Tag: anxiety

Is Living with a Mental Illness REALLY Living?

I know why it is called a panic attack.

Your body is being attacked, except the assailant lives inside your head.

Your body is flooded with burning hot adrenaline that feels like acid burning in your veins. You feel that acid pulsing in your nerve endings like it is trying to escape through your skin. It burns, but sometimes it feels like ice. The burn of cold, the heat of fire.

Speaking of skin, that feeling of pins and needles when a numb limb regains blood supply? That’s how the surface of your skin feels, from head to toe, like thousands of insects and spider webs crawling over you. You’re suddenly painfully aware of every article of clothing you’re wearing, or anything touching you, and the touch feels invasive. Like somehow your clothing is aiding your attacker and trying to suffocate you.

All the while, your heart rate increases, but the muscles in your body have tightened so much that each beat of your heart feels like a chore. The burn of adrenaline lingers there, and your heart feels compressed.

Air is nearly impossible, and sometimes you’re not even sure if you’re breathing at all. But you must be, because you’re alive, even if this doesn’t feel like living. You force your body to take a deeper breath only to realize it feels like breathing through a straw. Someone has removed all the oxygen in the room and you’re trying desperately to pull breathable air.

As though you’ve been electrocuted, your body is stiff and later when you’re finally released from the clutches, your body will ache and your joints will hurt. Then there’s what’s happening in the mind.

It can best be described as an active warzone. A flood of memories, and intrusive thoughts that weren’t asked for overwhelm the senses, and you learn your mind has the ability to feel it all as if it were real and happening in the present. Everything from imagining someone you love dying, to imagining an infidelity in vivid detail. And it loops, continuously, over and over.

Because the problem with your enemy residing inside you, they know every weakness. They know your greatest fears, they know what triggers the hardest. And it weaponizes all of it. It makes it all feel real, and every emotional reaction just creates a stronger neural pathway. Every part of you wants reassurance, reach out to the loved one you “saw” die, ask your partner if they’ve been loyal. But if you do, you’ll be deemed crazy, or your attempt to calm the chaos sounds more like an accusation.

No one outside of your head understands you’re calling for reinforcements because your troops are dropping like flies. Your troops, in this case, being all the coping mechanisms you’ve been taught, or learned, over the years in an attempt to strengthen your army. The positive self talk, the redirection, the cold water, the meditation. In this state, you are more self aware, and aware of your body, than you’ve ever been, and that self awareness cuts through every weapon in your arsenal unless you truly believe in what you’re saying. And if you see moving pictures in your mind? You’ll watch it all play out like a reel of all your worst fears. And you can’t escape the theater.

The words you need to hear to calm the hell inside your head will only cause more pain, to yourself and others.

The beating of your heart gets louder as it fights to pump life into you. You’re burning and freezing at the same time from the inside.

You can’t escape.

You can’t step out until things calm down.

You can’t sleep to have a moment of peace.

You’re the attacker and the hostage.

And if you do manage to sleep, it is from exhaustion as the adrenaline finally leaves your system, your muscles release their grip, and you physically can’t go any further. It is not restful, nor is it a guarantee that you’ll be free from the grasp because the torture can follow you into your dreams. Scientists believe dreams are the brain’s way of cleaning itself and removing waste, but for you, it’s just another avenue of torture.

And though you are running on empty, and you feel like you can go no further, you have to, because while you’ve been fighting a war with yourself, life continues on.

Life doesn’t care.

You have to pick yourself up and go to work, care for your home, and do all that life requires. Asking for a break to let yourself recover results in everyone calling you weak or pathetic. And you think, if they just knew or understood what you’ve just been through, or how hard you’re fighting to keep going, they would never think it. You start to wish your problems weren’t in your mind, but physically apparent, because then you wouldn’t be accused of faking it or being dramatic. But the truth is people don’t want to know the truth. They don’t care either.

And those you can confide in don’t understand either, because the words never come out correctly. You fight to be understood, to paint the same vivid picture for them that you’re tormented with. You’re fighting a war, they see it as you’re having a rough day. No, you want to rip your skin off and escape your mind.

You want it to stop.

And when you understand the depth of how terrible it is, and the lengths you’re willing to go to make it stop, you suddenly begin to understand why people turn to drugs, to sex, to alcohol, anything to make it stop. You understand how addiction works. It doesn’t just make you feel good, it is like a balm to an infected wound that has been festering and destroying you for years. You understand why people end their own lives, because it means escaping a torment that no one seems to have the answers for, and stopping the pain.

Then the part no one talks about is trying to live after the attack. Looking at your partner and remembering the image your mind created, the emotions you felt, of seeing them engaged with another. Seeing your loved one and remembering the image you’re mind concocted of their violent and gruesome death. Because it feels real, every actual real interaction is tangled with the reality your mind created. You have to sift through, and analyze, every emotion, every memory, which causes you to become more tangled in the vines of despair.

Because the people around you don’t have to do that.

You begin to think maybe you are crazy.

The false memories start to steal your actual memories, and soon you forget the tiniest details. You forget to take the trash out, you forget to do the dishes, you forget, because your responsibilities are buried in a cemetery of the rest of your failures. You forget names, birthdays, and entire people.

Maybe you are crazy. Maybe they’re right.

But when you try to explain all of that to someone outside the warzone? It sounds like making excuses. Like not taking responsibility. So you apologize for every little thing. But then you’re told to stop apologizing.

And every failure is just added to the arsenal to be used against you later.

