The Other Side

I’m slowly and agonizingly being consumed by my depressive episode. Everyday feels longer than the last, and yet bizarrely when I glance back at the last few months it feels like they’ve flown past. I’m so aware that I’m losing my younger years to my illness. My youth is just disappearing, floating out to sea whilst I’m stranded, unaccompanied on an island with only my thoughts to wrap around me. My thoughts entangle me like deleterious knotweed – rooting me into the ground so I can’t move anymore. After this amount of time being trapped, I no longer have the motivation to even try and wriggle. I’ve tired from feeling desperate and become despondent.

I’ve made baby steps that the people around me consider progress like getting a new psychiatrist, trying new drugs – but my journey to wellness still feels flat and stagnant. Finding help for what I am going through is sickening - quite literally – I’ve found that SSRIs are not my friend and will immediately induce violent vomiting and intolerable amounts of pain. I’ve had to make the decision not to take SSRIs, because my options were to either be depressed or be depressed and vomit at the same time.

I did manage to successfully go on my first ‘night out’ of 2019, which was nerve-wracking but I did it. I actually reaped the positive effects of the socialisation for about 2 days, and then I sluggishly returned back to my slump where I just want to vegetate and isolate myself. My island is the place of nightmares, but I still choose to return time and time again – because it’s familiar.

See, that’s the complicated thing about mental health – you struggle to live with yourself because you are telling yourself that your pain is a produce of your own free will, that you’ve chosen to torture yourself. Still now when I discuss aspects of my mood I’m met with questions of ‘why don’t you just stop doing that’ or ‘why don’t you just do this’, and it’s because my common sense and my mental health are going through a bitter divorce. I can’t do anything I set my mind to, mostly because I can’t actually set my mind to things. Some days I tell myself what I’m dealing with is a choice and I can choose to heal at any stage - but most days I feel incapacitated, out of control, and locked out of my own mind and body.

I’m desperately trying to find purpose everyday to try and ‘find myself’ again, and I sometimes get excited from cool ideas that I’ve come up with – only to eventually drop them by the wayside because the negative voice tells me I can’t do it.

‘You? Throw a Halloween party? You have no friends’

‘You shouldn’t write tweets anymore – because nobody likes them’

‘You should just be quiet and exist silently’

My insecurities have graduated from being little things that occasionally crossed my mind; to becoming a bible with rules and restrictions for the way I live my life.

I am grateful for my job, and I use all of my good energy on that day-to-day. I don’t have much leftover to keep up the smiling and socialisation. I’ve really disassociated from who I really am, and I’ve written off who I was as an imposter whose skin I’ve cruelly been encapsulated in. It feels like I’m trapped in the coffin of my own life. The happy version, the put together version of me, was the person who got my job and the person who had my friends - now I just feel like I’m pretending to be her.

Sorry for the brain dump, I’m tired and I keep thinking about this ‘other side’ people promise me that I’ll come out on. If anyone comes across me on my island, and knows the way to the other side, do let me know because I’m losing faith.