For some time, it seemed like things were going well. I wasn't having too many bad days, and overall I was functioning pretty well. For the longest time in therapy, we were working with this "little girl" part inside, and working through a lot of things with her. Well, she seems to be doing fairly well recently, but we have unsurfaced a "teenaged" part of me, who is very intense and is carrying a lot of burdens and hurts. While trying to help her let go of some of those burdens, we've had to go very slow, because it gets really overwhelming really fast.
So lately, things have been harder, and usually, it feels like it's for no reason. About two weeks ago, one night when I was going to bed, I all of a sudden started sobbing. I was up most of the night sobbing and couldn't stop. The things in my mind were really dark and scary. I finally fell asleep for a little bit, but I was a mess at work the next morning. I had several breakdowns and just kept crying. Thankfully, it was an admin day for me so I wasn't at the desk dealing with guests, I was just in the back office. It was like that for a few days before it finally calmed down for a little while. But then it started up again, just as suddenly.
Surely you can imagine how frustrating this is. I went from feeling fine to sobbing in about 5 minutes. I felt like I was being smothered by darkness and like something was holding my head under water and I was still supposed to find a way to breathe. Every fiber of my being wanted to give up and quit; every fiber of my being wanted to end my life. It was taking so much energy just to try to stay alive. At some point, I just started to feel numb, which frankly might be worse than what I was feeling before. And at the point, in addition to desperate desire to end everything, I was desperate to cut. I ended up spending hours crocheting just trying not to pick up a tool and hurt myself. It started back up a day or two ago, except instead of sobbing, it went straight to feeling numb, but the suicidal thoughts and wanting to cut are just as intense as ever. Slowly, in addition to losing the energy and strength to keep fighting, I've started to lose any small desire I had to fight against it. It's just too freakin tiring.
The longer this goes on, the more convincing my mind gets that no one would notice if I wasn't around. Truthfully, most of the time, I'm the one who texts people first (I don't mean to reach out, I just mean in a general friendship way) because if I don't, I could go days without hearing from anyone. You know what that tells my mind? That if I didn't bother trying to keep up friendships/conversations/etc, that it wouldn't matter, no one would notice if I just stopped. No one would notice if I didn't initiate the conversation, or if I didn't even respond. At one point, there was a friend who knew if I didn't respond in a certain amount of time, it meant I was really struggling because I was beginning to shut down and isolate myself. However, that time has passed as our schedules are busy and don't really match up anymore, so there isn't that person who has a sixth sense about how I'm doing. (Which really, I don't actually expect anyone to be that for me, it's nowhere near fair to expect that of someone, but it was nice when it happened.) So if I don't respond to people, if I don't initiate conversations, or didn't show up to things, etc, it simply wouldn't matter. And work, it wouldn't matter. If I didn't exist anymore, they'd just get fill those shifts and move on in a few days. This is what my mind convinces me of, even if, logically, I know it isn't true, it FEELS true. So I end up feeling alone and it makes all these feelings much much worse.
So, moving on to something else now. I can't remember where I heard about the book, but I've been reading a book called "Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things" by Jenny Lawson. The back cover describes the book as "...Jenny Lawson explores her lifelong battle with mental illness. A hysterical, ridiculous book about crippling depression and anxiety? That sounds like a terrible idea. But terrible ideas are what Jenny does best." It's been nice to read a book about experiences that I can relate to. I recently underwent a slight medicine change for one of my antidepressants (which may have added to the recent issues I've had) and Jenny wrote a little bit about it that really struck a chord with me, so I wanted to share it. Some of what she shares is the exact reason why deciding to try medication for mental illness is so hard.
"Being on medication for mental illness is not fun, nor is it easy, and no one I've ever known does it just for kicks. Kids don't buy black-market Prozac to take to raves. People don't use B12 shots as a gateway drug to heroin. The side effects and troubles with taking medication are very real and (if you have a chronic mental illness) are something you have to deal with for the rest of your life. Even if a drug is working for a while, it might stop working and you'll have to start all over again with something new, which can be incredibly frustrating and disheartening. And then you have to deal with the side effects of the new drug, which can include 'feeling excessively stabby' when coupled with some asshole telling you that 'your medication not working is just proof that you don't really need medication at all.' I can't think of another type of illness where the sufferer is made to feel guilty and question their self-care when their medications need to be changed.
"When I went on my first antidepressant it had the side effect of making me fixated on suicide (which is sort of the opposite of what you want). It's a rare side effect so I switched to something else that did work. Lots of concerned friends and family felt that the first medication's failure was a clear sign that drugs were not the answer; if they were I would have been fixed. Clearly I wasn't as sick as I said I was if the medication didn't work for me. And that sort of makes sense, because when you have cancer the doctor gives you the best medicine and if it doesn't shrink the tumor immediately then that's a pretty clear sign you were just faking it for attention. I mean, cancer is a serious, often fatal disease we've spent billions of dollars studying and treating so obviously a patient would never have to try multiple drugs, surgeries, radiation, etc., to find what will work specifically for them. And once the cancer sufferer is in remission they're set for life because once they've learned how to not have cancer they should be good. And if they let themselves get cancer again they can just do whatever they did last time. Once you find the right cancer medication you're pretty much immune from that disease forever. And if you get it again it's probably just a reaction to too much gluten or not praying correctly. Right?
"Well, no. But that same, completely ridiculous reasoning is what people with mental illness often hear....not just from well-meaning friends, or people who were able to fix their own issues without medication, or people who don't understand that mental illness can be dangerous and even fatal if untreated...but also from someone much closer and more manipulative.
"We hear it from ourselves."
Do you hear how crazy all that sounds? Do you understand why mental illness is just as real and as serious as physical illnesses? Can you imagine the journey we have to face when we deicde to try medication, or when we just become open about our mental illness; not just the things we endure from other people, but even from ourselves?!
