Living with mental illness is a shit. Whether that illness comes from nature or nurture is neither here nor there. Through the course of the illness, you learn ways to manage distress and those ways are frequently unproductive. Often numbing.
I’ve been quiet on here for a little while. I’ve been quiet everywhere for a little while. I have been in a period of significant restriction.
But simultaneous to all this positivity, I have been triggered. (I am learning to hate that word.) You would think after all this time that I would be used to managing difficult emotions and situations, but a small incident has flipped me on my head and my eating disorder is struggling. Well, let’s be honest here – today it is winning.
I think when most people think of chronic illness they think of diseases like cancer, arthritis or multiple sclerosis. Or conditions such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. I feel like it’s important to point out that mental illness is also a chronic illness – it occurs again and again for a long time.
A lot can happen in two weeks. You can lose everything, as so many people around the world are now discovering. You can become isolated, locked away, afraid and no longer in control of your life.
Navigating a lifetime of depression is like being an avid bushwalker and mountain climber. For years on end the scenery is stunning, the flora and fauna breathtaking and the hard yards well rewarded. For short periods of time steep, rocky, unnavigable mountains appear that seem interminable and impossible to navigate. Clambering over invisible rocks always happens in the dark and every inch of your body screams, No! I can’t do it any more! There are people at the summit cheering, saying, Come on – not far now! You know there are people below struggling on the same mountain, or back in the safety of the pretty woods. But on that dark mountain, you’re alone, lost in that sense of hopelessness – completely reliant on voices from afar – and the squabble between the angels on your shoulders.
“We belong to what we value, not what we desire.” A cool guy I know. I love that statement – it really resonates with me. I spend time and energy, make commitments and secret pacts, with the things I value. Not with the things I desire.
I’m the girl in limbo who lost who she was and doesn’t know what comes next. In the meantime, the grocery bill has significantly decreased at the expense of my sanity and my husband’s peace of mind.
It takes six little words feeding the eating disorder voice, to override a year of conversations nurturing the timid voice of recovery.
Hope seems like such a positive emotion. Something anyone would want to have and strive for. Something we’d all hope to have […]
When life falls apart, and everything shatters into a million pieces, and you’re not the person you thought, and have no idea […]
Relapse. For those of us in recovery from one mental health issue or another, it’s a filthy word. Who wants to relapse? There’s a classic meme showing the difference between reality and expectations when it comes to mental health recovery – expectation is a nice straight line on a consistent upward trajectory. Reality looks like a ball of wool under siege from a horde of rabid kittens.
After spending three years working on mental health improvement, it really is very galling to accept a slip back into insanity Yet […]
It’s 35 days since I touched down on terra firma. Jet lag’s done and dusted, the big adventure receding into once upon a time status, and I’m settled back into normality – taking for granted the luxuries of my pillow, my car, and our pristine drinking water. Yet for most of those 35 days, my mental health has been really shit.
It’s the unfun bit of travel – going home. And after three months, it’s the bit to look forward to – going home.
