Everything Anne said in her post was excellent, but I really want to support this. Those childhood issues weren’t a result of the medication your mother was slipping you, in fact I suspect a lot of them were a result of the parenting styles of your parents, neither of whom seem like swell people based on what you’ve posted so far.
Don’t let their mistakes define your future.
I understand that, I’m still not open to taking medication. It would take months to convince me to even consider it. Right now I need to focus on functioning day to day and getting in to counselling, school and such instead.
I will say this then say no more, because I have a feeling you’re not wanting to listen anyway right now.
Your brain is broken. You are struggling to live a normal life because your broken brain stops you from being able to do the things normal people can do. It’s going to take time and effort to fix your brain. There isn’t going to be a magic fix for your broken brain, it’s probably going to take a lot of different things, all slowly working together to fix it. One of those things might be medication. If you’re not willing to consider that as an option, then I wonder what else you are really willing to consider.
You’ve lived with your broken brain for a long time now. It’s what you’re used to, it’s what you know. Maybe the thought of fixing your broken brain frightens you, because it means a different life, an unknown life. I know what that feels like, because I’ve been there. The pain and suffering, I knew. The unknown was scary and I wasn’t ready to take that step.
Make sure you actually want to change, before you try to. Otherwise you will ‘fail’ and that will make you feel like a failure. But you aren’t necessarily a failure, you’re just not ready to change. Yet.
I don’t think I am in a situation of not wanting to face the unknown. I can see why you would come to that conclusions, but the life I have now has become unbearable to me in the most literal sense of the word. I would have liked to talk to you a little more but I doubt anything I say would convince you I’m willing to listen.
It’s true that I won’t listen if I’m simoly told that unless I take medication, my chances are slim to none. My only hope is that that isn’t so. I’m willing to do anything except take medication, and that’s saying a lot.
Unless I start functioning better very, very soon, the closest chance I have at actually living the life I aspire to will be gone. I need to get to a point where stress is not jeopardizing my ability to prepare for school, because if I miss next year’s deadline I know I won’t have anything left in me the year after that. It’s taken me so much to even get to the point where going back to school is a possibility. I miss that deadline, the rest of my life will be shuffling from one unstable living situation to the next.
And every day that I don’t improve, I slip down a little farther. I know that because it’s exactly what happened last time it got this bad. At thirteen I got so exausted from constantly being terrified that even knowing that I would be struck, berated and worse by my mother if I ceased to be a stellar student couldn’t keep it from happening. I got off the bus one day, I was walking up the hill to the school parking lot and out of nowhere I just sat down. I wouldn’t move, not for the threat of being late for school, not for traffic, not because it was pouring down rain- not for anything. The only thing I knew was that I Could. Not. Keep. Moving. My grade 8 teacher arranged for my ass to be dragged off to an emergency room, evaluated for suicide risk etc and it took me about two years to recover to the point of being able to do my schoolwork without my whole body aching and (seemingly- I am sure this was all in my head) getting too heavy to stand.
They bent all sorts of rules to keep me from flunking out in the interim, mostly once they discovered that I knew my shit and worked diligently so long as the memory of how I felt that day was kept at bay (I got around it by passing in assignments in unusual formats and, if I absolutely could not do that, then by passing them in on a different colour of paper). As soon as the main threat (my mother) was removed and I started physically & emotionally recovering from the overwork, my grades shot up and I was an International Baccalaureate student by grade 10.
At some point since then, I got overwhelmed by stress again and have been slowly gathering exhaustion ever since. I’m certain a doctor or a psych would tell me I don’t know these things for sure, but I do know that if I don’t turn shit around in time I’ll end up just lying down to die again. If I’m not ready to change now, then by the time I’m ready it’ll be too late.
No, it won’t. If you miss this deadline, you’ll figure out what you have to do, and you’ll do it. You will not ruin the rest of your life beyond repair by missing one deadline. It just Does Not Work That Way. There are generally chances to recover from screw-ups and missed deadlines.
This kind of thinking, “if I don’t meet this deadline, my life will be ruined” is adding to your stress level. I would know this, because I am prone to this kind of thinking, too. It’s wrong. It’s the broken part of your brain talking.
See? You went through a bad time,** then you came out the other side of it and got your life back on track.** Your life did not end. The world kept right on spinning. There’s no reason to think that won’t happen again if you miss this particular deadline.
