#depression

cw a bit of self harm discussion + mental health issues + parents

The thing I don’t like about mental illnesses with a component of a strong delusion: usually the delusion don’t make you feel better. It tortures you. Yeah there are cases when delusion of some kind actually helps with the trauma, although it complicates life outside the traumatic event. But at least it works somehow! It’s doing the job!

And sometimes you are doing kinda ok, and the delusion hits. And now you believe someone’s after you, or that your child is possessed, or that if you don’t cut yourself, your close ones would suffer. What the fuck? I hate that.

When I was climbing out of my own delusion (personally fragmentation to be accurate), I was often thinking “I’d love to go completely insane, it would be easier”. Mostly I thought of falling down the delusion that let’s me to not deal with reality. But sometimes it felt like anything would be better than trying to get back on a route of the normal life. I wanted to be officially written off. Left alone.

Sometimes you meet people like that. Everyone just doesn’t give a fuck about them anymore. Nobody believes they can climb out their parents’ basement and have an established life on their own. They don’t have a job or have a really undemanding one. They can have some diagnosis… Or not. Everyone have at least heard about a person like that.

I wanted to become it because I was so so exhausted of people wanting me to have a happy life in the end. I wanted to be an acknowledged failure. What a bad place to be, damn it.

A while ago I talked with my mom about all that, about me getting better. She asked what I want to do next, I told her but noticed I am still unwell and uncertain. She said it’s alright. And if I need half a year more, well, I can have it. Whatever. She just wants me not to push myself on too hard.

It’s nice that she finally acknowledged that I’m mentally ill and that can’t change. Before that she was putting deadlines on my healing and resting all the time. And it did not help me. I was so stressed all the time trying at least to make it in time, but it doesn’t work like that.

You cannot heal a chronic illness or put it on a leash in an exact amount of time. Like diabetes. You cannot try very hard and make a cure for yourself in a year or two. No matter how hard you try. It’s just obvious! It’s a life long work and restrictions and disability.

But mental illness is seen like a personality flaw, or a flu, or something like that. Mom was constantly worried about something that’s be after I’m cured magically. Like ohhh you should not take so many meds, it’s bad for your liver. Fuck, if I won’t take it, there will be no me to care about the liver!

I hope she really gets it better now. I really do. I don’t have anyone else to rely on like her. She’s a rock steady woman, stubborn, persistent and resourceful. And she believes that a parent should care about their child no matter what. I don’t think I have anyone in the world who is like her to me. I want us to have it better than we had it in the past.

Asa 1

So, mania ended and now I’m…depressed. Ugh.

It’s was hard to read. It’s was hard to watch tv. Writing makes me almost cringe. Research, I can do.

Trying to figure part of a plot for a story, just running through my head, and that’s challenging.

All I wanna do is hurt myself to stop myself from feeling this way but that’s bad. So, no.

Writing in my journal helps a little.

I wanna cry but can’t seem to actually do it.

I don’t wanna go to watch the game tomorrow but it cost a lot of money, so gonna go even if I’m miserable. Gonna bring headphones to help lower the volume.

Hubby is trying to help but there is only so much he can do.

Reparenting after a traumatic childhood is so important, but not only in terms of self care and self acceptance. The reason people perpetuate cycles of abuse is because they never learned what healthy interpersonal relationships look like.

For example, in my teenage years, I was extremely depressed but forced to run on fumes because that’s how my parents operated. I was taught to work through my depression instead of treating it. This is a survival strategy that may have served my parents for some time, but they never recognized it as such. It not only caused burn out for them, but also caused their child to develop high functioning depression.

Any time I brought up mental health concerns or negative feelings about something, my emotions were policed and invalidated. Instead of comforting me, my parents would begin venting about their lives, which created so much emotional distance between us that i just stopped talking to them.

Im not sure where this developed in my parents, but I know that it likely came from parental relationships or a toxic work environment.

So now, as a fresh adult, I find myself thinking in these patterns that have been instilled in me since childhood without even thinking about it. I was raised to be individualistic and not depend on others. When my friends vent to me, I feel uncomfortable. My trauma emotionally stunted me to the point where I can’t connect with my body to feel my emotions.

