Peregrina wrote: ↑Mon Feb 21, 2022 2:50 pmThey say that fear cannot persist where love resides, but it seems that love produces fear.
I often fear that someone close to me will kill themself. I know that in most situations this is irrational, but sometimes I kind of lose my mind when someone doesn't answer the phone / text me back when I know they are in distress. About a year ago a friend accidentally broke his phone in the middle of a heavy conversation, and I ran to his apartment (which is close to mine) faster than I've maybe ever run, the whole way imagining how I'd find his dead body, or how I'd have to block a bleeding artery etc. He was fine, and I think my becoming that unhinged was kind of hard for him. When two mentally ill people try to support each other, it's sometimes difficult to balance things like that.
This is probably related to my partner's suicide in 2016, though I had similar thoughts before that too. Living among very self-destructive people in general has taken its toll I guess. Often the obsessive focus on being certain that someone is safe feels similar to other intrusive / compulsive thoughts, like wanting to check a thousand times that I haven't left the stove on when leaving home. Like my mind forces me into a situation where I know that the compulsive thought is false but still have to obey it, and when that doesn't help, to "accept" that my apartment is on fire, that my friend is dead, that I'm poisoned by the mushroom soup I ate yesterday and will die horribly. This kind of thing is sometimes funny as hell - I often joke about "accepting death like once a week" with a friend who also has these problems.
My partner called me 11 or 12 times the day before she died, and my phone was muted the whole day; I noticed the calls only the next morning, when waking up uncharacteristically early feeling that something was wrong. I fear that this will happen again, that someone who I should be there for tries to reach me and I'm oblivious to it, and that my whole life will collapse as a result.
Tiden läker inga sår.