This is a blog post. Can you believe it?!

Life, I have found, is much like a shitty wooden roller coaster you find at that carnival in town that no one’s ever heard of. At first it seems like a good idea to ride, but a mild concussion and a bruised rib later you start to realize that sometimes it’s best to not do things only because you want a good story to tell.

This is how I like to think of my mental illnesses. I spend time and energy concocting lies to tell family, friends, acquaintances and anyone else who may ask about my position in life…but what does this do for me? Increase shame? Yes. Buy me some time? Eh…maybe. Give me an excuse to think I’m somehow a successful human being? Bingo! But, uh, that’s not really a healthy way for me to go about things. I’ve started a personal project that involves me slowly being more open about my struggles and where I am in life. Don’t like that I live with my parents at 23? Well suck it, Barbara. Don’t like that my openness is making you uncomfortable? Then go ahead and shove that Miller Lite up your ass, David.

Now I’m not saying that this is the best path for everyone to take. There are many risks and dangers to making a move like this. Having a good grasp of your mental state and keeping track of the coping skills you have mastered is the best way to tell if being more open is good for you. There are many mentally ill people who don’t have supportive parents and siblings like I do; just as there are many who don’t have steady therapeutic and psychiatric help like I do. Being mentally ill puts us at risk in the context of the public. I’ve been open with people who end up putting me down, shaming me or calling me a liar and it is the risk I run with this new project.

Recently I had to put it on hold due to a quick downward spiral I experienced this past month (hence the AWOL status of this blog) once I was put on Wellbutrin. In the past I’ve been on Zoloft and Prestique and both sent me down a horrible suicidal hole…aaand the Wellbutrin did the same thing. I was a mere shell of a person…a shell with the capability to always be in a depressed and angry mood. I was an absolute joy to be around! -.- In the end my Lexapro dose was increased to 30mg and I don’t want to jinx anything but it’s working out really well so far! And thus the project shall begin once more!

Let me give you an update about a few apps I’ve been using that help me de-stress and keep myself accountable and knowledgeable about my conditions.

Abyssrium: Yes, I know what you’re thinking…this name sounds like something that will drag your depression and self-hate to depths you didn’t even know were attainable before, but fear not because it is actually an awesome app that lets you create and maintain your own coral reef!!!!! Complete with a cutie pie talking rock formation, tons of corals and fish, and cool secret challenges that let you unlock rare fish this app has been a really fun and uplifting to play. The game structure is tap-based, so you earn vitality (the “money” of the game) both over elapsed time and through in-game tapping. You used the Vitality to level up your rock, coral and add new fish and depending on what you level up your tap or elapse earnings will increase. The best part is the rock itself and the fish. The rock will make faces and say cute things like “have you eaten today?” or give you clues on how to unlock secret fish. The fish are very cute and stylized and very accurate to their real life counterparts. If you’re like me and pretend to be David Attenborough while playing this game then good on ya, mate!

Dailyo: This is a mood tracker app that is pretty awesome and easy to use. I first downloaded an app that was called Mood Tracker and it wasn’t really what I was looking for seeing as you had to pay money to have your entries be private so I ended up deleting it once people started following me and commenting on my mood entries…yuck! Dailyo is private and free from the start so you don’t have to pay anything for it or any of its functions. To make entries you first input your mood- and to be honest this is the one part of the app I don’t like as much- you have a choice between Rad, Good, Meh, Fugly (like…yikes?), and Awful. Yeah, the mood labels are simplified and have weird names, but beyond that I really love the app. After you input your mood you can accompany it with an activity- and they have lots of activity icons that you can label to mean anything you want them too, which I think is awesome! Then below that there is a notes box where you can write however much you want in case you want to remember something specific about the mood, activity or contextual incidents surrounding your mood. One of the best parts is that it will have a notification dropdown box on your phone screen if you haven’t put in an entry, which is really helpful for people like me who forget to track fairly often. This app also has a very helpful “statistics” page that shows you your monthly mood chart, your mood counts, activity counts and a listing of your best and worst day according to the entries you’ve put in. I love, love, loooove this feature because as someone with a million and one illnesses I often only remember my bad periods, so this app really helps me remember the times I feel motivated and happy too! The is also a calendar function that will show your average moods for each day. I totally recommend this app to anyone who suffers from mood regulation issues or has trouble with dissociation, bipolar disorder…really anything, honestly. It is a really great tool.

Other than these apps, I’ve been working on reevaluating my values and goals I want to achieve. I’ve noticed that over the past year I have slowly been moving away from the activities and values that mean the most to me. The only value I haven’t strayed from is justice. I am happy that I have stayed true to my activism, but I want my creativity, curiosity and independence back and I want to work on reintegrating these back into my life. I want to create art that is only for my satisfaction instead of forcing myself to create lifeless pieces that I see as societally acceptable. I want to be out in nature more instead of letting my anxiety and past experiences keep me locked up indoors all the time. Most of all I want to feel like I am contributing to my life experience and to my parents since they’ve been so kind in letting me stay with them and helping support me in every way. I honestly enjoy living with them so much and I wouldn’t mind staying here for a while, but I want to be contributing to them financially, even if it isn’t that much.

