No One

For many people it’s not worth their while to hide everything they’re dealing with. For others, they use everything they have in them to keep people from noticing. I’m the second. I grew up in an environment where I mostly had to raise myself. I had to be self sufficient at a very early age. My sister had pretty severe learning disabilities and a serious mental disorder. My parents had their hands full trying to take care of her. So I was mostly left to figure this out for myself. I learned quickly not to be an extra burden and to keep my problems to myself. I don’t blame my parents, they did what they had to do. Somewhere along the lines I took this mindset too seriously. I can not burden others with my problems. I need to be the strong one. Always ready to help others. I learned how to turn off my own emotions and my own needs for whatever I perceived as the greater good at the moment. What was once a coping skill and a defense against my situation, soon became a serious hinderance. I don’t know how to depend on anyone else. I don’t know how to not be guarded. Every time I’ve been open and honest, I’ve been burned. I survived my childhood mostly on my own,  I can survive adulthood the same way. I know I can get myself trough most things. What happens when I’m too burned out to be strong? What happens when I’m the one who needs help? Where do I turn to? Who can I really trust? No one. I am alone.

Breakthrough

A breakthrough in the psychiatric world is not necessarily a positive thing. To the general public it means something exciting has been discovered. For a psychiatric patient, it means your symptoms are breaking through the barrier your medications put up. This is something to always keep an eye out for as it can have consequences. Recently I was unfortunate enough to have a breakthrough with my medicine. It becomes so difficult to think straight. All you can focus on is your level of anxiety and depression. Everything becomes so clouded. Yes I used to deal with this daily before, but I'm not used to it anymore. It feels so much worse when you're no longer prepared for it. You begin to feel like you're losing your mind. However you feel the need to resist that fate and try to come out alive. It's all consuming and absolute pure torture. Your life falls apart before your very eyes all within your mind. You can't see a way for your misery to ever stop. So you take more medicine than before, just hoping that will somehow calm your mind.... and wait. 

A Crisis Of Reality

It's been several months since I've gotten on medication. The confusion has passed and I'm fully experiencing normal. However this was an earth shattering process for me. Once the first couple weeks passed and my body adjusted to my new levels, it was time to start processing everything. See it's a very strange experience to have everything in your mind change but everything around you hasn't changed at all. You start to see the world with a new clarity and calmness that you never had before. For me personally, that was extremely rattling. I had a crisis of sorts. Suddenly I started to see what normal people felt and lived like. I was in shock and so frustrated. Is this what you people live like!? It's a paradise! You have it so incredibly easy! I had to fight every single day to deal with the most basic issues. I had horrible anxiety over insignificant things. Confession: I had a full blown anxiety attack over the wrong dickens village being set up at our house. Normal people don't deal with these problems. I had to live my whole life with this undiagnosed while people enjoyed easier lives. Why had I waited so long to get help?  It's hard to understand just how crazy you were thinking until you take the meds and you're not thinking crazy anymore. It was a several month process for me to stop and look at every aspect of my life and decide exactly how I perceived them now. It was time to realize what was anxiety talking previously and what was reality. This rattled me to the core as I fought with my new logical reality and the chaos I left behind. It's hard to realize that only you are changing.

Passing Through The Tunnel

Adjusting to a medication you'll probably take for the rest of your life is a strange thing. The transition period is nothing I expected. Yes I knew there could be nausea and such while I was adjusting but I still was unprepared. What I experienced was nausea to where I was barely eating, jaw clenching where I thought I'd break a tooth, and so tired that I just wanted to sleep all day. The worst side effect by far was the foggy feeling. I wasn't able to process anything. Everything was through a long tunnel of me straining to process what was happening around me. My ability to translate Spanish back into English in my head was gone. With no cut and dry answer to what would be permanent side effects and what was temporary, this was incredibly discouraging. Would this be my new reality? If this low level of processing was how people normally lived, I didn't want any part in it. I preferred the anxiety. I decided to try half of the dose and saw a slight lightening of side effects but not enough to satisfy me. However I talked to others who take it as well and they encouraged me to push through. With each new day, the side effects slowly started to dwindle and the dark foggy tunnel slowly started to pass. After about two weeks I had returned to my new normal though I was unsure of what all that would mean. How did I know if I had reached normal or if I needed more or a different medicine?