Please, please, please keep reaching out to mental health professionals and helplines if, like me, you can’t do this alone. You will find someone who gets it even if you have to push through several options. The barriers to help suck. The cost, the waiting. Don’t give up–there is a way through this.
The following post deals with some tough topics.
Sometimes the hardest thing is getting started.
I’ve been away for a while. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to share; it’s that life has just been too much. Every day is a monumental effort just to get up, mask up, and get through the day.
On top of the daily struggle, I’ve been hit with a lot of childhood stuff that I’m still making sense of. My whole world has been shaken up. It’s a rethink of everything I thought was working.
Previously, I preached about progress and achievement. Because it was working. It got me out of my first flirtations with suicide and brought me to the more positive zone I was writing from. But somewhere along the way, it got toxic.
By endlessly focusing on progress and achievement, I was feeding my logical brain at the expense of suppressing my emotions (as I have for decades). Problem is there’s only so long you can push things down before they resurface, and when they resurfaced for me, it was more than I’ve ever had to deal with in one go while supporting my family, while studying full-time, while hiding everything from everyone close to me.
My god the noise, the distraction. If I work hard, consume knowledge, output, output, output I get to feel like things are getting better without having to face the underlying issue–something is wrong emotionally, and it has been for most of my life.
Until I figure that part out I’m lost.
And it’s so confronting. There’s been a huge shift from mental to physical pain. I can’t logic or achieve my way out of this one. My executive function is broken–the very thing that used to get me through the darkness is now unreliable. It’s like my IQ has crashed. What used to take me hours now takes me weeks.
Something happened to me when I was little, but amnesia is shielding me from uncovering what that was. My body is screaming at me that something happened. I feel the flashbacks, the triggers, the disproportionate internal rage, but my mind has checked out–witness protection. Absolute dysregulation into fight/flight mode, then collapsing into freeze/fawn. Until I find balance, I can’t uncover and reprocess what happened. Just a glimpse is intense.
I honestly feel like I’m running out of time.
Suicidality is so complicated to understand if you’ve never been there. From the outside it makes absolutely no sense–you’ve got so much going for you/how could you do that to the people you care about the most? But after decades of pain, it gets harder and harder to fight. Every day is a fight. I’ve got nothing left. My mind is tapping out. It starts whispering about a logical solution…
I know the potential I have–I don’t hate myself, I don’t have low self-esteem. I’ve worked through that. I know I can be a positive influence in the world, but I can’t do it alone anymore. I just wish the people I care about could try to step into my shoes. It’s not about you–it’s about decades of redlining to exhaustion. The push and pull. Mind and now body have just had enough.
There has to be a way forward. Despite a history of reaching out for help and things going wrong, I decided in my darkest hour to persist. I called all the helplines. I managed to access (limited) counselling, but this has set me on a positive trajectory.
I’m aware of how fragile things are, so I’m not funnelling too much hope into any one source of help, but the therapist I’ve started seeing really gets it and is able to handle my emotions without judgement and guide me to understanding and to a way forward.
Additionally, she seems aware of the barriers in receiving help, so has put me in touch with other organisations so I’m not fully reliant on her limited counselling sessions. One of the organisations she put me in touch with has very much the same attitude, so I have at least a couple of months of support. Sometimes all you need is a little (reliable) hope.
If you are the one providing hope, please take the weight of that responsibility seriously – someone’s life may depend on it.
If you are in need of hope: despite being completely consumed by darkness for many of the past 7 months, I’m navigating towards a faint glimmer of light, and I see a fragile possibility that things are going to work out.
Hope is possible for you. You will likely have to dig deep despite the exhaustion, but what have you got to lose? Give it one more day.
Things may get worse before they get better, but that’s all the more reason to reach out to every support you can without depending on any one of them.
You have value.
You are loved.
Find your strength.
Find your reason(s) to keep going.
The world is better with you in it.
Love JR
thejourneyx 