May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I feel compelled to share some thoughts. Every day that I am alive is a choice. I have a beautiful family. I have an amazing career. My husband is as supportive as he knows how to be. I don’t really have a lot of ‘worries.’ But yet, that is all I do. I feel trapped in my head. Constantly worrying and afraid. But why?
Since I had my children, a lot of my own thoughts and feelings around childhood have bubbled back to the surface. Many of these are feelings around trauma that I have not processed. While many around me have fond memories of doing fun things with their parents, etc. My memories are from being home alone with an alcoholic. From the outside, people judged him so harshly. The reality is that he suffered from severe anxiety and depression and alcohol was the only way he knew to stop those feelings, even if only temporarily. I don’t judge him. My heart breaks for him. For the little boy that really just wanted to be loved and respected by his parents. My father made it a point to ‘love’ us. But he couldn’t love himself and you cannot teach what you do not know.
As an adult, I want my life to be different, but I don’t know how to achieve that. Mental illness is not a choice. It is not an indulgence in laziness or feeling sorry for ones self. Everyone feeling the anxiety, depression, constant fear is trying to hide it from you. I hide it well, do I not? I have been very open with people in my circle that I take a lot of medication for both anxiety and depression and have been in therapy off and on throughout my life but consistently for the past 2.5 years as I grapple with feelings I don’t even know how to talk about.
Every day, I am crushed by feelings of fear and panic that I will not be and am not good enough. Small challenges magnified by my lack of positive coping mechanisms. What looks like I’m doing well (high performer at work, etc) is me distracting myself from my feelings. For those of you who know my negative cycle, when I feel small I behave in a way that makes others feel small. It is never my goal to hurt others and I hate myself for it. I don’t know how to communicate my needs. I don’t feel I deserve to have my needs met. It is a constant and continuous struggle that I will undoubtedly work on for the rest of my life, no matter how short or how long that is. I am not suicidal. But I do want to run away from my life every day. Every challenge sends me over ‘the edge.’ I’m super un-proud of my thoughts and behaviors. It has taken much self-reflection to understand that a lot of this comes from strategies I learned in my childhood through my mid-20s. Ways that I learned to navigate and protect myself from trauma, that may not be really helping me know. In fact, they are clearly detrimental to my goals. If I could just stop it, believe me, I would. While I am willing to share my trauma with you, that’s not the point. People who are struggling don’t have to ‘prove’ their pain to you. We must accept people where they are.
My ask of you is that when you see someone who is struggling. Someone who may drink too much, or smoke too much or can’t seem to get anywhere on time. Just know that they want to be different. They may be smiling and telling you they are happy, but they are likely not. They may not even allow themselves to feel the pain and may be unaware of its existence. If you cannot feel it, you cannot heal it. Instead of judging or being angry with that person, try to find some compassion. Realize that while you may have learned how to deal with your feelings of being ‘less than’ in a positive way, not all of us did. Not that it’s our fault or our parents fault. We are all doing our best. When we find compassion for others, when we reach out that hand, we can make a difference in their lives. We can open a door for feeling those bad feelings and healing what lies beneath and developing human connection that we all crave.
Yesterday, I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t live. As you may know, my first son was a hard baby. He didn’t sleep the night he was born and he still doesn’t sleep. He just doesn’t. It is very hard on my mental health. I frequently run on 4 or 5 broken hours of sleep with a 3.5yo that just wants his mommy to cuddle. It’s really hard to do that for any substantial amount of time. Not sleeping is literally the worst torture. And I can keep it all together, if I can just get sleep. But friday night my son did not go to bed until 11:30pm and woke up at 6:15am. He would have gone back to sleep, except baby 2 was up, so we were all, very unhappily, awake. And trust me, nobody wants to be around a toddler that hasn’t had enough sleep.
So, I went in the back yard. Still in my tank top and shorts from the night before. No bra, didn’t brush my teeth or my hair, slipped on my Toms and I directed my feelings on my yard. By 3pm, both kids had taken naps and I was physically exhausted from yard work. This is the only time I can calm my feelings, when I have nothing left in my tank. This is why I look so ‘functional’ from the outside. But on the inside, I’m breaking.
Every day when I wake up, it is a choice. It is a choice to continue working and continue pushing and some days my brain is an insurmountable obstacle and I feel like a prisoner to my anxiety. To my fears. To my depression.
Please. Please. Everyone please stop being angry. Find compassion for others. Find compassion for yourself. We can all rise together. If 2020 has taught me nothing else it has taught me that humans are not as altruistic as we’d like to believe. But the thing that makes separates us from our animal relatives is our ability to reason and choose to be kind.
MumGene 