Believe me, I know what it’s like to have this kind of thinking. I know what it’s like to think that if you fail at one thing, you will ruin the rest of your life and you might as well kill yourself. I thought my life would be worthless and ruined if I didn’t get into grad school in astronomy, get a Ph.D, and get a faculty job. I did get into grad school in astronomy, but ended up leaving in 2000 with a master’s degree.
The world failed to end. We didn’t even have the pole shift that Richard Noone predicted. And you know what? My life since then has not been unrelieved suck. In fact, it’s generally better than my life in astronomy grad school. It’s also better than what Mr. Neville is going through as an astronomy professor trying to get tenure, at least IMO (he might disagree). I found a job I like better than astronomy grad school and that generally has better hours. I would not call my life “ruined”, and I doubt anyone making any kind of objective assessment (as much as such a thing as an objective assessment of whether someone’s life is ruined is possible) would, either.
There’s someone else you might have heard of who couldn’t get into the school he wanted to go to, in his case because he didn’t pass an exam (though he did do well in the science and math portion of it), and who didn’t manage to get the teaching job he wanted, but got a different job, working in a patent office. His name was Albert Einstein.
The world will not end if you miss next year’s deadline for school. Your life won’t, either. If you do, things might suck a bit for a while, but you’ll figure out what you need to do to get through it, and you’ll do it. Just like everybody else does when they screw up or fail to achieve something.
Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Good luck with that.
I hope I won’t offend you if I ask you a question: Don’t you think if you mentally had what it took to overcome these issues that you would have done it already? It sounds like you have a long history.
What you’re saying is that you would rather hang onto depression and anxiety over taking medication. I had a lot of the same problems you did and I couldn’t find my way out of a paper bag. I wouldn’t trade my meds for anything. Though I still have a lot of resentment from all those “loving family members” who told me to pull myself up by my bootstraps.
You might have a point. Thank you. As of right now, I’m feeling a lot worse than I was in the OP and probably can’t formulate any thought-out responses until that passes. Don’t misread it as me not paying attention or not wanting to hear it.
I’ve been somewhat encouraged by most of what you’ve said so far, which considering my particular situation is just about the most valuable outcome anyone can shoot for.
You’ve been told already that you made your point and that the one-line posts aren’t doing a damn thing more for anyone. If your mission is to get me on meds for my own good, you’ve done all you apparently can, and you need to either let go of it or take this to the Pit.
Or he (she?) might learn some new coping techniques from a therapist that will help to deal with these kinds of thoughts. There are mental techniques for dealing with thoughts like “if I don’t meet this deadline, my life will be ruined”. I love my meds, too, but they didn’t automatically get rid of those kinds of thoughts for me. A therapist who could teach techniques for dealing with those thoughts was helpful for me. I’m on meds, too, and they help me, but therapy helped as well.
That’s what I’m hoping.
And, I’m a she. 
Here’s another couple of mistakes you’re making in your thinking.
It’s not true that every day you don’t improve, you get worse. Mental illness generally isn’t a progressive condition. Depression and anxiety certainly aren’t. You’ll have your good days, and you’ll have your bad days. You’re not inexorably losing something irreplaceable every time you have a bad day.
That might be how you feel, but how you feel is not the same thing as how things really are. You don’t have perfect insight into how your brain is working. Nobody does.
You’re probably also mentally magnifying the effect of the bad days and mentally minimizing the effect of the good days. That’s another fun thinking mistake anxiety can cause you to make.
You don’t know how this particular episode is going to go after today. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly like that. If it did, it would be way easier than it is to win a ton of money in the lottery, or in Vegas. You’re not in Groundhog Day, where you’re doomed to repeat part of your life until you find the key to get yourself out of the cycle. Mental illness just isn’t that simple, that there’s only one way in which things can go wrong. Thinking there is is like feeling like you’re coming down with the flu and thinking you know you’ll feel exactly the same as you did previous times you had the flu. The flu doesn’t work that way. Some cases of the flu are worse than others. Mental illness is the same. You don’t know that this episode is going to be exactly like the one that happened when you were thirteen.
The anxious part of your brain also loves to predict the future. You start thinking, “X happened, now Y and Z are going to happen”. This part of your brain is actually lousy at predicting the future, maybe even worse than those psychics who write for the tabloids (do they still do that?). You can’t predict the future with any degree of reliability. It just can’t be done.
