Hello everyone,

A little over a year ago I was admitted to the mental hospital for having a mental breakdown. What triggered it was a combination of personal stress with the relationship I was in at the time and a significant lack of sleep. (Four days awake) After I left the mental hospital I was given mood stabilizers to treat what the doctors thought might be emerging bipolar I. But the antidepressants only made me extremely depressed. I was unable to finish the quarter I was enrolled in at college and I ended up going back to the mental hospital a second time. This time it was for suicidal ideation and self-inflicted wounds.

I stayed there for five days before getting out and when I did my girlfriend broke up with me. Her and I had been together for almost two years and we had been through so much. At the time I considered her my first love. But we were so young then that it’s hard to say whether or not it was actually love.

I spent the spring break alone wondering about who my ex was with, what she was doing, and what I was going to do. Meanwhile my mother was going crazy all over again. Eight years prior to my stay in the ward, she was admitted to one. In my childhood, she wasn’t crazy. She was completely normal. No one knows what happened. But my dad’s explanation is that she probably had something viral that got into her brain. But anyways, she ended up going crazy again.

Spring quarter rolled around at my community college and I told myself I would do my best. I joined the college play but my ex ended up being in it with me. I’d spend most of the quarter writing her poems and letters and begging for her to take me back. At home, I was being waken up at four in the morning every night by my mother who was convinced that she was dying. Eventually she went so crazy that she made some sort of bomb threat at a hospital. She was taken away and I was living on my own for a bit.

The depression was killing me. The mood stabilizer meds didn’t help and after a few more visits with the psychiatrist, we decided it was time to get off the meds. They no longer thought I was bipolar. But I was convinced something was terribly wrong with me. I begged for a diagnosis so I could deal with what was going on. But there was no relief. They couldn’t just diagnose me. I didn’t have the patience or the energy to keep going, so I decided to stop seeing the psychiatrist.

I ended up withdrawing from my classes again that quarter but I did stick with the college play. I also got my first job and started working. I found some friends. (I didn’t have many at the time) but I couldn’t let go of my ex. Even after the play was over, she was still on my mind. Over the summer I ended up falling back in with some old friends from high school and I ended up doing drugs again. I never did hallucinogenics because I knew that they could trigger mental illnesses and I was terrified of the possibility. But I did many other drugs and had some close calls.

My ex ended up contacting me asking for two hundred dollars to cover her abortion bill. (I got her pregnant and she ended up deciding to get an abortion) I immediately gave her the money, but only if she would answer questions that I had been ruminating on for some time: had she been with other people? Who? How soon after she broke up with me? How many people? She answered all of them. She started sleeping with others during the spring break right after she had broken up with me. It hurt her to say all those things. She didn’t want me to know. It killed me, but I held it together until I left her house. Then that night I got drunk and sent her hate texts calling her a whore and slut. I felt so ashamed of that night until just recently. The two weeks after that I got drunk, high, and completely messed up. I went to work messed up, I went home messed up. I felt so hurt. So betrayed even though she had every right to sleep with other people. It was so hard to let go of her. I was living in a reality that I hated and I hated myself more than anything. I kept looking back blaming my past mistakes on my current situation. Then I blamed others, then I blamed the way I was. I felt so much shame and anger.

I forgot about the problems with my mother during the summer. But my saving grace was college. When fall quarter arrived. I enrolled again, ready to repeat certain classes that I wasn’t able to finish. It was frustrating going through them again. I felt so inadequate for not being able to finish those classes the first time around. But looking back, I was going through a lot. I had my reasons for not being able to finish those classes. And I learned more the second time around.

I still had my struggles with drugs over fall quarter and winter quarter. I tried dating a few girls but the relationships went nowhere. My mind was still on my ex. I was trying to figure out the truth of the situation. Who was to blame. Who was more wrong. And all the while I thought I was ready to date other girls. I had been ignoring the signs. I was obsessing about my ex every day but I thought I had moved on. It was only after I started admitting that I was hurt that I felt better. Spring quarter came recently and I decided to try hard to get away from drugs. I succeeded. I quit my job to focus on school 100% because it was going to be a hard quarter. With math. And I hated math. It was hard work. And my ADHD brain hated hard work. It was hard to focus on things for more than twenty minutes at a time. and my mom was getting worse and worse. She ended up going missing the night before one of my math tests and I wasn’t able to focus. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t do it. Once again.

There have been many times within the last year that I have freaked out wondering “what is wrong with me”. I wonder why I can’t focus. Why I don’t have friends like other people do. I wonder if I don’t inspire people to hang around. But I realize now that drug friends aren’t the best friends to have around. They’re more like the people you sit next to while watching a baseball game. You talk to each other and enjoy each other’s company. but it’s only because of that mutual like; baseball. or in my case. drugs. once I stopped doing drugs. They didn’t want to be around me. I didn’t have the money to supply their addiction.

Now, it’s the summer. I got through a semi-successful year of college. I got over an ex. and I have learned to accept myself a little more. But I’m bored, depressed, and I feel hopeless. I expected this summer to be the summer where I would do lots with music. But I’m now realizing it’s not a realistic expectation. I have been trying to get a job. I have been spending lots of time alone. I have a girlfriend currently, and she’s realized that I’m a wreck. I feel inadequate. I feel unprepared for life. I feel alone. In the moments before I wake during that half-awake mode, my mind gets filled with negative thoughts that seem to attack me to no end. They fill my mind with my insecurities and shortcomings right before I wake. And I spend most of the day wondering what to do. Nothing seems to excite me but I want to be doing things. I wonder if I’m crazy. But I think I just need organization and support. I think I just need to be organized. Know that those negative thoughts aren’t me and that they’re just ants (automatic negative thoughts). Do I sound crazy? Is what I’ve been through anything? How do I keep going? How do I find purpose when in the summer there’s nothing to do? How do I keep my self-esteem up if no one responds to my job applications?