There is nothing that feels like a bigger joke than being an extrovert living with depression. You master the art of being articulate and leading conversations without ever talking about yourself. Talking about yourself is a burden and it hurts and it invites questions. Questions which will require how, what, why, when and where. It is not that you do not understand that these questions come from a place of love and concern but the energy to participate in emotional expression is stressful.
If it is not the sleepless nights, it is the days when you withdraw yourself and spend your days in the dark where you will not have to talk. The days when you wake up and existing is painful. There are days when you plan all that you want to do with your day but intrusive thoughts come through.
The days when you force yourself to wake up and smile when all you want to do is weep. You become the funny friend. The entertaining friend. The party friend. The person who seems to be able to do so many things in a day and whose body seems to work as if it is running on a battery.
It is in the taking up of a thousand obligations then failing to even put in ten minutes of a task and you cannot even explain why your thoughts are racing.
I remember my very first panic attack. I was in school. I felt a pain in my chest like someone had just thrown a heavy sack towards my chest and told me to lift it. The room felt too small. I felt like everywhere was crowded.
That was five years ago. My understanding of having fragile mental health deepened but I never associated it with myself because I always felt that I always have to have things under control. I had scheduled taking care of my mind for later. If I would not hold off going to a doctor for a broken leg why was I doing it with my mental health? This is what I ask myself now but earlier on I would have probably said ‘we mooove’ or ‘it be like that sometimes’.
You will have a day when you do so many things so you can tire yourself out to get some sleep but when you get to bed, you will stare at the ceiling. Five hours later you are still wide awake and decide to move on with your day. You excuse it as a one day thing. Something that might go away. Then it doesn’t go away. The tingle in your arms comes again. The shakiness.
It is in the cramps, your stomach turning into knots when you try to eat. First time it happens you assume you had something bad and your tummy is acting up. Two weeks later knots in your stomach are still the order of the day. This time you can sleep but you dream about the same thing every day. The dreams are vivid, the characters are familiar .Then comes the forgetfulness when you cannot separate your dreams from reality. A nightmare.
There are days when I have sat and I felt like waking up next week. Days when a lot of dark thoughts come into my mind and I wondered how it would feel if I intentionally hurt myself. The days when I think a lot about pain and how people feel when they decide to pick up a razor and draw patterns on their arms and they do it at the same time every day. Imagine the consistency of knowing that you are going to hurt yourself at the very same place every day and stop before you go too far. I never think about dying though. I am scared of dying.
All I want is to wake up every day and know what bullshit my brain is going to come up with. I want to be able to wake up and know I will be productive. I want to be able to sit down and not feel like I am wasting time when I have no explanation as to why I am feeling the way that I do.
Truth is I am scared. I am scared of many things. I am scared of thinking too much or thinking too little. I am scared to confront how I feel about things and why I feel the way that I do sometimes. So my body forces me to take care of it.
My body tells me that Rori today you think you cannot breathe because at this moment you feel like you are running. I tell my body to behave that I would not like to cooperate and think about nothing today. My body refuses. It tells me that whether I want to or not I will have to sit down and learn that I need my brain and my brain will shut my body down till I take care of it.
I like being in control of every aspect of my life. The fact that I cannot decide how I feel sometimes, scares me.
There are people who have called me just at the point when I was on the verge of a breakdown and they did not know it. They spent hours with me. They made me laugh. They had no idea that I was in a dark place when they just told me that they were outside that day. Those who let me ramble about nothing and everything on the nights I could not sleep and had not slept properly in weeks. I appreciate you.
There are people that we encounter in different places every day. The people who heard you even when you were silent. The ones who hugged you on the day when you thought you did not need people. The ones who heard you when you could not put your feelings into words. The ones who were not aware at all but they were literally the bridge between you and a mental breakdown.
You may have been the person who sat down to someone on the day they decided to open up .The one who listened without judging and lent your ear even if you did not know what to say. You are appreciated.
I have learnt quite a lot about myself as well. I have learnt to set boundaries in how I would like to be spoken to and how I speak to other people. I am learning to not be too hard on myself. I still feel silly sometimes when I cannot explain why my work ethic is in the toilet or why I was in a crowd of people and made up some excuse to leave because I had had enough.
Sometimes I feel like a robot where I cannot appropriately place the correct facial expression to an emotional situation. I withdraw and would rather show a blank face.
I have never been one to express sadness and anger in front of other humans. I will probably be sarcastic about it and use one occasion a year to collectively cry about anything that I felt like I needed to cry about previously. That is just me. I refuse to wear my feelings on my face. If I do not want to smile I would rather be alone and not perform.
I am learning a lot about myself and emotional expression. I am taking some baby steps and I hope I will get there one day.
It is okay to say you need help. It is okay to have a few safe spaces that you set for yourself. It is okay to understand that not everyone is a therapist and to see an actual one.
Take care.