Writing this all out…it’s crazy to think about how many ups and downs I’ve had in the past month alone but I feel like I’m on an upswing and I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth!!

All the love and care to my readers and everyone out there struggling!

-M

In a Month…

Trigger Warning: suicide mention, medicine mention, sexual abuse,

In a month’s time I have seen my lowest low and an unnatural high. For the past year I had been off my medicine after I stopped going to see my old psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist I was seeing was a very soft speaking and kind woman. She had a very calm demeanor which sometimes borderlined on seeming distant or dismissive. For someone like me, who has been reading people’s body language/vocal tone/facial expression/eyes, it was a bit strange and off-putting somehow. Given the extreme anxiety I had I guess it isn’t abnormal that I would read her aura as something that reflected on me. I thought “It must be me…maybe I am a bad or difficult patient. Am I saying weird things? Am I making sense? Is my frustration coming out too strong? Maybe she is writing down that I am a huge fake…” and so on and so forth. Eventually I began having issues with a medicine I had been prescribed, Trazodone, and it was giving me immense stomach pains when I would wake up in the morning. I deal with general sleep issues and insomnia so I was prescribed Trazodone to help with that. The first few months were great and I was getting about 6 hours of sleep instead of the 4 or 3 I would be normally getting. However as the time went on I was waking up early in the morning with pains like I had been stabbed in the stomach. It seemed like it was triggered when I would stretch or tense my muscles. I have a pretty high pain tolerance so I didn’t bring it up to my psychiatrist until I was really upset about the constant pain. I went in a told her what was happening; that I was experiencing horrible pain and wanted to try a different sleep aid. I also mentioned that I was worried my antidepressant wasn’t working as well anymore.

Well…three visits later (aka 3 months later) I’m still taking both medications and she either isn’t listening, doesn’t believe me, or she isn’t understanding. By this time I was so frustrated and anxious to be around her that I just didn’t ever show up there again. I was so devastated about the whole experience and I had many voices in my head telling me that I had done something bad to bring this whole experience onto myself. That’s a pretty common path for my thoughts to take. After that I decided I would try to continue my recovery without the use of medicine…and it took me until a month ago to realize just how far down my mental health had fallen. My temper and anger flares were destructive and extreme (one kicked hole in the wall and one twisted cell phone later…oops), I was experiencing major mood swings at least 15 times a day and I was extremely suicidal. It felt like my mind was way more out of my control than usual and I was becoming extremely scared. I’ve always been an angry person because of my childhood sexual abuse but I had never been the type to show my anger violently. My OCD quickly latched onto that fear and all the sudden I was obsessively imagining myself hurting other people. My anxiety went through several roofs and I became absolutely terrified of my emotions. I was shutting down to how I dealt with things as a young child and I was risking all the progress I had been making in my recovery.

My therapist recommended a new psychiatrist that many of her other clients see and like a lot. There was a lot of apprehension on my side because this psychiatrist, though he was the most empathetic psychiatrist my therapist knows, is a man. I am very distrustful and scared of men. In my life I haven’t had a consistent positive male role model and growing up men were part of my active abuse so I never knew how to form healthy and safe relationships with them. I was almost certain that I wouldn’t be able to talk about my past of sexual abuse with him, but at the same time I was in such a critical condition and I didn’t want to give my anxiety priority. One day I sat down and wrote an organized list of my illnesses, symptoms and concerns. Psychiatrists make me nervous already because I have a lot of paranoia around being seen as a faker or someone who is just trying to get pills I don’t need (yet another one of my OCD thoughts) so I wanted to make sure I was as prepared as possible to make a good and responsible first impression. I wanted to find ways of decreasing my anxiety rather than do what I normally do; avoid. I ended up writing 5 pages that detailed everything along with symptom severity, frequency and how debilitating I find it on a daily basis. I felt a little like the class geek who writes over the page limit on a paper but it did help me feel more organized and I went into the office feeling like I was prepared for any question. In the end I had a great first meeting with him and after two visits I feel like we see eye to eye on many things.

I feel proud I was able to do a lot of things I haven’t been able to do in the past. I found ways to work with or around my anxiety, I faced a big fear and I ultimately put myself first instead of my anxiety. It is a small accomplishment in the larger spectrum of life, but knowing how different I feel now on medicine…it’s so amazing. I feel so proud of myself and I feel proud for being proud of myself. Sometimes I need to sit back and give myself credit for my small steps too. My life right now is made up almost exclusively of small steps and I need to adjust to welcoming that with kind and accepting arms. I love that I wake up and feel excited or curious about the day…those are things I think a lot of neurotypical people take for granted. My passion and my curiosity are two things I hold dear to me and I enjoy those aspects of my personality most so it is devastating feeling like you’ve lost that; like you’ve lost part of yourself.

Mental illness is part of me and I am slowly learning to incorporate it into my identity rather than isolating it from the rest of me. If I want to accept and validate myself then I feel like I need to accept my past, my issues, my illnesses and my limitations. I can be frustrated, angry, sad, excited and curious – I can be anything while also being a mentally ill individual. I can coexist with myself!

-M