Will I Ever Be Ok Again

Trigger warning: suicide

I am not always an easy person to be effectually.

I'm sure that nigh people feel that mode, and to some extent it'southward probably true. But at that place are times when I am specially, peculiarly, really atrocious to be around. What makes these times fifty-fifty more hard is that they usually coincide with my periods of mental health crisis, which means that the point where my behaviour is most probable to drive my friends away is also exactly when my self-esteem is at its lowest ebb.

I don't have a very adept instinct for boundaries. I have a hard time enforcing my own, and I'm not e'er good at knowing how to respect those belonging to other people. I call back that for a long time my personal boundaries were treated more than as points of negotiation than hard lines, and past outcome I don't have a very solid foundation when it comes to agreement how they work. If someone spells them out to me, that's fine – simply in my feel that kind of articulation often doesn't happen until after the relationship has been damaged and feelings accept been hurt.

I am a great friend until I'thou non. I am fine except for when I am in a crisis, which in a bad year can last for several months on stop.

I am a cryer. I am someone who panics loudly. I am a person who feels dread everywhere – in my teeth and the tips of my fingers and deep in my bones. There are days when I know with an accented certainty that I am a miserable monster who volition never feel happiness over again.

I have sat in my living room at three in the afternoon and three in the morning time and every hour in betwixt consumed with an unhappiness so intense that I'thou not certain how to describe information technology except to say that it merely is.And it swells upward so huge inside of me that it obscures everything else including my sense of myself and the passage of time so that there is no more past and at that place is no more than future and there is just this exquisitely atrocious present that tin can but peradventure be escaped through death.

I know. I know. Simply also that's just how it is sometimes, you lot know?

And once yous're in that location, you just proceed going further down the rabbit pigsty. All you can talk about is what an awful person you are, and the more yous say it, the truer it feels. When your friend disagrees, you get angry and charge them of not existence on your side (the joke is, of form, that no one is on your side considering what the fuck is your side). Y'all show up at their place crying, request if you can crash on their burrow because you're non sure you can survive a dark alone at dwelling. When they call to check on you, you say that yous're going through the medicine cabinet trying to effigy out the deadliest combination of pills.

These are all awful things to do and I am ashamed to write them out merely at the time they felt inevitable. I didn't know how else to be, and every new friendship meant counting downwards the minutes until they discovered the real me, the atrocious me, the one who cries over dinner, in the grocery shop, during a very normal conversation that shouldn't exist distressing at all. I felt like I'd tricked people into wanting to spend time with me, and much of my mental and concrete energy was used keeping up the image of what an ethical not-awful person I was. That is, until the next crude patch hit and I couldn't sustain it anymore.

I did not drive every friend abroad. Just I can honestly say that I did drive some friends abroad.

*                    *                   *

When I was going through a specially hard fourth dimension in university, a friend that I oft leaned on for support – permit'due south call her C – suggested that I make a listing of all the things I hated nigh myself. "Once you've got that listing," she said, "you'll know what you desire to change."

C was big on self-improvement. She did stuff like quitting the school'southward meal program and buying herself a bar refrigerator so that she could amend follow The Zone nutrition in the privacy of her own dorm room. She was the kind of person who always seemed to intuitively know what she needed – a new carpet for her room, an hour at the gym, a serenity night in watching Sense and Sensibility. And, in marked contrast to me, she didn't have frequent weepy meltdowns nigh how much of a mess her life was. And then when she suggested writing out all the worst things about myself, I readily agreed. Later all, if I couldn't place the problem, how on earth was I going to come upward with a solution?

Then I parked myself in the library'south atrium one afternoon to make this list. Some other friend – permit'due south telephone call her K – asked me what I was doing. When I told her that C had told me that I could improve my life by thinking upwardly all the things I didn't similar about myself and and then changing them, Yard said something like: "You know what will really improve your life? Getting rid of the friends who tell you to brand lists of the things yous hate about yourself. Maybe start hanging around with the people who want you to similar yourself for who you are."

In the decade or then since then, I've realized that both of their ideas accept merit.

I should exist able to expect that my friends honey me for who I am, including the wailing banshee that lives somewhere in the shadowlands of my centre who believes that she is anything but loveable.

But I should also try to take what responsibility I can for what I say and do when that banshee does her best to trash the political party and leave.

Because that banshee is me and I am that banshee and even though I'm all the same not quite certain what to do with that information I know it'due south important.

*                    *                   *

I've seen a few debates lately almost what the "right" kind of cocky-care is. Should yous do the dishes or leave them in the sink while yous take a nap? Should yous make proficient on your plans and get out with friends even when you experience crappy or should you bail with some transparent excuse? Should you clean your room or crouch downwards with a adept book and permit your future self worry most picking up your clothes?

I don't think at that place are whatsoever cut and dried answers to these questions. There'due south no practiced way to have a mental wellness crisis. Sometimes it's smarter to wash your dishes and sometimes you need a break and it'south hard to know in the moment which 1 is truthful. On the 1 manus, a messy apartment makes me feel like the world is endmost in on me, but on the other hand the best prescription a doc e'er wrote for me said "do more things that you bask." Maybe the matter that feels worst is non making a choice and spending a iv hour stretch sobbing on the couch unable to determine whether you should clean the bath or brand yourself a cup of tea.

*                    *                   *

Here are a few things I've learned after virtually two decades of weathering my own breakdowns:

1. All feelings are valid, but they are not necessarily an accurate reflection of reality. Treat feelings as symptoms rather than the disease, which is to say do what you can to alleviate them while at the same fourth dimension looking for a root cause.
2. When y'all are downwardly the rabbit pigsty, there is not a unmarried thing anyone tin say to brand y'all experience better about yourself. The best they tin do is agree your hand while you go through it.
3. Information technology helps to ready for the bad times during the adept times. I accept a word doc of all the reasons why my friends probably don't hate me that I go through and read when I feel like all of my friends probably detest me.
4. Look a mean solar day before ending a friendship or quitting a job or running away from the thing that you really want to run away from. You lot might be making the right pick, but it rarely hurts to give yourself some breathing room before committing.
5. It'southward practiced to create a condom infinite for yourself on social media – a group chat with friends y'all trust or a Facebook page where people can post stuff for you and commiserate about mental health woes. I know this isn't everyone's jam, but I live in terror of exhausting people with my shit then it'due south better for me to have an opt-in system where friends can choose to participate if they experience upwardly to it.
6. Your survival rate up until now has been 100%. That is the all-time possible rate. You have made it through every bad 24-hour interval and then far, and statistics are on your side when information technology comes to making it through the next ane.
7. I don't know if my expert days outnumber my bad and I'm not sure it'south worth counting them, just I do know that after each storm blows itself out I'chiliad e'er grateful to nevertheless be here.

If you're in a bad place, I hope some of this helps. Happy January, darlings.

sometimes you need to observe that internal conditions map (not to mention that internal weather girl so you lot can get hot tips on her bouffant hairdo)

bolenthilove.blogspot.com

Source: https://bellejar.ca/2016/01/08/what-to-do-when-you-feel-like-your-world-is-ending-and-everybody-hates-you-and-nothing-will-ever-be-ok-again/

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