Broken Crayons Still Color
A crayon that breaks, still colors. Although it will never be the same again, it finds a new way to work. Recovery is the same way. You can’t erase your addictions but you can find new ways to fight them and learn to live a happy normal life. But is it easy? Hell no.
I still have a hard time believing how people still don’t understand mental illness and the misrepresentation circulating throughout social media. When people down play your illness, you literally start to go crazy. I have gotten several statements such as, “What problems? This is all in your head. You don’t have any issues.” You feel like you are insane. When people talk to you like you just decided to wake up one day and make up every issue within your life, you start believing maybe you were never really sane at all. Maybe you did make it all up. Maybe you are crazy and everything you feel is a lie.
A couple weeks ago, I had an episode and cried in my car for 2 hours straight. I was so unbelievably close to driving myself to the hospital to check in, so someone could watch me, in case I decided to end my life. Did I make that up? A couple weeks after that, I had another episode and cried my eyes out, while I wrote a poem about how I didn’t think I should be on this earth anymore. Did I dream that?
One problem in learning to recover, is believing you are worth the recovery. You need to believe you are important in this world. No matter how many people tell you they care about you or need you around, it means nothing to you if you don’t believe it yourself. The same thing matters about getting help. If you don’t want to get help, you won’t. If you go to rehab and spend three months there but you fake your way through it, you aren’t going to be okay. Recover is about wanting to change and wanting to get help.
The night I wrote that poem, I decided to go to bed and sleep it off. This is a vital step to my recovery. I learned to shut off my thoughts, go to sleep and if I wake up in the morning and am still feeling this way, I will get help for my problems. Everything seems worse at night, could not be a truer statement. I woke up the next day, reread my poem and got a wakeup call. I didn’t feel that way in the morning but what if I went through with my thoughts that night? What if I didn’t build up resilience, over the past couple of years, to find ways to be okay? Maybe I wouldn’t be here, sharing this story with you today. Did I make that up?
I get a lot of negative feedback from the closest people to me. Mental illness still seems to be this topic of conversation that isn’t quite ready to be talked about, even in this generation. Same thing with being gay, openly talking about that issue was another problem starter on its own. I am not ashamed of who I am. I have been given many obstacles in my life but I have overcome every one. And the ones that return, I fight like hell to overcome again.
I am never going to stop being open about who I am or the life I live. If that makes people uncomfortable, there is the door. I am not asking you to stay. I am asking for respect for the choices I make because they are mine and nobody else’s. Who I choose to love is between me and the person I decide to date. The inner demons a part of who I am, are my burden to carry. If I choose to talk about them openly, who has the right to stop me?
I respect choices others make because it is not my place to judge nor is it my life. If their choices don’t affect me, then why should I feel the need to badger them into changing their minds? People are too concerned with looking bad and how the world will see them. I am my own person, if others decide to judge the people I associate with because they don’t like my choices, that’s on them. I am not going to hide the biggest parts that consume me, to make sure those people could keep a certain image about themselves. Did I make that up too?
One thing I’ve been struggling is being vulnerable, while actually going through my depressive episodes. For years, people have come to me for help and guidance to fix them while I was trying to fix myself. I pushed everything aside, to help everyone else with their issues. I put myself last and, in the end, I am the one paying the consequences. How much help can I be, if I don’t actually live until tomorrow?
My issues started acting up a couple of months ago, when I stopped doing things that kept me on track and made me happy. Going to the gym and yoga, kept my mind sane and my life safe. I started to focus on other people and let my life take a back seat (again). I am a natural care taker. I live to help people but developed a lot of mental health problems in the fallout. In order to be of any use to anyone, including myself, I need to start taking care of me and continuing to do so for the rest of my life.
The worse part about experiencing relapses or episodes within your disorders, is you feel like a failure. When I get into these moods, I feel like I let everyone down. I feel shame and disappointment I wasn’t strong enough to handle it. Someone said to me, “Wow you are struggling again. I thought you were stronger than that.” Right there. Those are the exact comments that make recovery so damn hard sometimes.
Do you know how hard it is to struggle with something your entire life and then recover? Do you know how hard it is to stop yourself from looking into the mirror a million times a day or every time you pass it? To find the strength to stay happy, when all you want to do is lie in bed and cry all day? To feel like your life is nothing and to find the strength to sleep it off? Recovery is hands down, the hardest thing I have ever had to go through. You never get a day off. You never know when your illnesses will creep up on you and you will live with them for the rest of your life.
When you recover from something like this, you believe in your heart, you have overcome it. You think it will never be able to get a hold of you again but recovery is not that simple. Every day, you fight to save your life. You could go weeks, months or even years, without a single relapse, but anything could happen in a split second. Your recovery is never guaranteed.
If I could give anyone struggling advice about staying in recovery, I would say to let people help you. Let the people you trust have your best interest at heart, be there for you. Be open about how you are struggling and let them in. By telling people I am going through a hard time, it makes me more aware, I am in a more delicate state than usual and need to be more alert of my safety.
I told my friend I didn’t want to tell her I was struggling because I didn’t want to call her over my house and ask her to watch me, so I didn’t do anything I would regret. The very sentence, makes me feel like a child who needs to have a babysitter in the game of life or death. By being honest with her, she made me feel okay about needing help and knowing she was there for me, helped me feel I was going to be okay.
Sometimes you just need to remind yourself of your worth or allow the ones around you to help. As far as feeling crazy and people projecting their own negative ideas about mental illness onto you, let it go. I know I didn’t make up my past. I didn’t make up my feelings connected to those events and I didn’t make up my mental illnesses. I am who I am and if someone can’t respect that, I don’t need their negativity in my life. They don’t have to believe me. I believe me and that’s enough.
