carpet burns

so what is the hardest thing i have ever done? I could write about triumphs, about supreme achievement, about scuba diving and scaling (small) tropical mountains, jumping rooftops, quiting lifelong addictions, or a multitude of other exciting, bombastic activities. but this is a different kind of story. a story filled with guilt and pain, that's ending doesn't lie in the present but in the past, on a carpet smelling of antiseptic and apathetic tears. this is the story of how i came to get off of the floor.
when asked to explain the difference between mental illness and feeling bad, i can best explain it by saying being depressed, you lose a few days work, having depression (or bipolar in my case) i lost my twenties. there are a myriad of agonies that lie within that statement. the drugs pumped into and out of my body in so many variations and doses that when asked these days what i've taken in the past and how it has worked for me, i can't answer.
my body reflects now these early aggressive treatments with migraines and facial twitches and spasms that have lessened through homeopathic remedies.
i was so disconnected from myself that i allowed other, more drastic treatments to violate me. The ECT series done not once but twice in two different hospitals. It was just empty hope that these destructive electric surges that while contorting my body would release my mind from its deadened state. i was left only with pounding headaches and an apathy so strong that treatment was finally halted before i drifted away permanently.
and then there was the cutting. self-mutilation, my scream of body that i couldn't articulate in any other way. it's sadly, the most interesting star on my chart that enthralls every eager medical professional almost as much as the vile criss-cross and keliod scars capture the eye of those whom catch unintentional glimpses of them.
to look back now from a better place does not make it an any less bitter time. i hope to convey at least with the physical situation of myself the utter emotional desolation i was immersed in. i didn't care what was done to hurt or heal me. i felt i deserved it all. a guilt too personal to share engulfed me so entirely that no light shone through. i made attempts but did not succeed. i simply did not have the energy to die. this was my despair.
so this is how i found myself, weeping into the carpet of a mental health facility common room
asking a Chaplin, "how i could go on?" "Why would God care for me, if He knew what i had done?"
The Chaplin, who i'm sure had heard this weepy question many times before told me that, "God knows what i had done and will do and has already forgiven me-isn't it about time i forgave myself?" what a staggering thought, forgiving myself!
looking at bandaged arms, lace-less sneakers, and foggy glasses, i eventually got off of my carpet burned knees and took a breath, many breaths, and forgave. i wasn't magically cured and it wasn't my last time in a hospital, but it was the first time in the history of my illness that i felt hope. and that glimmer of hope remains with me, these years later when my strength of personhood would be unbelievable to that creature of the past. and i use it when the darkness revists me and am confident that i will never find myself broken like that ever again.