Living with a Mental Illness
My Daily Struggle to Survive
First off, I'm going to let it be known right here and now that I am not ashamed to admit that I have a mental illness and I somehow manage to make it through each and every single day of my life without hurting myself or anyone else. Some days this is not an easy task. Some days it takes all I have inside of me just to get up out of bed in the morning. I honestly hate it. There is not one single day where I do not know that I have it because each day it presents a new challenge to my life in one way or another. Please allow me to explain.
I suffer from severe depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I was first diagnosed with the depression and anxiety after my marriage of eight years came to a crash ending. There were days where all I would do was cry for days on end and I wouldn't want to eat, sleep, or get out of the house. All I wanted to do was be alone in my dark room so no one would see me hurting. I honestly believed that I would burden people with my issues if I were to open up about what I was going through. It was one of the lowest points of my life. I became so despondent that one day I attempted to take my own life (I will not specify how because I do not feel that those kind of details are important to my story at this time) and that was when I was given my diagnosis. I felt like I had been branded or cursed. I was put on medication for both my anxiety and my depression, and I was hospitalized for nearly three weeks.
I was also assigned a therapist of whom I ended up meeting with once a week for four and a half years. By the 5th year I began feeling better so my therapist took me off of my medications. I did fine for a while until I ended up in an extremely abusive relationship. That was when I developed the PTSD. Needless to say, I ended up back in the hospital, back on meds, and back in therapy. I was miserable. There wasn't a day that went by where I didn't wish to be normal. That went on for another three years, then my therapist once again took me off of my medications and once again I felt better for a while until abusive relationship number two. Wash, rinse, and repeat. I attempted suicide, wound up in the hospital for three weeks, back on meds, back in therapy and that is where I'm still at right now.
Living with a mental illness is really tough because there is a social stigma around it so I find that I'm not really comfortable talking to many people about it. I kinda learned to keep certain things to myself because I feel that unless someone else is going through or has been through what I have gone through or what I am going through they just don't understand and a lot of the time they just don't want to hear it. I also hate hearing questions like "How can you be depressed when you have such beautiful children?" So I just prefer not to talk about my mental health issues to many people anymore.
My mental illness is something that also affects all of my relationships, be it with friends or with family. Thankfully, I have a few really great friends and family members who have managed to ride out the storm with me and for that, I am truly blessed. I've even met myself a really great man recently who treats me great and refuses to go anywhere even on my most difficult days. I truly love him for this because I never thought I'd find someone who would be kind to me like at all and I never in a million thought that I'd find a man who would tolerate my mental state on a daily basis and still manage to love me and be proud to be with me. My children have learned to accept it as the new normal as well. After all, I was diagnosed with my mental illness when they were babies so it is really all they have ever really known. I'm never mean to them, they just know that their mum has both good and bad days and that my bad days can sometimes be really, really rough for me. They love and support me and I would be so very lost without them.
I'm also proud of myself because I have managed to keep myself going each and every day, even despite the fact that I have lost three friends just this year alone to suicide. It truly isn't easy. Like I said before there are days where I don't even want to get up out of bed and those are the days that are the worst. I still have thought of hurting myself every now and then (I have never had thoughts of hurting anyone else; let's be clear on that right now) but I somehow manage to pull myself out of it without doing any physical harm to myself. I just wish I knew how LOL.
I have had some people tell me that I am strong and brave. I don't see it. I see myself just like everyone else only I have to live my life differently from most because it's a good bet I will probably be medicated for most if not all of the rest of my life. I'm not stronger or any braver than the next person; I'm just trying to get by and managing (even if it is just barely) to do so. Win, lose, or draw this is my life and how or if I choose to live it is entirely up to no one but me. Today, I'm choosing to live.
I have a message for those of you who are suffering with a mental illness every day. I know it's hard and I know you may feel alone, unwanted, tired, and scared but please, if you're not already, please I beg you to get yourself some help. You are worth it. You are loved and wanted. Your life needs to continue. Your voice needs to be heard. Without people like us, the stigma around mental illness will never go away. Things may not always go right and that's okay cause you are strong enough to get through it. Don't let your diagnosis define you. Get help and keep living.
About the Creator
Phoenix Cobain
Phoenix escaped her gilded cage and rose from the ashes broken yet beautiful.
