The Dark Cloud

Walking around feeling like you are in a fog is never a fun time. There was times when I was fine and the dark cloud was not there, and then there was times when the cloud was just letting all the rain come out of it on me. I went to several therapist to find someone to help me, but I did not feel a connection with any of the ones I went to. I gave up and stopped trying to find someone to help me and decided that I would just deal with it myself. That went horribly wrong. There were nights when I would cry myself to sleep and have breakdowns at work. I was getting so overwhelmed with everything in my life that I did not know how to handle it. I decided that I did not want to be 250+ pounds anymore and that I was going to lose weight to help with the dark cloud. At first this was an amazing idea, I joined Weight Watchers and the weight started to come off really easy in the beginning. After the first month I decided that I would start going to the gym. Food and working out was a way to punish myself without it being physical or visible to others. Weigh-in days were Friday so I would check my weight around Wednesday to make sure that there would be a loss on Friday. If it looked like there would be a gain then I would restrict my food and workout twice as hard. This methodology led me to losing 75 pounds in 7 months. There was nothing truly stressful but there were just things that I could not figure out how to deal with. I started to feel like I was being isolated from my family. There was family events that I was not invited to and was not sure why. This started to take a toll on me mentally since I was living at home with my parents and they would leave to go to the events that I was not invited to with my son. Occasionally on their way out the door I would get an invite to come with them to the event, at that point I was not interested in going. This lead me to self harm. I was not proud of it and tried to cut myself on my arms where I could cover the marks with a jacket or long sleeve shirt. There was one time when a coworker saw the marks because my sleeve slid up a little too much. I felt so embarrassed and had to try to come up with an excuse. My coworker said “what happened to your arm?” The first thing that I could come up with is “I was reaching behind a cabinet and got scratched.” He said “Well they are awfully straight to be scratches from a cabinet, and there are a lot of them.” Thankfully the topic was switched by someone else that walked in the room. Did that stop me from cutting myself? Absolutely not! This meant that I had to be careful of where I was cutting and what I wore around people. I got really good at hiding my cuts from people even those that were seeing me everyday with short sleeves on and all. I decided to turn to journaling as a way to clear my mind prior to going to bed since my mind would go over everything in my mind when I was trying to sleep. This helped for a little bit but it slowly started to take a dark turn. My journaling slowly turned into nothing but rants about suicidal ideation and how I have ruined everything in my life and everyone’s life around me. Again this is something that I kept to myself and did not tell anyone. I put on a brave face and interacted with people as needed. After a while I was so drained mentally from trying to deal with everything on my own that I started to give in to the thoughts in my head that I was no good for everyone and that everyone would be better off without me. It got to the point that I started to write my goodbye letters.