Diary entry 09-06-2022 (After a month)

It feels like an eternity. I’ve been away for about a month now. I decided not to get admitted into a place where I will just be another number. A name on the list. A cog in the great machine. I chose to go on a little ‘vacation’, I stayed at a friend’s house for a bit. This person is a psychologist for a little institution that helps people who no one wants to help or the system just has forgotten. This person has been a friend for such a long time I almost forgot that she is a friend and not family. I’ve talked with her for most of my teenage years and all the years that followed. But I was never in her care ‘professionally’. We kept those two worlds apart for each other. I was scared that our friendship would suffer severely because of that. Friends shouldn’t be in a doctor patient relationship. It almost always ends in suffering, pain and loss.

This time however, she made an exception. She knew I was struggling with the choice I had to make. My wife eventually agreed to let me stay there for a bit, as long as I could see the kids once or twice a week. So this seemed like the ideal solution. The perfect answer to my questions. But nothing could be farther from the truth. She was brutal on me. I’ve never experienced her like this before. The professional, the psychologist behind the friend. Off course I couldn’t stop with the medication I was prescribed by another psychologist. She really thinks it could help my overall wellbeing. There where some ground rules and conditions at her place of course. No drugs or alcohol. Talking sessions every day in the morning and in the evening. Eating at regular times with her and her husband. When a situation could get dangerous (too much anxiety or stress) I had to go to her garage to cool off. There were camera’s there so she could step in when I tried to hurt myself. Oh yeah, self-harm was a big no no. She knew I could injure myself quite severely when let loose alone with uncontrollable emotions or thoughts. That’s also the reason for the next rule. I had to show her that I did not injure myself in her absence or at night. Of course this led to some really awkward situations. I’m not very proud of my body because of the scarring and showing those places made me feel really uncomfortable. But for whatever reason I agreed to that. And the last rule was whenever she felt like she couldn’t help or deal with me anymore, I would get admitted in an institution under lockdown. That, of course was the last thing I wanted. So I agreed to all of that. I must say that the beginning was easy. It was like a sleepover at a friends house. We had some fun and the talks we had were actually helping allot. But as the month progressed it became very hard for me to control myself. I would have regular black-outs and was locked in the garage quite a few times. Thoughts racing through my head with no apparent trigger. I broke a few rules because of that. She was not happy off course. And she would tell me that every morning or evening whenever we had our mandatory talk. Also the no self-harm rule was broken once. That was almost the reason I got send away. But she didn’t, she just sat down next to me, took the screwdriver out of my hand and nursed the wound like a professional. After that she ordered me to freshen up in the bathroom and to take a seat at the dinner table. Her husband cooked the most delicious lasagne and we just sat there eating. Not uttering a single word. Until her husband would ask me, ‘why did you do it?’. This was also a rule, almost forgot, no talking about the treatment at dinner time. I was shocked he would ask me this. He has never interfered with anything his wife does to her patients. So why now? She was also a bit surprised. But I had to answer, she told me to answer the question as if I would answer her. So no excuses. I got really nervous and scared. I was scared that this would be the moment he would throw me out of his house. But I started explaining why, I didn’t know what came over me. The emotional pain was just too much. I almost lost control. The voices where becoming so overwhelmingly violent that I had to. I just had to put both feet on the ground. And because the only way I knew what worked in these kinds of situations I took a short screwdriver out of his toolbox and stabbed myself repeatedly in the thigh. About 4 to 5 times. After that everything went quiet and I sat there for about 15 minutes before she found me. It around 16:00 o’clock when it happened and she just came back from doing groceries, her husband was still at work. But after I answered his question he just said, ‘and how do you feel now?’. I just answered, ‘really tired and sad because I broke one of the most important rules’. He did not become mad or threw me out of the house. He just told me to go to bed after dinner. Sleep it off. She just nodded and obviously agreed with him. The next morning she told me to go home for the weekend to see the kids. So here we are.

Now I’m just trying to make the most out the time I’ve got with my kids. Tomorrow I will go to the zoo with them and my wife off course. And on Sunday we are going to the woods and have a nice walk and a picknick. I’m already looking forward to it. Hopefully my wife and kids will just treat me like they normally do. I don’t want them to treat me differently because of the situation. After the weekend I will go back to my friends place. I have no idea what will happen next after that last situation. We’ll just have to wait and see.