It’s never ending.

Every explanation feels like an excuse, every question is an accusation. Everything that calms the chaos kills the order.

And you try. You try to learn better ways of dealing with things. You try to find healthy ways to make it easier. You go to therapy. You try to do better. But even that becomes a chore because now you have new habits to learn, old habits to break, and when you’re overwhelmed, the old habits come back like muscle memory you long for your body to forget. You think to yourself “if I just do this, it’ll get better. I’ll be free.”

You won’t.

And, of course, when it doesn’t, or you can’t keep up, you feel like a failure. You know you’ve disappointed everyone closest to you. You think maybe you’re just not trying hard enough. But you’ve given everything you are, everything you have, can no one see your tank is empty?

It is a game that you designed, but you’ve rigged it so it is impossible to win.

Turmoil

A few days ago, I was in bed trying desperately to sleep before my shift at work. My eyes were heavy, my body exhausted, but my brain didn’t get the memo. My brain was rushing around, no singular thought, but a conglomeration of thousands in a symphony of chaotic bits. My brain is never quiet, there is always noise. Sometimes I can tune it out, sometimes it is deafening. I describe it often as trying to live, and function, in a very crowded food court.

That day it was very loud, and I knew there would be no sleep. No matter how hard I fought it. To those with a mental disorder, they are no stranger to this. Sometimes just laying in bed and resting my eyes is enough.

As I’m laying there, my anxiety goes through the roof. Heart pounding, shallow breathing, followed immediately by the overwhelming urge to hurt myself. Not in a suicidal fashion, but cause some form of harm to myself. I needed a cigarette, I needed drugs, I needed to cut myself until I bled. I needed to get so messed up that I couldn’t recognize who I was anymore. I needed pain so I could fix it.

I tried grounding myself, telling myself I didn’t really want to hurt, but I didn’t listen to me. Of course I needed to hurt, wasn’t I listening? The longer I denied it, the worse the anxiety began to feel. Soon, invisible insects were crawling along my skin, and I was scared too move for fear that any movement would be to bring about this harm.

A pen wouldn’t work, a popular technique taught to those prone to self harm allowing them to draw on themselves rather than harming themselves. I needed the actual pain of it, not just seeing the marks left behind. I tried thinking of anything else, tried to drown out my thoughts with television. But I quickly lost focus because I wasn’t LISTENING to me.

I found a crisis text line, but couldn’t bring myself to text them. Couldn’t bring myself to admit it, because how do you explain to perfect strangers that you want to hurt yourself, need to hurt yourself, but you don’t want to kill yourself? Mental illnesses are stupid. And complex. So very complex.

I was in no condition to work, but I had no choice. I had to do something. The only thing I could think of to do was pop myself with a rubber band, so I wore one around my wrist. That seemed to help. Whenever I felt the urge, I’d just pop the rubber band. It helped. Healthiest way to deal with it? Maybe not.

But I didn’t drink.

I didn’t smoke.

I didn’t cut myself open.

I didn’t resort to drugs.

Just a rubber band pop every so often.

I’m calling it a win in my book, and truth be told, I’m proud of myself. I made it through my shift, and when I got home that night I was exhausted. I slept.

When I woke you, I felt….different. I felt better. Better than I had in a long time. The weird overwhelming urge to hurt myself had pulled me out of the depressive funk I’d been trapped in for the better part of a year. And it was nice.

But this is one of the reasons I hate how romanticized mental illness has become. Depression isn’t curling up in a blanket, eating a tub of ice cream. Manic isn’t a “good thing”. Not everything can be cured with a positive mental attitude. Trust me, we’ve all tried that, and when it fails, it makes the symptoms worse. Because then not only am I depressed, I’m also a fail whale for not being able to just snap out of it. With everyone trying to fix me, whatever the intentions, what my brain picks up on is you believe I’m broken, and you’re trying to fix me because I’m problematic. So depressed, failure, broken, burden.

My impulses aren’t always funny, though it has led to personally funny moments. Like once I bought a life size cardboard cut out of Matt Smith because I was really manic. But do you know how much money I could have saved, how much trouble I would be out of right now, if I could control those impulses? That’s not a joke.

I won’t lie, this blog just took an entirely different direction than my original intention, but I needed to get that little rant over before I could continue. It has taken me years of studying, and research, to get where I am today with my mental health. Years of personal growth, acceptance, and forgiveness (of myself and others) as well. The only reason I didn’t completely collapse under the mental pressure the other day was the familiarity of what was happening, and applying knowledge/techniques I’d learned. Even with the knowledge of what was happening and why (invasive thinking exasperated by OCD turning it into a mental compulsion, and the inability to complete the compulsion caused anxiety, fueling the compulsion), it was still terrifying.

As a teenager, I didn’t know what was happening, or why, I only knew that I needed to hurt so I could feel better. I will always carry the scars on my arms. With the knowledge I have, I was able to forgive teenage me. Teenage me as even more afraid than adult me. A lot of shame was just taken off my heart, a lot of pain was repaired.

And that’s why I felt better. That’s why I feel better than I have in years.

Getting myself back where I need to be in order to function as an adult, a mother, is hard. But I finally feel like I’m back in the driving seat of my head and I can control the car. But just like operating a motor vehicle, I have to accept there are elements beyond my control, and sometimes I just have to hold on and hope for the best. But in the more turbulent parts, where I feel like I’m hydroplaning out of control, I just hope that I never touch the brakes.