I worked today. I visited my team leader at her home to sort out some things to do with our job. I was cheerful, attentive and focussed as she went over PDR's and clinic plans. I nodded at her suggestions and made a mental note to get things right, since I care about my job immensely. I gazed out of her dining room window and thought about my body hanging from a tree!

I live with suicidal thoughts and have for several years. I am two faced, probably multi faced. Outside I promote and efficient, kind caring and engaging woman but on the inside I am smashed to pieces and broken...I am damaged beyond repair.

I remember seeing a counsellor several years ago, she was nice. The kind of lady who was intelligent but ever so slightly nuts herself. The kind who reads feminist theories and Sylvia Plath poetry with coffee stains on her blouse and papers spilling from her desk. Uncontrollable frizzy hair pinned into a heaped bun and fingerprints on her glasses.

She told me I was not failing because I was washed and dressed. I was not worthless because my house was clean and I got to work on time. Apparently it's much easier to spot a suicidal person if they are standing on a ledge holding a razor blade to their wrist (and they haven't cleaned the toilet). In reality we walk amongst the fatalists on a daily basis but they are keeping a lid on things, holding in the pain and trying to cope on their own.

I cope alone...I am alone and shall most likely always be so. I am middle aged, reclusive, shy away from company or fun of any kind. I am a private hermit and I hate it because I didn't ever want to be this.

I have read a lot about depression, have tried medication, but there isn't a pill that will cure loneliness or shyness. Joining things compounds my anxiety and even mixing with work colleagues makes me feel uncomfortable. I always worry that my depression will be subject to ridicule or expose me as an inept worker, but work is the one thing that really keeps me going.

I am not going to list all the reasons I suspect are responsible for my mental health 'issues' because only I need to know and they would be insufferably boring for anyone else to know. Sometimes I do not even mind being as nutty as a fruitcake, as long as I can keep up the facade and not let anyone else see. Suicidal thoughts are my comfort because if things get too bad I can 'off' myself and spare the human race the extrodinary burden of having me in the world.

I have the weekend off and I know when I stepped through this door about an hour ago, that I won't step outside until Tuesday morning when I am back in clinic. I won't see or speak to anyone and nobody will call me or come looking for me...not even my family.

I will clean the house, write, read some books, watch a movie or two and do what I mostly do when I am alone...sleep. I will probably cry too, I find it helps to release the tension and lessen the bitter dissapointment I have about myself.

I know other people have worse lives, I am acutely aware of that fact and as my Mother says 'Well you've just got to get out more'...yes, well I would if the fear didn't grip me and the feeling of being completely and utterly unloved and useless left my mind for even a few minutes.

The doctor said I am a highly functioning depressive, well that's nice isn't it. It's easier to be machine like and not allow emotions to strangle you...it's much more functional to just be there for others rather than look for your own happiness. In fact I have no idea what would even make me happy these days since there is no point even thinking about it.

I do not know how to make things different, I have tried and failed. If I make connections with people they tend to move away (as in my whole family...yes everyone...and my friends) I cannot date either because the catalogue of horrors I have been through, where men are concerned, is like a 'burning bush' to remind me that that kind of thing(love/romance) is most definitely not mapped out in the stars for me.

I live in my head, have done since I was a child. I have been afraid my whole life and even though I have fulfilled my role as a Mother as an employee as a woman, I am no closer to my own sense of achievement...I just lend a hand in others.

Depression dulls your senses and mutes life, everything is fuzzy and muted by the rocks you carry in your chest. I wished I drank heavily or was addicted to something else, but even that scares me...it would be so nice to get so stoned that I could not even remember my own name, I could put the rocks down and take a rest, but they are sewn to my body.

I know loneliness will kill me, it's already beginning to do so, I just have to wait until it catches up with me...

and so the weekend begins.