I’m Not Dying Right Now
It's been awhile since I've felt out of control.
There's also been times that I've sat in my bathtub wondering what the least painful way to kill yourself is.
There's a duality inside of my head. Passionate, happy, social, broken, scared, lonely.
I still have the desperate need for change, wether it be shaving my head, or painting my walls. But it's currently pretty comfortable to sit with my own thoughts, and the voice that's been telling me 'you're gonna die soon' for the last 20 years has stopped screaming so loudly at me.
Mental illness is fucking wild. It's weird and it comes and goes, often without you realizing it. There are years of my life that have been lost to my own darkness. Time passing by while I counted my heart beats per minute, and felt lumps or moles on my body until they hurt from the repetitive strokes of my fingertips.
So many hours wondering if I'm a psychopath, or if I'll develop schizophrenia one day. It's exhausting.
And when I feel good, it's easy to forget that it never really goes away. Like any other chronic illness that you can see, my chronic illness doesn't go away just because the palpitations stop. This will forever be a part of me.
It seems easier to talk about mental health when you're at that point of looking in from the outside.
When you feel pretty good.
And I've been coming out of my cage and I've been doing just fine...or something like that, and I can control my triggers well enough that my nails have grown out and they don't regularly break when I wash the dishes. But there's been times I've legitimately weighed the pros and cons of cutting off the tips of my own fingers to keep myself from fucking biting them. Or picking them. Or thinking about biting them and picking them.
I think a lot of mentally ill people are afraid of the good times because it means you will inevitably feel like shit again, and that's a fair and valid reality for a lot of us. I know I will have times again where I can't function normally. I know I will wish I wasn't alive again one day, because it's happened before.
I still feel the occasional bout of mania, and that awful feeling that something dark is coming. An inevitable crash. I still get obsessed with things. I try to put it to good use now. I try to act on the obsessions, as long as they aren't truly unhealthy.
Currently, it's writing. I've been filling notebooks with, mostly sub par garbage, but the relief is incredible. It's therapeutic because I can say any fucked up thing I want, and it doesn't hurt anybody. I also have been trying to do more things that make me uncomfortable. My driving radius has gotten larger, and I'm having an easier time in social situations.
Mental illness has a tendency to make you feel like a failure at everything you do. Lucky for me (jk) my OCD forces me to obsessively overwhelm you with content. Photos, paintings, writing, graphic shit....but bipolar disorder tells me that it's all fucking shit and I should stop altogether.
I have 10k photos on Instagram because making things is my therapy. It makes me feel like I'm contributing something to the world, even if no one likes it. It's how I unload feelings of self hate, or feelings of inadequacy.
I'm talking about this because I hope it fucking helps someone else who is 30 or 20 or 15 and has no idea what they're doing. There's so much stigma. We all think we're the only ones in the world who don't have our shit together. But I see someone with obvious anxiety every time I leave the house. I see someone engaging in obsessive and/or compulsive behavior. It's everywhere, and we're definitely not fucking alone. It really sucks that we all try to hide it. It sucks that we feel shame.
In reality, we're all extremely fragile and none of us know what we're doing and I wish we could all be a little more gentle with each other. So remember, while everyone else may look like they're fine...that's not always the case. We need to work together to make each other feel better. Next time you're up try to talk about the down, because you never know when someone might really need to hear that we're in this shit show together.
Love and Vibes.
Chels-