Errors in thinking are kind of like optical illusions. In this one, I know squares A and B are the same shade of gray. But it still doesn’t look like they are when I look at it. It’s kind of like that. Those thoughts don’t feel wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are. Missing one deadline or making one mistake is not going to ruin your life, and you really can’t predict how this particular mental episode is going to go. Don’t let your brain tell you otherwise.
I’ve been aware of that for a while, in principle. Not so much in practice. On some level, I’m still convinced we’re all going to die slow painful deaths & that I need to jump ship now while it’s still an option. On another level I’m still sure I can’t possibly rise above the looming inevitability of getting more behind on the rent and that I need to go live under a rock.
I leave for work in two hours, and I’ve already been told that if I call in sick one more time I’m in hot water. Still I’m debating checking myself in somewhere instead- I caught myself thinking of walking into traffic when I went for a run this morning. It really seems to be simply walking to and from the bus stop to work that’s the worst- seeing so many cars and feeling firsthand how screwballed the weather is for the place and time of year.
In either case that means that as of about 4:30pm Atlantic Time I’m not going to be around for at least six hours. Longer if either I do well enough at work to get a full shift or the folks at emerge decide .
{{big hugs}} if you like them. Anne has some good points. Your brain is telling you that you’re doomed, but that’s not how the world actually works. You’ve hit bottom before, and you’ve come back up before. You’re in a sucky situation, and you feel like you’re slowly losing steam, but you’re also taking action to do something about it. You’re reaching out and asking for help. That’s the best and most important thing someone in your situation can be doing right now. Asking for help requires making yourself vulnerable, and it can be frightening. I am seriously proud of you for doing that. Even though your brain is screaming at you even louder right now, you’re on the right track.
I get what you’re saying about wanting to jump in front of a car. When I had a job that was killing me (also a call center!), it was the commuter train that looked most tempting. If you have to leave your job, can you find retail or waitressing work? They’ll usually take anyone who looks clean and respectful. Leaving the call center job on bad terms didn’t sink me - I was able to explain to people that I was not a good match for that kind of work and found it extremely stressful. I was applying for jobs that required face-to-face interaction, which is a whole different world, and the people who were interviewing me understood that.
Check yourself in somewhere if you need it. They’re there to help people like you, and it won’t be the end of your life, just a rest stop.
I think I’ll do just that. The checking myself in I mean, not the walking into traffic.
Before I go, I should also mention that I made all those phone calls early this morning. Most were dead ends and two I’m supposed to call back tomorrow morning, one of those two looks quite promising.
Okay, best wishes to you. Get some sleep, if you can. We’ll be here. If you want to contact me off the board, my email address is my user name at gmail dot com. (And hopefully gmail’s spam filter won’t grab it.)
Good job on making the phone calls. I’m glad a couple of options turned up.
Yes, do that. Even if they do fire you from your job, your life and your health are more important than your job. They’re more important than making your rent, too.
Don’t do that. Even if you don’t care if you live or die, don’t involve a total stranger who has probably never done anything to hurt you in your suicide plans. It would be a traumatic experience for them, possibly cause them real economic hardship, and could even cause them to be injured physically.
[pedantry]The screwy weather we’re having this year doesn’t really have much to do with global warming, any more than the huge amount of snow we had here in Pittsburgh in 09-10 proved that there is no global warming. Those weather patterns have more to do with short-term oscillations in air and ocean temperatures, notably El Nino/La Nina and the North Atlantic Oscillation.[/pedantry]
Good luck to you - check back in with us when you can, once the opportunity arises. A bunch of anonymous strangers are cheering you on. 
Seek help whenever and however you can - that’s what it’s there for, and you’re giving people the opportunity to help someone in need, which is what they want to do.
Ideally. Sounds like you met a couple of proverbial bad apples in your medical past. Not to mention being raised by people who, it sounds to me, were not really cut out to be parents. But that’s past now - you’re responsible for yourself, your own life, and it sounds to me that, despite how you think you’re doing, you’re actually doing quite well. Meds or not meds aside, it’s time for you to find someone who can teach you the tools you need to address your issues. Everyone has them (issues, I mean) and everyone needs specialized tools for the particular job. You, me, the mailman, the guy in line behind you at the grocery store.
All the very best to you.
I think you might have been better off with wolves.
I can’t speak to the mental illness, but I did cut my parents out of my life for a long, long time. Occasionally I have moments of regret, but then I remember why, and it was the best and healthiest thing I ever did.
Good luck.