Real Talk

I was originally going to write a small Facebook post about this, but my small post grew, and here it is.

Today's Let'sTalk blah blah blah got me thinking - I see a lot of people "support" this day with various social media gestures, but I have never actually heard someone speak out about their own experience with mental illness. I've never actually seen someone take this day to talk about it. So today, I'm talking about it.

Mental illness is different for everyone who experiences it. Anxiety is different for everyone who experiences it. I can pinpoint where I physically feel my anxiety - it sits right below my heart, below my ribcage and down into my abdomen. It is a near constant sensation that increases and decreases situationally. When I'm feeling mentally and physically healthy, stable and on top of things, it decreases; when I'm feeling destabilized and in flux (the way I've been feeling lately) it increases. I've gotten really good at tempering my anxiety with various tools: exercise, yoga, breathing techniques, aromatherapy, acupuncture... keeping things around me clean and organized also helps. But even doing all these things never fully eliminates the signal my brain sends to my body that something even minutely stressful is happening or might happen in the future.

My anxiety presents itself in the way I worry about things that are totally beyond my control, things that I know will probably never actually come to fruition (and most often never do). It presents itself in a constant preparing for things that probably don't need preparing for. It presents itself in my internal restlessness, never quite being satisfied with being in the moment. It presents itself in a constant need to check the clock.

It most keenly presents itself in chronic insomnia, which has me laying awake for hours before falling asleep, unable to turn off whatever unhelpful circular worries swim through my brain, waking up throughout the night and having those same circular thoughts immediately swim back in. This aspect of my anxiety has mercifully improved with the use of various tools, but I've still never had a decent night's sleep without the help of things like melatonin, earplugs, and on really bad nights, gravol. Cannabis often exacerbates my unhelpful circular worries but has been a lifesaver in terms of falling and staying asleep; it has been, without a doubt, my number one help in my struggle with sleep, and my quality of life would be significantly lower without it. 

My anxiety presents itself in sensitivity to auditory and visual stimuli. I am rather jumpy and very easily irritated - too much stimulus tends to make me feel extremely elevated, probably because I'm working so hard to regulate what's going on internally that any extreme external stimulus is simply too much for me. I have gotten this far in life with zero debt, I make regular investment contributions and I am able to save enough to take myself on amazing world adventures... but I constantly worry about money and that I'm not doing enough to be financially stable. 

I know logically that everything is fine, that my life is great and I have my shit together more than most people... but my anxiety - that unsettling sensation in my chest and abdomen - can not be rationalized away. It is something I have dealt with since my teenage years, and something I couldn't actually recognize in myself until I was a young adult. I've worked really hard to combat my own specific neuroses that are nothing more than inconvenient, annoying symptoms of my anxiety, and I've started to talk about my mental health more and more, and without self-consciousness. It isn't to get attention, or concern, or even help - I know I'm doing very well overall and that I will continue to do very well, because it's who I am. I am strong, I am capable, and I am totally secure in who I am. 

I talk about my own experience with mental illness to normalize it. 

I see symptoms and unhelpful neuroses in so many other people, and I see so much unwillingness for people to speak out and say: "I'm having a difficult mental health day, and I know I'll be fine, but here are the boundaries I need respected right now." And I know other people deal with much more extreme cases of mental illness and aren't able to say "I know I'll be fine," so I feel lucky that I am able to recognize and acknowledge that my own elevated state isn't necessarily rooted in reality, but in the way my brain is wired.

Mental illness is different for everyone, and it is much more common than we think. I don't give a shit about hashtags and profile picture frames. Instead, I'd love to hear an unapologetic, unfiltered account of your own experience with mental illness. Let's actually talk.