Noise.

There is always noise. My head never ever stops making noise.

Ever.

EVER.

it’s exactly midnight and I’m tapping away as quietly as possibly on my iPad, trying to clear my head. I think I have tinnitus; I’ve suspected it for years, as all I can hear is D breathing, and a high pitched, consistent whining screaming buzz in my ears.

In my head.

Combine this with the never ending noise of thoughts from my brain, and there is never any silence.

If I stop and listen to the screaming buzzing noise, I can hear the blood pounding in my ears too, a horrible throbbing noise, sometimes quick, sometimes slow, never stopping.

Then there’s the noise I wish to god I could control. The thoughts. All the thoughts. The ones which are full of logic and sense, the ones which challenge every ounce of logic and sense, the ones which visualise everything and make things horribly real.

The latter are the worst.

Like someone plants the image in my mind, writes out the storyline before I have a chance to decide if I want to take part in it or not, puts me on the chess board like a pawn moving forwards to be slaughtered.

And all the time, there’s noise. Even in the silence. The silence I crave for, there’s noise.

I stepped away from twitter over the last few days; the noise was too much. I had a bit of a breakdown on Sunday and I’m scared of where I am mentally. I want to write about it, but with everything in the blogging “community” feeling horribly vivid, very raw, strangely repulsive; I don’t want the associations and wonder if my voice is being silenced.

How ironic.

A silenced voice when all I want is to be able to make my own noise. Noise of my choosing, not the noise I am forced to listen to.

I feel like I belong nowhere, and that’s fine; I don’t want to be pidgeon-holed. I use this space to shout freely, to remove the noise which I genuinely fear will one day kill me. I haven’t forgotten The Voices; how can I when they were there for so long? So strong, dictating everything and anything if I gave them that tiny little inch to work with. They were so noisy. Not so much now. But I can’t forget them.

People tell me to take a break. From blogging. From twitter. Why should I? My blog is my outlet, it’s my voice. Why should I silence myself? Why should I conform to The Rules made up by someone else, someone who doesn’t know me, who feels the need to tell me where and when my voice can be heard?

Sometimes when I start a blog post, I wish there was a way to convey the noise. I wish I could give you an audio post of the noise. The relentless, endless noise, awash with colour so bright it gives me a headache. Noise so harsh it sometimes physically hurts.

I wanted to write about my breakdown on Sunday. I wanted to write about how I sat in the kitchen floor, whimpering and crying in the dark, wondering how much effort I would have to summon to reach the nearest tablets. There was a drawer of sharp knives right behind my head. I didn’t cut; I didn’t want to be found in a pool of blood and have someone have to clean up the mess.

For years when planning self harm or suicide, I always planned the cleanest ways to go. Swiftly into sleep always seemed best. Hindsight stopped me this time; what if I failed and ended up back in a mental hospital again? How do I explain myself to people? The boys would be fine; too young to understand right now, they would have one less person shouting at them all day long, one less person they would have to drag along with them.

That’s how it goes right? “They’ll be better off without me?” I always wonder.

I didn’t do it. What stopped me? I don’t know. Probably the noise. I knew I wasn’t thinking straight, on many levels. On ANY level. Maybe the exhaustion stopped me. Too tired to move off the kitchen floor, yet too cold to fall asleep there.

Irony is cruel.

I should probably be on mess. I’m probably not even a fit mom. I can say it out loud, it almost washes over me. An ex once told me I would never be fit enough to be a mom. I guess he was right; I still hear his words ringing in my ears to this very day, some 11 years later. His voice joins in the noise.

Do you know what I would give to shut down the noise? To stop this screaming buzzing? To drown out voices? To stop the vibrant harshness of everything that makes a sound? I smacked my head repeatedly on the kitchen cupboards hoping for distraction from the noise, to stop me thinking aout the things I shouldn’t be thinking about. I long to think about mundane shit without the pressure of any kind of bigger picture.

Shit like whether I should have advertising on my blog. Shit like when can I get the time to do people’s images they’ve been asking for from recent blogger events. Shit like finding out about photography course for other people when I have never even been on a course myself. Shit like who fucking well unfollowed who, who’s in the latest In Crowd, who kicked off the latest arguments, and why the fuck people can’t open their eyes for one iota of a second and be fucking appreciative of what other people give to them or do for them.

The shit that, really, would probably make my life so much more manageable, because I wouldn’t have the elephant in the corner to worry about.

I wouldn’t be thinking about the fact that I came horribly, horribly close to those pills, less than 5 easy steps away from me in the kitchen.

I wouldn’t be thinking about the feeling of the relief of pain as my arms were cut open, letting my insides literally and metaphorically seep out of me.

I wouldn’t be thinking about being so terrified of going back on anti-depressants and having what’s left of my spirit muted and made into dull shades of grey.

I wouldn’t be thinking of destroying myself on the inside leaving a shell, in the hope of stopping this perpetual, mind destroying, insanity creating noise.

I wouldn’t be thinking about how what I want, perhaps what I need, is stuff that rages against my very being.

I want the noise to stop now.

It’s really loud right now and I want it to stop.