Knowledge.

Since this morning I know why I suddenly went into a downward spiral and why I ended up cutting myself. It was because of me buying that new second hand bicycle.

When I first saw the bicycle I liked it right away, but I thought it was too expensive, even though it was the cheapest one there, and I left the store pretty much determined not to buy it. When I got home, doubt started to settle in and I thought that maybe I should buy that bike and that if I waited too long with making a decision, it would be gone and I wouldn't be able to afford any of the other ones.

So I called Eduard to ask him for advice and he said he would come the next day and have a look at it for me, but I said no, that if I was going to buy it, I was going to do it immediately.

With a great deal of trepidation, I transferred the money into my bank account and convinced myself that it was okay for me to buy that bike for myself. I felt very unsure about it and had to call on every bit of nerve that I had to get on the bus to the station and walk into the store to buy the bike. I didn't think I deserved anything as nice as that bike.

After I rode it home and parked it in the hallway, my nerves were highly strung and I felt very nervous and uneasy about having bought the bike and I could hardly look at it without feeling all sorts of guilt and other bad feelings. I thought, "Now you've done it, you fool."

It took me the rest of the evening to settle down and the next day I tried to push all the unpleasant feelings associated with the bike away and to only pretend that I was very happy with it. I pushed very hard against those feelings, but they kept nagging at me in the back of my mind subconsciously, making me feel uncomfortable and unsettled and uneasy until I ended up in a downward spiral, but when that happened, I didn't associate it with having bought the bike, because I had pushed away the unpleasant feelings and didn't make the connection.

My discomfort grew and grew and took on enormous proportions, until I cut myself. That brought me hours of relief and an opportunity to talk to my psychiatrist and have my medication changed. Finally, this morning, I was so calm that I could retrace the past week in my mind and make the connection and I had a real "Eureka" moment and suddenly felt a lot lighter about everything.

Since then I've had a conversation with my psychiatrist on the phone about this and he understood the situation immediately and said that it is not an isolated incident, but that it is probably something that happens often to me and that it is connected to my childhood and that the link can be laid there. He said I had given him very valuable information and that he was glad I called and that we would work on this in the future. In the meantime, I am to be aware of these feelings when they happen again and rather than push them away, I am supposed to feel them very consciously and acknowledge them and let them happen no matter how uncomfortable they are.

I hope this clarifies it to you as much as it has to me. Once I knew what had happened, I felt so much better. Suddenly there was no mystery anymore.

Ciao...