Hello! It’s been such a long time since I’ve attempted to write anything, almost 2 whole years! But I feel like it’s time to check in again.
This is going to be a bit of a heavy one, the ongoing conversation about mental health is a really important topic for me and I just want to share my experience in case anyone is in the same position or just to give a bit of insight about daily life being mentally unwell.
At this current moment in time I am experiencing a mental health dip, it usually starts off slow, I’ll have the odd panic attack or maybe have a few down days and then it will slowly increase over a month or two to where I am now, constant panic attacks and struggling with everyday tasks. But I’ve stopped taking about it and stopped telling those closest to me when it gets like this. I used to be so open about my mental health and when I was struggling, I feel like the older I’ve got the more embarrassed I am about being honest with how I’m feeling at risk of being judged. At the moment I’m really struggling to vocalise how I feel so I thought I’d bring it here and put it out to the void. I feel like I can be honest writing here, I’ve always been much better writing down how I feel than physically saying it.
When I’m in this headspace from the moment I wake up it’s like there’s a weight on me, I feel numb but also paralysed by sadness in every inch of my body, most mornings I’ll just open my eyes and lay in silence, my instant thought is that I don’t want to be awake, I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t have the energy to deal with this again. Almost immediately the intrusive thoughts will set in and are persistent till the moment I go to sleep again. I can be doing literally anything, I’ll be staring in the mirror brushing my teeth or wiping a table at work and I’ll be having intrusive thoughts about how I don’t want to be alive anymore and visualising all the ways to go or ways to harm myself to feel something. I know deep down I don’t want to die or hurt myself, I’m clinging onto a dream that things will get better for me, so instead these thoughts usually manifest into self-destruction in the form of being reckless, selfish and impulsive like getting black out drunk, or being promiscuous to try and feel something good or numb how I’m feeling. I’ll stop replying, stop making plans and I’ll want to spend most of my days just in bed alone. Having constant thoughts that are so against you that you have no control over is exhausting, always hearing in your own head that you aren’t good enough, you aren’t doing enough, you aren’t amounting to anything is get hard to fight and hard not to believe. It makes you feel so unworthy of anything good and doubt yourself. You feel unworthy of any positive feeling.
Throughout all of this simultaneously happening it also causes me to have no appetite, constant panic attacks, memory loss, sleep too much or not at all, skin breakouts, hair loss, a heightened level of paranoia, brain fog, maaaasssive fatigue and I just feel like I’m going crazy? Like I’ll never feel normal again. I’m just so exhausted.
The worst thing about it is when I’m in these dips I feel like I can only help myself, I don’t want to reach out for help, I don’t want to respond when people reach out, communicating in general becomes so overwhelming i can’t hold a conversation. I stop replying to texts and messages and disappear to try and put all my energy into getting better. When I’m scrolling socials and I see all the mental health ways to help I feel like they don’t work for everyone, I’ve tried medication, I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried talking. It’s such a complex situation to try and navigate. I really feel for those who just want to help because sometimes you genuinely can’t. Sometimes you have to do it on your own.
There are also still the everyday things, all of my anxieties are still prevalent, all of my PTSD triggers are still there, my insecurities, and it really amplifies during these times. It’s gets to the point where being alive feels like more hassle than it’s worth. How are you supposed to vocalise this to someone? Like I don’t want to die and have no plans to anytime soon but it gets too much to deal with.
I feel lucky I do have people around me I can lean on when it gets bad but overtime it becomes your new reality.
Just to lighten this one up, I know the dip doesn’t last forever. One day there will be a moment something switches, the motivation comes back, the drive to want to do things and live a good healthy life returns. Slowly things do start getting better and there will be a couple of weeks or months where things will feel and be amazing, it just takes some time to get there.
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