Asking for help...

This last few years, I have reached my lowest and worked my way back up again. I've gone from pretending I don't exist to feeling like and I can accomplish anything, I have been diagnosed with depression, I've been medicated, I've gone through an environmental and emotional overhaul and I've started again.

The most difficult part of it was asking for help. Not because I didn't think I needed it, but because I was scared about telling people, about telling anyone that there was this thing inside of me, this thing that was eating away at any happiness - any emotion that I had in the world. I wasn't scared that they'd feel bad for me, I was scared that people wouldn't believe me. I wasn't afraid of pity, I was afraid of being discredited. Of being something and having something shameful. Of being told that my illness wasn't an illness and that I just needed to try harder.

I'm disappointed that my biggest fear was asking for help. The majority of my friends were the most supportive people I could ever have hoped for. But there were a few people, there are always a few people, who live up to a fear. I had - and still struggle with - a legitimate illness that will always form a part of me, and there were some people who told me that maybe if I stopped talking about it, and tried harder, it would just go away. I'd like to see anyone say that to someone who is physically ill.

The stigmatisation of mental illness is something that has always bothered me. Partly because I have depression, and partly because I know, without a shadow of a doubt that it's wrong. It's wrong to joke about people who are sick. It's wrong to think that mental illness isn't serious and that it's something you can think your way out of. It's wrong to assume that you understand someone else's situation because you've felt a bit sad once.

There are varying degrees of mental illness, just as there are varying degrees of injury, of physical sickness. Telling someone that what they're going through isn't real doesn't make them better. I hope that at some point, people start realising that. I had everything that I needed at the time I was diagnosed. Trying to appreciate it made me feel guilty for not being able to appreciate it. I was incapable of being happy.

Having a battle with yourself every morning as to whether you should bother facing the day, seeing other people, going to work, to school, just getting up, wondering whether it's worth trying anymore is not something that should be made light of. This is the kind of thing that ruins friendships, relationships, jobs, lives. It is real, and it's horrible.

If you need help, don't be afraid to ask for it. I wasted a lot of time being scared, and I found out that I didn't need to be.

-AJ

Talk about it!

I'm not very good at talking about my feelings, so I write about them instead. There is something inherently terrifying to me about the idea of sitting down with someone and just being honest. I know that this is something that many people experience, and the advice that's thrown around a lot (including by me) is to USE YOUR WORDS! But that's just a lot easier to say than it is to do, isn't it? It still paralyses me a little bit to talk about some things, even though in writing, I can say (and indeed, have said) a lot of what I need, and what I want to say.

But there are some things that you can't really just stick a blog post up about.

Being able to tell your friends that you're petrified of losing them, being able to tell people you love them, tell people that you're in love with them, be able to talk to the people you want to talk to about the things you want to tell them - even that's hard. Just starting a conversation. I genuinely really struggle with this sort of thing. There is something that eats away at me when I try and talk about this stuff.

So I've come up with a little project - something I'm going to try to do over the next year or so, to be able to talk to the people I want to talk to, without an instant response, and using writing so that I don't have to internally panic every time I open my mouth and just spew out a load of words that don't mean anything, or worse! Just not say ANYTHING AT ALL! Oh god the awkward...

I'm going to start writing letters - this is something I really want to do, and I feel like putting it on here will actually make me do it. As well as this being an easy form of communication for me, I think it's a great way to add personality into communicating. It takes longer than an iMessage, or an email, it won't arrive instantly, and people won't respond as soon as they see it. I think that's part of the beauty of it - you can send something saying everything you want to say, but without the crippling anxiety of starting at that little tick waiting for the other person's response.

This is something that's likely to always be hard for me. I don't really know how to talk to people about deeply personal things, but somehow writing everything out helps me think everything through and seems so much less scary, so maybe, that's where I need to start?

Always nervous about something...
AJ