I've been having recurring nightmares for years now. It's often very difficult to get to sleep because sometimes I'll just wake up with a sudden very painful jolt where all of my muscles tense up. It's incredibly painful and nearly impossible to sleep after this happens.

It's usually followed by intense feelings that I'm worthless or that I deserve to be in pain. I would have thoughts about my boyfriend sleeping with other people and bragging about it. In the dreams he would go into extreme detail about how other people were better than me and it made me feel really awful. It would often cause me to start crying and need reassurance that it was just a dream. My boyfriend is sweet and would never do something so hurtful to me, but I felt like I deserved it.

I deserved to be told how everyone else was better than me. I'm still very afraid of having a bloated toxic ego whenever I say anything positive about myself.

Other nightmares I have involve being in a car that's about to crash and I try my hardest to steer the car safely but nothing I do has any effect on the car. Not the brakes, not the steering wheel, nothing. They've been getting more and more frequent and I just had a panic attack in the store thinking about these things. My brain feels like it won't slow down. I can't enjoy things that I used to enjoy. Everything makes me cry or feel terrible. I feel so needy and disgusting.

CW: I'm strongly considering suicide right now because every second feels like torture. I just want my brain to stop forever. I can't take this.