Numbness is a smoke screen

Dear reader. For my standards, you haven't heard as much from me lately.

This is partly due to my having been really much busier than I ever like to be. Work has been hectic lately.

However, I think I'm also in a sort of depression, so that has been affecting things.

Now when I say 'depression' there are two varieties for me. One is the horrible sense of endless despair and 'downness' which strikes me from time to time. Generally if I feel this way, I am inclined to constantly write, either here or on paper and reflect and 'feel' and be hyper aware of the voices in my head. During these times I feel I just manage to hold on by my fingertips to some sense of normality between one session with my T and the next. During these times I feel so despairing and hopeless that I wish for death or complete insanity for some relief.

That's not how I'm feeling. The kind of depression I'm talking about is just a general 'lack' of everything. I lack energy, motivation, appetite, concentration, desire for doing anything whether fun or not. I lack positive feelings. I lack negative feelings. I lack interest in therapy; I lack insight into my alters goings ons. I also lack despair, misery, loneliness, pain. It's definitely an easier way to be than the despairing kind of depression but it is dangerous, I find.

Dangerous because being this way involves such a lack of insight and feeling that it is easy not to realise there is anything wrong. When I'm like this, I want to be alone, so I don't see anyone, so I feel fine. It's only when for some reason out of my control or because of obligation that I find myself in company, that I feel bad. When I say bad I mean, irritated, angry, impatient, drained, frustrated, squirming to be away, overstimulated.

I also notice that there is a problem when I go to therapy in this state. I have NO clue about what's going on with alters in this state. I struggle to see the point in my being there. T's questions aggravate me like a bear being woken mid hibernation. I feel angry and unsettled by her probing and want to just shut off and sit in silence. I suppose in a way, I am not really there when I feel this way. I feel like me, but just me, not a mixture of parts, but just a shell of a person. It's like all of my alters have gone on holiday and left a robot to do the main tasks. There just isn't the capacity for much else. Except the alters haven't left, so when T starts trying to talk to them and they are trying to have a break from reality, it provokes anger.

Alters? That seems like a joke. I don't have alters. It's just me knocking around in here. Just one, lifeless shell of a human.
What set this off? Is it just because work has been so hard lately that there is no physical energy left for coping with my mental health issues so I have shut them all out in order to continue functioning? That sounds feasable, I think it's more than that though.

This way of being is very dangerous. The lack of emotion and awareness is just a smoke screen for the darkest most desolate kind of pain ever felt by one so well hidden, I can only glimpse the pain that surrounds her. It's when she stirs that the numbness begins. Being numb is the only way of keeping us all separate from her and everything she is and knows and wants to say.

Being numb is dangerous because she is there anyway, I just forget that. It only takes a little trigger then and she is out and my world is ending. That's why when I'm in this state of not feeling anything, it is the time when I am most likely to physically hurt myself. That's why I found myself so close to self harming having not felt bad at all that day. The badness is still there. She wants out.

It's in this state that I may be just finished eating my dinner, sitting watching TV, on a normal evening and then in a split second have the urge to slash my wrists open. Yesterday I went into the bathroom to get dressed and took off my robe. I went to hang it up on a hook and found myself hypothesizing about whether I could hang myself successfully from that hook. I felt close to trying it out just to see if I could. I thought the better of it and carried on with what I was doing and then went on my way, not thinking about it again until now.

The fact that I have written about this state is a good thing. It's either me moving out of it, or its a brief moment of insight. I hope it's the former because I have a session with T on thursday and I really want to be able to make the most of my sessions.