Tag: isolating

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8 Things That Plague My Life Because Of Mental Illness

Mental illness, like any other illness, brings with it many changes and things that we have to cope with on a day to day basis. We have to take these changes and learn to live with them and not allow them to consume our every moment. If at all possible, we have to accept them and realize that no matter what happens we can live, in spite of everything.

  1. Completing a task that once seemed so simple. Most simple task that we all perform on a daily basis, we don’t even think about; we just do them.  Driving on the highway (something I haven’t done for 6 years now) the fear itself paralyzes me. Every task that I perform I will now replay over and over in my mind.
  2. Being unable to work. “Not working, I do not work, I cannot work.” Now that makes me angry; I worked for 28 years and loved it (most times). It now makes me feel so worthless. I wish I could, there’s nothing I need more, both for my mental health and for the income that we so desperately need. It seems so simple but for me it seems impossible. 
  3. Fatigue! Whether from my medication, mental fatigue or just plain exhaustion from fighting to be okay. Tiredness is an everyday occurrence that controls what you can or can’t do in  your day.
  4. Isolating! Days when you feel like hiding away or not coming out of your bedroom (but that’s not an option for me). Sometimes you just want to hide “YOU” from the world or vice versa
  5. .’Zoning Out’. I’ll just kind of withdraw from a conversation I was holding and zone out, unblinking, staring blankly at nothing. Maybe sitting in a room of people and totally separating yourself from everyone and everything in the room and creating your space in your mind.
  6. Sighing!  Everyone thinks I’m angry or frustrated all of the time, when really I’m just exhausted and overwhelmed. And sighing is just a release of negative energy.
  7. Losing my “Train of Thought”. I can lose my train of thought mid-sentence and often forget very common words. My mind just goes blank and I fumble for the word. Many times I have to be reminded of where I was and what I was talking about. This could be both frustrating and humiliating.
  8. Memory! I believe we can all forget things at one time or another. But for me there are blocks of my life that I forgot. Details that I can never recall. A song that once I probably knew every word; I now have to trust to writing the words on paper because I cannot depend on my memory anymore. Maybe it’s best I do not remember some things, maybe I don’t remember for a reason.

These are just a few things that my illness as plagued my life with, there are many more. But I have tried, to the best of my ability, to live above my illness. It’s one moment, one hour and one day at a time; it’s what we have. We cannot live in the past, we cannot dwell on the future but we can live for the moment!

 

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Inside My Broken Mind

It’s evening, my high point of the day; evenings seem to give my mind a little reprieve. I feel like a minister preparing for his sermon. What can I say that would help someone today? What can I say that would help myself today? My search for healing and peace are never ending.

I compare my mind to that of an hamster on a hamster wheel; always moving but getting no where. Thoughts enter your mind that we have no power over. What we have to realize is that; that’s all they are, thoughts and nothing more. Taking control of these thoughts and realizing that they can’t harm us is the first step to recovery.

While these thoughts are controlling our mind, we have to concentrate on our breathing, that distracts us from our thoughts, which are usually dark and ugly. It is a never ending nightmare. Yet we long for night time and sleep to escape our nightmare. Sleep is our only escape.

We watch everyone around us, living life as if all is well, but in reality we know it’s not. We want the world to stop and let us get onboard. We’ve fallen off and can’t get back on. We are swimming in an ocean of pain, trying to keep our head above water and hopefully one day will learn to swim like everyone else. But right now we are drowning; drowning in our own thoughts.

Everyone experiences depression differently. But during my major episode, the world looked dark, what was beautiful; looked ugly. The simplest task seemed impossible. I felt I was slowly dying while watching everyone else play, laugh and smile. Those things felt impossible for me, that I was not worth any of them.

Depression is utterly isolating. You hide inside your head, knowing that no one can see what’s going on inside. You live in a world of your own, afraid to come out. An overwhelming fear of your own life and mind.

Everything seems meaningless, including previous accomplishments and what had given life meaning. Anything that made you feel a sense of self-worth, self confidence or self value; just vanishes. But over time, with a lot of hard work, you can find meaning again. It’s difficult to describe all of this in a way that someone who’s never experienced it can make sense of it, because it never always made sense to me.

My depression manifested itself through uncontrollable emotion. But a better way of describing it is a constant feeling of numbness. You felt nothing!

When you wake up, you don’t want to get out of bed; life just seems too big, too unbearable. All you feel is sadness. You wish you could sleep all day and never wake up, where dreams are better than life (the life inside your head). Sleep was an escape from reality. But I have taught my brain that reality is not that bad and I can get through each day (one day at a time).

Now I try to stay outside my mind, not always listen to what my mind is saying. But enjoy the things that I do have around me and be thankful for the little things. This takes time and practice but it’s what you have to do if you are going to survive this “battlefield of the mind”.