One of the Only Cures

A lot of my posts have been more personal and vulnerable lately. I think I've been more frustrated with how easily people shove their hard experiences and unpleasant feelings down, and I refuse to just write about solutions that aren't going to fix a single thing in anyone's life. Truthfully, sometimes I think the only thing we really are capable of doing to help each other is removing isolation. 

I find it really difficult to live in a world that silences the truth, and shames the honest. 

Life is really hard with a mental illness, it's just the reality of it. There have been times I've found myself sitting and thinking, 

"This really isn't that bad. I'm probably making most of this up, what was I thinking? I'll go back and tell everyone I'm okay. How embarrassing." 

Not too long after that, I find myself holding onto my head, trying to do anything outside of thinking about what's happening inside of me, but I can't. I can logically think of solutions that could make it better. I'll spend hours doing this and thinking, "All I have to do right now is eat. I'll be able to do my homework, the voices might calm down, I won't have this horrible, intense feeling inside of me, I won't be an obsessive maniac. All I have to do right now is eat something." That would make so much sense! This scenario has been making a comeback in my life the past few weeks. 

The part about it that people don't understand is that I have no intention to stop eating. I have absolutely no intention to hold myself back for any reason. I've, by miracle, grown to not need my eating disorder to be my support system in life. I won't deny that I once felt that I needed that to protect me, and it did serve me for a short time, but I don't need it anymore.

The issue is, it turned into a symptom of my depression and anxiety. The voices in my head know exactly how to paralyze me, and they'll do what it takes. The devil knows that I have every intention of doing the hard work and recovering from all of my mental illnesses, and he's using every trick he can think of to make it harder. If he can't get me to relapse, then he's going to still use food to prevent me from relationships, to make it impossible for me to focus, to isolate me, to take away hours and hours of my life of just thinking the same things over and over again. It's a Catch 22. I know I need to eat to focus and ultimately have quality of life, yet I know that if I do eat, the voices will get louder and I might be more anxious and even less able to focus. I'm at the point in my life that I'm willing to take that risk, but then I spend hours trying to convince myself it's the right thing to do while the voices yell at me that I can't, and <insert abusive negative adjectives here> about who I am as a person and the things that will happen to me if I do what I know will make me better. 

It's never as simple as just doing the right thing and getting over what your head is telling you. More than half the time people are ready to move forward and willing to do everything it takes to get better, and then end up spending hours fighting with themselves. It just all seems so real, it all is so real inside of us. Inside of us is our whole world and what's inside of us dictates how we react to the world. 

I don't think you need an eating disorder to have similar experiences. I think food and perseverating thoughts over it take away precious time from the majority of human lives. I also know that overthinking does the same thing to us. How much time do we spend wondering what someone meant when they said the thing that sent us down a rabbit hole? That ends up haunting you the rest of your life. It takes your mood down a level or 5 levels. You spend hours thinking about it and hardly ever feel like you can go back and just ask what the person meant. Sometimes you don't have the opportunity too, other times you're just too afraid of what they'll think of you if you do. 

The problem with our greatest obstacles being inside of us is that more often than not, people don't know how to support us - and set off our alarm systems more than it already had been set off when we reached out in the first place. Whether that's anxiety or depression worsening, voices getting louder, trauma being triggered. The people who you love the most can inadvertently do this. Even the people who love us the most are imperfect lovers. 

A really important person in my life said something to me the other day that felt like they were purposely summoning this reaction from the voices in my head. I know that they weren't, but they used words that triggered fear and past trauma. It was heartbreaking for me. Why would someone say something that I've even said in the past triggers the voices in my head to go off?  I felt more isolated than I have in a while, and the voices had a lot to say about it. 

