I've been thinking about mental illness a lot in the past year, and there are several reasons for that. I've watched a few of my friends get brutalized by it. I've been getting reeeaaal into Maria Bamford's Netflix show.
Also, I guess I kinda had the largest mental health crisis of my life less than a year ago, so, I dunno, maybe that also got me thinking.
Seriously, great show. Source
Now, I'm an over-sharer extraordinaire. If over-sharing were a job skill, I'd be absolutely murdering the market for it. I'd be at an "able to afford Starbucks every day" level of obscene wealth. I'd maybe even stop taping my shoes together with electrical tape and actually buy new shoes.
Despite my need to talk about myself all the time always, I have largely avoided talking about what happened. And I'm not ready to get into a lot of it yet. It's not even because of the mental illness stigma, at least not wholly. Honestly, it's because I don't want my family to read about what happened, and I know they're reading this blog. Irrational as the thought is, I don't want to add to their giant list of ways in which I disappoint and/or worry them.
Which is absolutely a crazy, unrealistic concern. But that doesn't stop the worry from happening.
TL;DR: I'm not going to talk in detail about what happened last fall. Not yet, but maybe someday. But I am going to talk about how I got here, and where here is.
I've always been a quirky kid. Very dramatic, very imaginative, very blunt, very bad at blending in. I'm not bitter about those traits, but they have made my life kind of hard in places. I was prone to doing loud, crazy things, things that became embarrassing as soon as they happened. Licking other kids in the shower, eating a newt, tying imaginary elephants to my desk, telling people that the bumps on my arm were clusters of non-human DNA and that I'm an alien hybrid.
Ya know, kid stuff.
And I've continued to be just as weird, with even greater confidence. I'm an ambitious person. I want to be successful in my creative endeavors, and my career, and my relationships. But all the weird stuff I do carries that baggage of guilt, and I quickly start hating myself for my strangeness.
Not just strangeness. Anything that makes me "other" or not enough, because, dang it, I want to be the best. I want to be clever and funny and good at everything I do. When I don't live up to the ideal vision I've made for myself, I quickly turn to self-hate.
The thought process seems to be: "If I made this mistake, I must not be as smart as I thought. If I'm not as smart as I thought, then I must have a very bloated self-image and an unrealistic image of myself as a smart, capable person. I must be way off base. Ergo, I'm the dumbest creature on this planet, I'm the scum of the earth, and I deserve to be punched."
With that, there are also a lot of other thoughts buzzing through me, like: "I'm the stupid sibling; I'm an embarrassment to my family." "I can't even be an adult." "I'm not good enough to exist in this world." "I bring everyone down." "I was wrong to think I could keep up." "I'm a pity hire at my new job."
"I should kill myself before I make things worse. It will be better for everyone."
I've mentioned these thoughts before. But here's something more: I don't believe them.
I really don't. I think I'm pretty damn smart. I think I make some good jokes. I'm okay with my weirdness because it led to me writing stories and creating art and making suuuper high quality friends.
That's the thing with whatever my brand of mental illness is. I'm still a glittery, sunshiny person, and I'm still confident, happy even. Hell, I have such high standards for myself that when I fail to measure up, I, uh, go off the deep end. That is some first class narcissism right there.
It's just that these invasive thoughts come in and cloud my thinking. I see that they're ridiculous, but there are just so many of them, and the evidence is there (in the form of my mistakes) that my self-image is a little off. It hurts to look at my flaws. The cognitive dissonance can be crippling. My impulsive nature acts as a catalyst, and things get out of control.
I feel everything intensely. That's probably why I write, why I started creating so many imaginary worlds in the first place. They were vessels for the abundance of feelings that I've always had.
Last fall, I hit a critical moment in my job in which the massive volume of intense feelings that I encountered working in auto total loss claims became too much for me to handle. On top of that, I was getting little sleep, working longer and longer hours, and being told I wasn't doing enough. That I was too slow. My name plastered in red writing in a "shame list" for not being good enough. So my own thoughts ("I'm stupid, I'm worthless, I can't keep up") started piling on as well.
My body ached from invisible injuries to my mind, and I didn't know how to explain that to anybody. I thought my panic attacks would literally explode my heart.
Then, I stopped feeling entirely. That's when it all collapsed. Some piece of me broke away in an attempt to cope, and it opened a terrible path.
Like I said, I can't go into the details yet. But it was like living in the skin of a different person, a person I desperately wanted to destroy. I wanted to peel off my skin and emerge something less terrible, or maybe not emerge at all.
I was a parasite to myself. Or, my depression was.
I want to talk about this stuff because if I don't, it will just be another secret sitting in my soul like cold iron, weighing me down. I feel uncomfortable interacting with people when they only know parts of the story and are afraid to ask about the rest. I worry about what they think of me, or whether they think they're walking on eggshells when they really aren't.
Also, I want this sort of thing to be talked about. Mental illness is entering more conversations, but the stigma remains, and so much of it is considered "off limits" when I don't think it should be.
Yeah, I'm incredibly embarrassed about what happened to me. I wish I weren't, and I don't think I should be, but I am. This is my clumsy attempt to bring up the elephant in the room (not the invisible one I tied to my desk as a child) and make it something OK for conversation. I'm not the only person who thinks like me. I think I'll always think like this, and always have nasty thoughts I'll have to chase out of my head like rats with a broom.
The other night, I asked Kelsey what she thinks of me, whether I seem depressed or what. She described me as cocky, and I took it as a compliment. Ten months ago, I don't think anyone could have described me as that.
If you have questions, ask 'em. If you want to tell me your story, please do! I'm going to keep being weird, and screwing up, and letting people down. But I'm also going to keep doing good stuff. As best I can.
Because I can.