Ensuring that you don’t treat people the way your parents treated you takes conscious effort. You cannot claim to have good relationships if you aren’t checking yourself and critically thinking about these things. If you were constantly dissociated as a kid and seeing people who are connected to their emotions makes you uncomfortable, that is a thing you need to process and work on, because it will effect the people you care about.

And DONT GET ME STARTED on repression. I have met so many gay people who get pressed when you ask them if they’re going to pride and separate themselves from “those gays.” People who shit on masc 4 masc because its “too gay.” When you are a gay or trans childhood trauma survivor and you have not done the work to accept yourself, you will end up embodying heterosexuality in gay relationships to assimilate. You will shun your community for being “too much.” You will embody gender roles to fit in with cisgender men and women. AND THAT HURTS OTHER PEOPLE!

“oh im too far gone things will never get better” no. look at me. in high school, my anxiety was so bad i couldn’t even ask to go to the bathroom without freaking out. i had panic attacks every week. now, i go out all the time. i go places alone. im the one pushing my friends towards new experiences. i talk to strangers. and have i had awkward and scary experiences? yes. but the amount of fun experiences ive had vastly outnumbers those.

it takes a lot of work. ive been in therapy for years now, and although ive brought down my sessions, the skills ive learned there have been invaluable. ive been on lexapro for about three years now. and getting out of a stressful environment was also a major factor. but i promise you, you are not beyond help. things can get better. they will get better. you can get better.

love is possible. but love is also cruel.

I can’t lie to you. I don’t know how many more times I can say “not today” anymore.

If you believe in your heart that the Gospel is all about blessings, then the devil has access to your soul and heart because you are not rooted and grounded in love. As a result, you may experience discouragement, depression, anxiety, and feelings of not being good enough for God because you have not been taught the truth and the heart of Jesus.

The way God set me free from depression was by helping me believe that I was more than someone who simply had to accept being depressed. He encouraged my heart to believe that I was worth more.

There was a girl on Tumblr about a year ago who made a post about how she was depressed and had asked for prayer. I felt compassion for her, so I prayed for her, spoke life over her, and commanded depression to leave in a comment on her post, but she was not online at the time.

Later that day, she sent me a message back saying that right when she read it, something lifted off of her and she wasn’t depressed anymore! She was so excited and happy, and I was overjoyed and thankful to God.

Prayer of faith can bring healing and freedom, but simply connecting with the heart of God and believing that the blood of Jesus says you’re worth more than the life you’ve known can bring freedom as well. ✨🙏

As someone as actively depressed and suicidal as me, I rarely ever say anything about going to kill myself when something bad or upsetting happens.

Like when something goes wrong and you respond with “I’m going to jump off a bridge, I swear” or “I’m gonna become a statistic.” I never do that

Instead, I say “I’m gonna make some else a statistic” or “I’m gonna throw someone off a bridge.”

Often times depression is the result of becoming depressing things instead of like your strong God. You become like the one you worship.

My depression is so powerful no therapist can defeat it.

i feel unmoored, untethered, adrift. None of my usual interests are grounding me anymore. I feel like im alowly spiraling into insanity.

Why is it that people make it seem like it’s wrong being happy with what you have and who you are? Everyone around me seems to always be striving for more and more but I already have the life I want and it feels like no one wants to be with me because I’m “too comfortable”.

I don’t wanna be rich. I don’t wanna study abroad. I don’t wanna be stressed all the time trying to reach a goal that keeps moving. I wanna wake up, work, study something I like, draw, watch my show, read my book, have a drink with my friends and spend my money on books and cute merch and my cats and fish. Why do they make comfort seem like a bad thing? I never thought I’d make it this far. Every day is more than I could have hoped.

Life is pain, no matter what. I’ve been dead for a long time now, so if I’m finally physically dead, don’t act surprised, I’ve been dead for a long time now, the only difference is the physical body is catching up with the mental one.

I just took an edible because today I just want to escape and try to feel good all day.

That, and there’s pains and a headache.

Weekends can be hard for me. There are many days in my life when the only thing anchoring me against the winds of self-doubt and despair is the knowledge I’m in the right line of work, and am privileged with the responsibility of affecting young kids’ days. But two days a week, I wake up and have no purpose.

Most times, I can ride that out with the rest of life’s little (or large) responsibilities, but sometimes there is just nothing but the knowledge that the hours will come and they will go, and I simply have to Be. It’s just harder some days than others.