The Feel Of Free

on mental health and reaching out

[tw: self-harm]

y’all

y’all

i had a relapse today. it was bad. the scary thing is, it was bad compared to how good things have been this year, but compared to things in the past, it was meh. it’s amazing how quickly we can adapt and accept new normals. i remember when cutting every day/week was normal. i’ve been a cutter for about twelve years, and it has never worried me the way it worries other people. i honestly cannot empathize with how alarmed people get. to me, it’s just skin opening and blood and then it scabs and then it heals. i mean, i’ve also been branded before, so cutting to me has the same impact as any other body modification.

anyway. i had a rough morning, a subsequent breakdown, and at some point when i was crying hysterically in my kitchen with pieces of glass all over the counter and the floor, and a bleeding arm, i decided that mayyyybe it was time to reach out to someone.

my people who know what i’m talking about know how goddamn hard it is to reach out to someone. and say what? “help, i can’t stop crying”? “help, there’s glass all over my kitchen floor”? “help, i’m partaking in a dash of self-mutilation”? 

we keep thinking we’re bothering them, they’re too busy, it’s not a big deal, we should be able to manage this alone, we suck because we’re shit at managing this alone, as evidenced by the glass and the blood and the hysterical crying. 

but we have to force ourselves to do it. we have to make it a habit. we have to get over our fears, because like i’ve said before, those little voices in our heads telling us all these things are a) liars b) trying to kill us. at least in my case, they are. i was sitting there and i realized that i was in the same chair in which i made a suicide attempt seven months ago. 

yo, when God wants me to die, They’ll kill me Themselves. 

until then, i’m reaching out because i need to live. i have shit to do, lives to change, and all that. i’m busy.

# mental health

Posted 1 week ago 23 notes
People get really irritated by mental illness. ‘Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!’ I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, ‘You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.’ It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, ‘Oh, you’re just an attention getter.’ Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice…. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. ‘Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.’ Or: ‘I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?’

— Maria Bamford  (via yeshairy)

# mental health

Reblogged 3 weeks ago from zebablah (Originally from tylercoates) 5,154 notes

let’s talk about anxiety real quick

  1. i’m trying to write final papers, and i usually don’t get efficient until a few days before the deadline when there’s a lot of pressure. trying to do things ahead of time is really hard because i can’t get started. i feel like if i just started, i’d get in the swing of things and it would be fine, but i just can’t start. then i see how much time has passed and the anxiety starts to climb, so i take time out to lower it and do something relaxing, ie not starting, and it cycles on and on. this has been my afternoon. i got home almost 8 hrs ago and haven’t done any work because i can’t focus enough to start. 
  2. then, i start watching obsessed, without thinking how a show about anxiety disorders could trigger my own anxiety. great. 
  3. now, i manage my anxiety by telling myself that i have time, and i always deliver my assignments done well. i always get my papers written, eventually. so in the meantime, i tell myself it’s okay to be ‘inefficient’ and spend 8 hrs reading octavia butler novels, cooking, and watching online tv. as long as i’m okay.
  4. one of the sex education blogs i follow has been answering a lot of asks about vaginal secretions and i had a flashback to when i was dating an ex and i was freaking out cos we were having sex and my discharge was whitish and he was reassuring me that it was normal, happened to some girls. this wouldn’t be fucked up except that he took my virginity by raping me and i’ve blacked out the memory and we ‘dated’ for months afterwards and he is the only person i can’t remember what it was like to fuck and he never used protection and i didn’t know better than to care because i was so fucked up. 
  5. so all of this is spiking my anxiety a lot and i want to cry and i’m feeling the pull to spiral into the hole of omg i can’t call anyone but i know that triggers depression, the thoughts of being alone and abandoned. 
  6. so i am just trying to breathe and be okay

