Joy In Life

I'm typing this while sitting in front of my computer which is currently located in the living room at my mother's place, in the Eastern part of the country. A lot of things have happened since my last post and I'm not sure that the full experience can be captured using mere words. A brief summary should suffice.

For the past two months I have found myself in an increasingly more impossible situation. It started when my then housemate Pieter started dating this woman, or maybe I should say she ensnared him. She and one of her friends then started terrorizing and bullying me, as well as brainwashing Pieter into believing certain things, like that I do not have PTSD, that I use it as a pitiful excuse. That this woman didn't traumatize me. That if I mention in an unrelated Twitter message that my weblog suddenly got a lot of hits from Capelle a/d IJssel - a city here in the Netherlands - and it happens to be this woman's place of residence, it suddenly threatens her life and that of her son. I still don't get that last one, and it shows how far Pieter got brainwashed by this woman. He actually got angry at me over it, something he never got before.

Anyway, after two months of what basically amounts to a weird, outrageous psychological stress experiment I was pretty much about to snap. The weekend when Pieter messaged me that he was going to have this woman over for dinner, even though he had previously promised he wouldn't do that, was the last straw. I got pressured into leaving the house before the end of last week, but not having found anything suitable and being confronted with my Asperger's like that combined with existing stresses and traumas managed to completely push me off the edge.

During last week I went to multiple health centers in Almere, talked to the crisis center and more in the hope that anyone could help me. I didn't want to go to home any more, spent 4.5 hours walking outside one night, couldn't stop crying and basically had turned into an emotional wreck. On Thursday night my mother came over to the house in Almere, got a frigid reception by Pieter and spent the night there because I had already gone to bed.

The next morning I greeted my mom relatively normally and she went downstairs to make some tea. I got dressed and took my usual medication, as well as all the sleeping pills I had collected up till that point and swallowed them all. I then put on day creme, brushed my hair and everything which is part of my usual morning routine. I wanted to look good. While brushing my hair my mom came upstairs and talked to me some, but I already had begun to feel the effect of the sleeping pills.

From what I heard later, I collapsed shortly after that moment. First my mom and Pieter thought I had merely withdrawn into myself, so he put me on my bed and my mom stayed with me. After a while when my lips began to turn blue it was Pieter who called the emergency number. About 6 hours later I more or less woke up in the hospital and got fired pretty much right away. There I heard that I had to go with my mom to her place, that I couldn't go back to Pieter place and that he had begun packing the moment the ambulance left. I was so dazed at that point that I didn't realize the full impact of what had just happened.

That came the next day, when my older brother brought my things with a van to my mom's place. I had decided that morning that I wouldn't want to eat or drink any more, and that I should have died that Friday. I became more and more suicidal after that until a psychologist of the crisis center Almelo came over after an emergency call by my mother. I threw a huge tantrum, locked myself in my room, yelled at the psychologist, tried to suffocate myself with a plastic bag and basically was just hysterical and impossible to deal with.

Once the suicide attempt failed because I began to feel really nauseous I somehow felt the strange energy possessing me ebb away, and instead I began to feel strangely calm. Talking to the psychologist, I realized that I had just thrown out part of the trauma, frustrations and pain of the past months, and that my suicidal thoughts and attempts could be attributed to this trauma. That same day I began to eat and drink again.

The crisis center couldn't help me further, though, as they agreed that I'm psychologically totally okay, and that all I need is to find an apartment, house or other place where I can live on my own back near the environment I lived in for the past three years: back to Amsterdam and surrounding area, basically. That's the part where I'm at now.

I try to sum up the joyous things in life but all I can come up with just sounds hollow and unimportant. I'm still essentially homeless, getting back onto my feet financially is going to take a lot of effort and help, today I realized how poorly I fit in these surroundings where everything is so firmly male & female-only, leaving no place for someone like me. I find myself wondering at which point I'll be allowed to have a life of my own. I used to have something like a freshly budding life a number of months ago, until it got crushed cruelly.

I am not saying that I'm feeling suicidal at this moment, but I do feel tired if not exhausted, am drained emotionally and everywhere I turn I find painful memories and reminders of what my life could have been like. I guess I'm just really, really sad.


Maya