This happens often because everyone reacts differently to the world than we do. Our supports either feel helpless and lash out, or they try to do for you what helps them because that's all they know how to do. People with mental illness, myself included, tend to lose people who are very important to them because they feel helpless to help. They think somehow that they were supposed to heal us, they fear what will happen if we don't heal, and they run before they feel like it will be their responsibility if anything bad happens. Or they just get worn out and tired, because they think we'll never get better. The sad reality is that a chemical imbalance doesn't just heal. We can take meds, we can do all the medically appropriate things, and at the end of the day, some illnesses are chronic. The same way that someone with a mental illness might do things that sometimes make things worse for them, a layperson without mental illness also does things that hurt people around them that they swore to themselves they would be better at. It's really difficult for people to reach inside of themselves to find connection with someone who feels so different and seems so distant, and yet really isn't as far away as they imagine. 

Unfortunately, we need to learn to function in a world that was built for one very specific prototype of a person. 

To add to it, there are things we go through that we can't speak of. Things that people may have told us not to speak of. Or it has been heavily implied. 

Sometimes we feel so overwhelmed and isolated, that the only answer we can think of is a very extreme answer, because we believe it's the only option. 

The more isolated we are, the more real our fears become. They start to take over and become part of reality. Suddenly, our realities seem impossible to manage. 

It can feel like no one in existence understands our suffering. 

The only way to fix isolation is to find connection. Sometimes we can't find people to connect with, or feel safe enough to attempt this. 

Of course, I know that explicitly telling someone the torment happening in your head and the bad decisions you don't want to make is not always the way we cry out for help. It is in fact hardly ever the way we cry out. 

This goes for anyone. 

The way we reach out can be received as off-putting, because people can't always see through our words to our hearts. 

People might tell you to reach out to them, and yet, when you do, you feel rejected, misheard, misunderstood, even more isolated than before. You wonder  - why would they tell me to reach out if this is how they were going to respond? When that comes from the people who love us the most, our hopelessness becomes greater and our heart's break. 

Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting a battle I can't win, or a battle that will never end. 

The battle against self is the hardest battle, because in order to win, I have to keep fighting - no matter how loud things get in my head or how isolating circumstances become. Regardless of if people know how to support me or listen or understand, I have to continue to hold on. 

I'll tell you this much - we can't stop fighting for connection. I wholeheartedly believe that connection is one of the greatest healing factors. Connection and love. If we believe we are isolated, we give way to the voices in our heads. It's not our fault, because we can't simply fix anything on our own, and none of us chose the battles we would have to face. Heck, there are studies that show the street we grow up on can determine our life expectancy. We have a very small percentage of say in our health outcomes. I would argue to say that one of the few things we are able to do to heal is find a way to connect with humanity. 

I've never actually met Glennon Doyle, but she was one way I connected with humanity. My doctors don't have mental illnesses, but they've found ways to connect with me. 

There are people out there who can connect with you - even if they don't struggle the same way. We need to open our minds and reach deeper to find what it is in someone else's language, that they can understand. How to communicate in a way that someone can feel what we are feeling. 

Jesus did that for us. Jesus knew that we needed to connect with him. He knew that as a human, he would be no different in his desperate hopes, fears and desires. He might not have had the same exact problems that we have, he may not have reacted the same exact way, but his heart was so open that he still connected with us. And Jesus did have to battle against his mind just as the rest of us do, he was as human as any of us. One of the reasons he was so isolated on earth was people being unable to understand him, and unwilling to connect with him. But he still connected with us, and chose to be vulnerable, which is the most loving sacrifice. We rejected him for it when he was on this earth, and hopefully we can learn from that to accept each other. No matter how much we rejected him, he still chose to connect with us. Even the ones who had demons living inside of them. He cast the demons out of literal demon possessed people by connecting with those who had them. 

I'm not saying that our demons will go away when we connect with people, but I think it's a beautiful parallel. Connection and love can quiet down the demons, even sometimes drive them away. Connecting and love are two of the few choices we have when we grow up in an environment that shapes who we are. 

I've been asked before to relate to a wider audience - which I totally appreciate, because I want to reach as many people as I possibly can and bring connection to as many people who need it. I'm open to feedback on how to do that too. I would vouch to say though - that this message can relate to everyone, we need to find points of connection within ourselves. The more we can do that at home on a personal level with random blog posts or friends posts or anything, the more we realize we can do that with other humans that we know, who we never imagined we could connect with before. 

Next week or the following my post is going to be for supports of someone with an eating disorder or mental illness.