Tag: life lessons

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.

Things I’ve learned working in a hotel

I’m back!! I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Life has a way of stepping in and ruining all the fun.

The worst part is, I have had so many things I’ve wanted to talk about. But what I have in terms of inspiration is constantly being thwarted by my lack of desire to actually type it all up for others to read. Perhaps another time I will type up the blog that includes everything I’ve wanted to type about.

However, we are not here for what I may do, we are here to discuss the hotel business. Yes, I am proud to announce that I have finally managed to land myself a job, and I’m nearly finished with my third week. It is quite exciting, and challenging. As an introvert, I face a few struggles that an extroverted person wouldn’t. In my journey, I have picked up quite a bit of useful knowledge that I shall now share with you. I am typing this on my phone so forgive me any mistakes I may make.

1). Customer service is everything: When a person walks into a hotel, they are looking for a nice, professional person to hand all of their information to. You have to look the part, and act the part, even if you really don’t want to. This is, obviously, the same in every business from food to cars.

2). Multitasking is a bitch!: I’ve always been a pretty good multitasker, but I had to really step up my game. Often times I’ll have phones ringing, and people trying to get a room. You’re typing in credit card numbers in the machines, and giving quotes to the next person in line. I am horribly number dyslexic, so I struggle a bit with it. But I’m getting better.

3). Assholes exist here too: I’d been working for all of six days, and a self entitled asshole gentleman walks in. He starts spouting off all these questions that I don’t have the answers to, and gets angry with me when I explained I was new and didn’t know how to help. He slammed his hands on the counter and walked out, calling me an ignorant ass as he went. I also get people who get angry at me for the price. If it were up to me, I’d lower of. Which brings me to my next lesson…

4). Sympathy has no place here: I think this was the hardest lesson I had to learn (other than keeping up with math). During horrible weather, or so late st night they are falling asleep at the wheel, drivers are often shoved off the interstate and forced to get a room. The first few days I was here, I felt awful and would charge the lowest rate we offered. And that was a no no. After I sewed up the new asshole I’d been given by my bosses, I realized I was going to have to harden my heart. What is even worse than that is when you get people who are here for really sad reasons. I had a woman who hadn’t slept in days because her daughter was in the hospital having her fourth open heart surgery. She’d been forced to leave but didn’t want to go home, and chose my hotel instead. I hated. Hated. Charging her full price. But. This is a business, and businesses are here to make money. Sympathy, unfortunately, doesn’t make money.

5). You will become emotionally invested: I see a lot of truckers, a lot of travlers, and because I sit and chat with them, I tend to learn about where they are heading and where they came from. The incredibly nice ones I often find myself wondering if they made it to their destination safely. It’s a sad thought to realize that some of the people I see won’t make it. This leads into my next point.

6). Your sense of responsibility triples: Along with becoming emotionally invested, you take on a sense of responsibility for them, and their belongings. We have security cameras covering every inch of this place, and it is my job to keep an eye on the screens to make sure nothing gets stolen.

7). Your job doesn’t stop at the front desk: If you’re working in a small hotel in a small town, there may not be enough staff on hand to do all the jobs that need to be done at any given moment. When I first started working, I simply worked the front desk. On my second day, I was doing laundry. Fourth day I was fixing a computer. Fifth day I was typing up documents for my boss. Tenth day I was stripping down rooms, and delivering things up to people. When people ask what I do, I usually tell them I’m a personal front desk maintenance maid assistant.

8). Being a female in the hotel business sucks sometimes: I’ve only had this happen once, thankfully, but a guy took my niceness as flirting, and then started trying to have sex with me. Since I work in a hotel, it must also mean I can um…assist them in other ways.

9). You quickly learn your surroundings: Before working here, I knew the bare minimum of my town, and neighboring towns. Now I know every restaurant, gas station, etc in town, how far it is to the next towns, which towns would provide the better rates, and so forth.

10). Entertaining yourself is a must: On Mondays and Fridays, I’m always busy. During thr rest of the week, later into my shift, it gets very boring and very quiet. I was bored to tears during my first week, to the point that I started cleaning just so I had something to do. The lobby has a great shine to it now, though. This doesn’t stop at the slow days. You have to find a way to make this fun for yourself. I like to learn about people. So I make this fun by talking to them.

11). It’s like a family: I can’t speak for all hotel chains, only for the own I’m in at the moment. My boss told me they treat everyone like family, especially their employees. At first, I didn’t believe her. But it’s true! Her husband told me if I have problems with a person, tell him and they will kick them out, because “my life is more valuable than their money”. I’m sorry, I just don’t know a lot of businesses that would say that, and mean it. I don’t get mad and bitch about not wanting to come to work. Instead, I show up hoping to make them proud. I have value here, and I’m shown that often.

I feel very blessed. This job fell into my lap unexpectedly, and I love it.