thought worth saying but I'm not sure of that.

I think that I had a small 'snap,' a minor snap but that instead of just letting go, as I did last time, I pulled myself back somehow. It could have been my imagination. I loved this quote from Borderline Personality Disorder:

I love that. I love it because I feel that way for several seconds hours a least once every two days. It's more complex than it may appear. You no longer think of yourself as "being." You "are not" and you "cannot be." You can "be" a character in someone's dream (maybe that's the highest level of being) or, higher than that, I guess, is "being" a character that inhabits the mind of someone you know or once, somehow, knew. Dead, or never having been born, but a fantasy of a lover, a fantasy lover that you've never known as other than existing in her head. Never have existing, never having been born, but "being" a kind of neural community conglomerate.

Not being able to slip into the silliness of "I think so I am," but looking beyond the "I am." I may have once been in some sentient form. I don't mean reincarnation at all. I may have been a portion of a sentient form, merged with others. An explanation, or on a path to explanation, of how to lose all "being," all surity of "existence" and yet having a déjà vu that's not real. Nothing that could be remembered because you've never existed to experience a memory.

I can no more explain my non-existence or my possible existence. There isn't any evidence for one or the other.

I'd best go. Maybe try to sleep some time before midnight. That would be great.

No, I've not. But now that I know that there is one, which I thank you for letting me know about, I'll take it.

In reading the diagnosis criteria, I seem to exhibit every single one of the criteria... but not to the extreme that they note. For instance, idealizing a new lover can go on for years and years, rather than for a short time.

Those are the things that confuse me – reading of a criteria that is exactly what I experience... but without the longevity or severity.

Let me look for that quiz... I"ll let you know what I find!