# mental health mental illness

Posted 1 month ago

the bad dominicana: A Dose of Dissociation →

yo, i was so glad when my therapist told me this was called depersonalization. for me, it’s sudden attacks of not knowing who or where i am. it feels like everything in my life never happened to me because it was too much and i couldn’t relate to it. then i’d start panicking because i felt scared and lost in a place i didn’t recognize. it puts me on pause where i just stay still and freak the fuck out in my head.

i was also dissociating when i attempted suicide last fall, so now i’m wary of when it happens because, well, it’s dangerous for me. i can’t think of the future or understand consequences when it happens. 

i’m doing a visual art series linking depersonalization to the feeling of being an ogbanje and having your spirit siblings calling you n’ala mmuo, since the feeling is one of i don’t belong here and i should be dead because this is not my life #yup #artandmentalhealth #intersecting

lapalomaazul:

baddominicana:

flapjackstate:

Today’s gratuitous self-diagnosis is related to dissociation. There are a range of experiences with dissociation, and this made me realise I’m down the more severe end. Today nothing seems real, and I can’t seem to connect with…

# mental health mental illness depersonalization

Reblogged 1 month ago from bad-dominicana (Originally from flapjackstate) 32 notes
Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.

—

EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS.

Depression is not a synonym for being sad or having a bad day/bad week.

It’s not a PHASE. It’s not a CHOICE. It’s not LAZINESS.

spread the word guys.

(via general-grievous)

(Source: sherunsfromdarkness)

# mental health

Reblogged 2 months ago from bad-dominicana (Originally from sherunsfromdarkness) 63,639 notes
“Depression in the clinical sense is a really hard thing for people to empathize with. There’s this bootstraps approach, like, “Why don’t you get out of bed and get a job! It’s all up to you.” But that isn’t for everyone. There is a time when you realize: “Whoa, you’re sick just as if your leg was rotting off.” David Foster Wallace is a hero of mine, and I read an interview with his wife where she said that everyone was shocked when he killed himself, but if he had pancreatic cancer, no one would have been shocked. The guy was not well. I know a lot of people that have been afflicted by anxiety and debilitating depression. It takes this momentum: If you’re not pushing the boulder up the hill, it’s rolling down on you.” — Craig Finn 

I’m not even going to put this in the tags, because this is something really important to me and I’m not going to hide it in a place where people might not even see it or will ignore or Karp will cut me off. 

People who believe that the bootstraps approach is realistic in all cases of depression are delusional, narrow-minded morons. Get out of bed and get a job - wow, what a thoughtful thing for you to say! People don’t realize that not only does depression have lasting emotional effects, it has serious physical effects as well. My stomach problems can be 100% attributed to my depression and anxiety - I have tried numerous diets, attempting to cut out foods to see which would affect my body in what way, and no matter what I ate, no matter if I cut out meat and dairy, my stomach was still a mess. I read an article in the NY Times about a year ago that discussed Charles Darwin’s depression and how he faced numerous stomach problems because of it. When depressed, people are often achy, experience migraines, etc. 

Also, the whole “it’s all in your head!” argument is completely irrelevant. If I punched you in the diaphragm and you were in massive amounts of pain, guess what? The pain would ALL COME FROM THE SIGNALS IN YOUR BRAIN TELLING YOU THAT YOU GOT PUNCHED IN THE FUCKING DIAPHRAGM. SO THAT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD TOO, ASSHOLE. 

Craig Finn makes that remark about pushing a boulder up a hill, and that’s a very accurate metaphor for depression. To fight depression and anxiety, you have to constantly work work work, and all that work is absolutely exhausting. Often I was too exhausted to go to school because I spent so much time trying to sort out and deal with my numerous emotional issues - which, of course, is the lovely Catch-22 about depression. You work so hard to fight it that it sucks the life out of you, you stop to take a breath, and then suddenly everything, all the progress you’ve made, comes crashing back and topples you. 

I have never understood why there’s such a social stigma around depression, anxiety, and every other mental illness - I legitimately have no idea why a good number of people are quick to dismiss such afflictions and believe that they’re all false or trivial or what have you. 

