Right now my eyes are really puffy and they hurt the ways eyes hurt after you've cried too much too fast. This maybe isn't a story that everyone will want to hear, and honestly I'm sort of afraid of posting anything too deep or real about me on here. I don't have thousands of followers or anything, and this blog is more for me than it is for anyone else, but just the fact that what I type will be out there for anybody to read is mildly terrifying.
So I suggest if you are looking for something more lighthearted, move on to another post.
My topic: mental illness. It's strange to think that it is still a pretty taboo topic given that the statistics say its so common. I think it's something that takes some courage to talk about because if you bring it up and tell people then you have to explain it. If you break your leg people don't even have to wonder. They'll just look at it and understand how much it hurt. But mental illness is different, because even the people that have depression like you or anxiety like you will experience it differently. And it's hard to feel like people really understand how much it can tear you apart inside.
Another thing that makes it hard is that it isn't always an everyday thing. Some days will be pretty good and you can almost pretend that you weren't curled up on the floor bawling the week before or rocking back and forth focusing on breathing the right ways to try and calm yourself down because even the idea of having to go to the grocery store is too much. I know a billion other sites probably say something similar but it's important to me to write it out in my own way.
It's actually the hardest thing because a lot of the time you feel like the only person to blame is you. It's hard to distinguish the lines between who you are and your mental illness. So a lot of the times you can fall into this deep dark hole of thinking that you are utterly alone and beyond screwed up and if you could just buckle down on yourself life would be better. That it's entirely your fault that you feel like everything is collapsing in on you. For the first few months that's what I thought. I figured I just couldn't hold it together, I wasn't strong enough and all the consequences from skipping school and sleeping whenever I could were because of who I was.
This is not to say that my depression and anxiety are not a part of who I am. I would say that they are, I think anyone with a chronic illness of any sort would agree. It doesn't define who we are, but it has shaped who we have become. There are a lot of things I understand now that I didn't before. I have more empathy and compassion and I've gotten really good at finding even the thinnest of silver linings because that is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes.
My apologies that this is so long but I just feel that it is so important that people understand to their core that despite feeling alone in dealing with mental illness, they are far from it. It can suck, to put it lightly. It can make you feel like nothing sometimes, but I like to think that for as low as we get in life, there is something in store for us that is higher. (Not drugs though. Eat some chicken nuggets instead, those things are delicious.)
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