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The Sad Story Behind My Tattoos
The sad story behind my tattoos all begins with the first tattoo I ever got. A friend of mine was a tattoo artist with his own shop. He actually designed the tattoo for me as well. I got the tattoo in the middle of my upper back; it is of two female cherubs holding a banner between them which had both of their names tattooed inside of the banner. I got this tattoo in memory of two babies I had lost. I got the tat done on my 28th birthday, it took almost 4 hours just for the outline alone and then another 4 1/2 hours to shade. When it was finished and I was able to see the end result I literally cried because not only was it beautiful but it was also my first tattoo and it actually held sentimental value for me. I wish I had pics but when my old phone was destroyed so too were all of my pics. I loved how my friend had actually given the cherubs the exact eye and hair color my babies had been born with. My second tattoo was the semi-colon butterfly. The story behind that tattoo goes back to 1994 when I was only 14 years old. I became friends with the boy next door after moving up to Maine from my home down in NYC. He was a good looking Asian boy with manners and a smile girls would literally swoon over. His names was Tim, and because this is a true story I will protect the privacy of my friends family by not giving any last names. Anyway as I was saying Tim was exactly a year older than me, not only did we go to school together but we were also next door neighbors so we hung out a lot. His mother’s family owned a Chinese restaurant right next door to the park we would play in. Our families became fast friends. Well anyway to get back to what I was saying. The story starts with Tim dating a mutual friend. I had warned him against dating her but poor kid wouldn’t listen so he wound up learning the pain of a broken heart the hard way. The chick ended up cheating on him and breaking up with him in front of the entire school. He became really distraught and started becoming anti-social. All of a sudden I get a call one Friday night asking me if I’d like to go to his place to watch the Lakers game on the tv down in their parents basement bar. I was so happy to hear him sounding so upbeat I agreed to be there. I woke on Saturday morning all excited to finally get to hangout with my best friend. Well about an hour into the game I see Tim get up and head to the stairs. I let him get a head start on me only so he wouldn’t see me get up therefore he wouldn’t know that I was following him. As I got to the top of the stairway I saw Tim go around the corner and into his grandparents room. I heard what I thought were bullets being loaded into a gun and then I heard the hammer as it was being pushed back. I literally ran into the door of the room while opening it. There Tim sat in his grandparents bed spinning the chamber of the gun he held in his hand. I asked him what he was doing and his response was to ask me why he wasn’t good enough. I began telling him how he had done nothing wrong and how she was just being a gold digger and how he was smart and funny and cute and how one day he would forget all about this and find someone who will truly love him. He kinda scoffed at me and went quiet for a second. I finally asked him why he had the gun and why he was playing with it. I then lectured him on how dangerous guns could be if not handled properly. He looked up and smiled at me then responded with where he had found it and how he had been taught from a young age how to carefully handle a gun. I told him to put it away and to come back downstairs cause his friends were down there waiting for him. After all he had invited everyone so that automatically made him the host. He then began to empty all but one of the chambers of the gun. He spun the chamber back in place and asked me if I’d ever heard of Russian roulette, which I had thanks to the types of movies I was into. I told him to quit screwing around and to empty the gun, put it away where he found it and come back downstairs with me. He then put the gun to the side of his head and pulled the trigger, it clicked but nothing happened due to that chamber being empty which meant one of the remaining four chambers had a bullet inside of it. At this point I start to panic. I start begging him to put the gun down. I told him he was scaring me. I began sobbing as the second click sounded indicating he had 3 more chambers left and one had a bullet waiting to be fired. I started screaming for someone to call his parents and inform them of the situation. I went over to the bed and tried talking the gun out of his hand and then I grabbed for it but had it quickly yanked back out of my reach. Third click....my heart is pounding trying to get my best friend to relinquish the gun to me. He pushes me from the bed and onto the floor and as I scramble to get up he stands up directly over me, looks directly at me and says “Tell Belinda I loved her.”and then he proceeds to pull the trigger, this time there’s a loud bang and lots of blood and I watch as Tim’s lifeless body crumbles to the floor. Tim had taken his own life right in front of me and there was not one God damn thing I could do to stop him. I was so torn up over his death that I refused to attend his funeral or the memorial that was held in his honor at school. I was so pissed off at myself for not knowing what to do to stop him and then I was pissed off at Tim for doing such a thing to me; his best friend. I was traumatized. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I stopped talking. I just didn’t understand why he’d choose to take his own life over a failed high school relationship. It blew my mind. Everyone at school blamed the girl for his death. To this day I still think about it and I still find myself asking why. I have since come to lose many other dear friends to suicide. It feels like it has become an epidemic. I still don’t know how to feel about any of it because I too suffer from depression and I too wanted to take my own life. I came close to doing just that twice. I just could never understand being so upset over a silly little high school fling that I’d have ever wanted to kill myself. Two months after I got this tattoo a very dear person who was close to me took her life as well and it broke my heart. And her reason in the note she left behind had to do with her relationship. Then a year later another of my friends ended his life over some chick breaking his heart. So yea this tattoo has a bittersweet reason behind it. It is in memory of not only my friends and family who took their own lives but also to all of the other lives lost to suicide around the world. This tattoo also reminds me of all of the shit I’ve managed to overcome in my life and it reminds me that my story isn’t over yet for there are many more chapters that need to be written before my book comes to its conclusion.
By Phoenix Cobain4 years ago in Psyche
The secret journey to regaining emotional stability
Do you feel that the anxious and avoidant types both seem to be strong and independent, but in fact they are sensitive and fragile. They often fall into emotions because of small things and start to be anxious and avoidant? If anxious and avoidant types want to change these, what they actually need is to compensate for their missing parts and heal their injured parts. In this issue, we will teach the avoidant and anxious types how to cultivate themselves again, making their emotions more stable, more rational in relationships, and at the same time gaining the ability to actively output emotional value. If anxious and avoidant types want to overcome the sensitive and fragile parts of themselves and obtain stable emotions, they need not only cognitive adjustments, but also need to heal the traumatized parts of themselves and compensate for the regretful parts of themselves. For example, the regret of the avoidant type is that they have not been paid serious attention to and have never truly rebelled. Therefore, the avoidant type will not fight for their own needs in many situations, resulting in uncomfortable situations and relationships, and they are always running away and wandering. The trauma of the anxious type is that they are trapped in unstable relationships and have been hurt by the instability in intimate relationships. The slightest fluctuation will make the anxious type feel nervous and anxious. Therefore, anxious and avoidant types are inherently fragile, sensitive, and unstable. In summary, these reasons are that something is missing during the growth stage, or they have suffered some trauma, so if you want to solve these problems, this is the time. Compensate when you need to compensate, heal when you need to heal, exercise when you need to exercise, just treat yourself as a child and raise yourself again. If the avoidant and anxious types re-train themselves, what kind of growth can they gain? First of all, emotions will become more and more stable. For example, you can be aware of your emotions at the first time, avoid emotions from affecting your thoughts and judgments, and learn to regulate your emotions. Secondly, you can truly understand yourself and know your real needs and fears. In the process of re-nurturing yourself, you can clearly understand your needs and fears, that is, you can know why you are attracted to a certain person, why you behave like this, and then you can better understand what you need.
By angelababya day ago in Psyche
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