(Source: youdsay)

# mental health depression

Reblogged 2 months ago from zebablah (Originally from youdsay) 1,361 notes
depression is
turning your phone off because you think nobody will try to text or call you anyway
having to deactivate your facebook so you aren’t tempted to impulsively post depressing and attention seeking statuses
being paranoid to the point where you ruin your friendships with people before they have the chance to hurt you
walking into your room and collapsing onto the floor and into tears as soon as you’re out of everyone’s sight
having to say “what?” all the time because you can’t seem to focus on what anyone is saying
looking at your school books and being unable to read or write anything because you just can’t seem to think at all
getting angry at people when they touch you
not being hungry or feeling sick when you try to eat
the feeling of a constant weight on your shoulders
always being tired, no matter how much sleep you get
staying up all night because you don’t want the next day to come
lying to your friends, psychologist and parents, telling them that you’re getting better because you don’t want to stress or worry them anymore
feeling like you’d be better off dead
seeing the worst in people at all times
being unable to take a compliment or accept anything nice towards you
testing people to see if they actually care about you
overthinking things to the point where a kind gesture can become a hateful insult
spilling your whole story to people again and again in the hopes that maybe someone will save you
not being able to take a joke
having to fake a smile all day
hurting the people that you care about the most
asking yourself “why can’t you just be happy?” on a daily basis
being constantly judged by people who have no clue what you’re going through

— (via aloneintime)

# depression sad mental health

Reblogged 2 months ago from loveonmysleeve (Originally from aloneintime) 49 notes
Academics are not the end of the world. You are not competing with anybody. You are just born to shine, not to compete with anybody except yourself. Your life is not worth a degree. Your happiness is not worth a degree. There is no time attached to what God wants you to be or who *you* want to be. Take it easy. We love you not only because of your intelligence, but because you are *you*. Take a deep breath. Go to sleep. I love you.

—

my father, after i called him at 1am sobbing from exhaustion and stress and anxiety. best if read in a broad igbo accent :)

i’d been feeling the emotional load of school and other shit that had just drained me, so i was up crying too hard to sleep and feeling that crushing loneliness. so i called my father.

# family my father advice mental health

Posted 2 months ago 510 notes
Apart from the hilariousness that our mouth I love your blog because of how open you are about mental health issue. I have had an anxiety disorder for a while and although I have pretty supportive parents and family members being Nigerian I struggle with the shame that come from having an "un-African problem". Because of this I find it hard to ask for help at time, and admitting that my anxiety has has affected my academic performance in college. How did you deal with all of that at college? from Anonymous

first of all, thanks for writing in. it kills me that our culture is so intolerant of mental health issues. (TRIGGER WARNING: self harm, sexual assault) in college, i didn’t know what i had and it didn’t even occur to me to seek help. i would have frequent breakdowns and cut myself and break shit…although in retrospect that was also due to being assaulted at some point. in my first grad school, i still hid it and jut stopped caring about my grades, eventually withdrawing from the school.

this time around, i started seeing a therapist at NYU who diagnosed me with major depression and encouraged me to register with the center for students with disabilities, because mental health issues count as psychological disabilities. the professors here are trained to make accommodations for students like me, especially with the school backing me up with paperwork that states i can have extra time on exams, etc. i can’t take as many classes as i would like, but at least my grades are doing okay and i’m having a balanced life outside of school. before, i used to push myself so hard with school and make my entire life revolve around it, and that was terrible for my anxiety (which another counselor at the school diagnosed me with).

so i would say: find a therapist. especially if your school offers those services. with your therapist, you can work on strategies to reduce your anxiety and learn how to put your mental health first, regardless of whether other people think its valid or not. learn what triggers your anxiety, learn how to reduce the triggers, learn how to take time for yourself, how to be your own advocate. 

i hope that helps! write me at thefeeloffree@gmail.com if you’d like to talk more (hug)

# Anonymous mental health

Posted 2 months ago 1 note