Sitting on my hands

Today has been a very rough day. This has been a hard week and a worse weekend. I have been reacting very adversely to a medication my doctor gave me. I’ve been experiencing suicidal, depression, and self-harm thoughts, I’ve lost my appetite and thirst, I’ve been having extreme tingling and numbness in my legs, feet, and face, severe OCD moments, anxiety attacks, and some very irrational thinking. Overall, it’s been enough to make me feel like I’m legitimately going insane.

Due to the lack of appetite and thirst, I didn’t eat at all on Friday (except the bite of ice cream my sister surprise spoon fed me) and I’ve gone from drinking water all the time to drinking hardly anything ever. Even when I try to make myself drink water or eat, I find it very difficult. I did, however, have my mom for accountability over the weekend so she was there helping to make sure I ate some and drank water. But neither was what I should have.

The worst part, however, it the combination of the amazingly strong self-harm urges and the completely irrational thoughts. I have wanted to cut and punch things and burn for several days straight now and earlier today I thought to myself “I can absorb nutrients by cutting, right??” How does that even make sense? I’ve been having many other thoughts that are just as irrational, thought thankfully most are not as self-destructive. I feel like I just need to go curl up in a small, dark closet and hide out until this medication is out of my system.

So I find myself in the position of literally sitting on my hands, or trying to occupy them so completely as to make harming myself impossible. I keep reminded myself that I am not crazy, I’m just reacting badly to a medication. I keep reminding myself that I do not need to cut or burn or anything else and that I do indeed have a choice, regardless of the overwhelming feeling deep inside me that says otherwise. And now I wait it out. I pray, I listen to music, I try to occupy my ever increasing ADD and foggy mind, I read my Bible, I reach out to my amazing support family, and I just wait for this horrid medication to get out of my system, wishing I could quit cold turkey and that I’d never taken that first dose.

Here’s to the next few weeks of weening myself off.

Advertisement