Like all others who endure daily living with chronic illness, my life is not just impacted by KTS. For a while I thought this to be false, and believed that I could somehow overcome the odds in regards to the correlation between mental illness and chronic illness. I was different. Little did I know, however, I was already deep within its vicious cycle. Yet, I continued to vehemently deny it despite all of the trouble it was inflicting upon my life. Perhaps that sounds somewhat absurd, but that was my sixteen-year-old mindset of denial speaking.
Some of you have already read about my issues with OCD; If you already have, feel free to stop reading as I do not mean to sound excessively repetitive by any means whatsoever. I do, however, refuse to be silenced in regards to this issue as I feel it is one that needs to be addressed. It's vital for people to know that having something wrong with them mentally does not make them any less stronger of a person than anyone else. They need to know that mental illness is indeed a concrete sickness, and that just because it is not a sickness that cannot be seen from the outside, it is not any less real or true to form than perhaps the flu.
I look back on my early days of OCD with a sense of sorrow; I had no idea what was happening to me or why it was just now occurring (in retrospect, the actual onset of the condition had been several years in the making). For hours on end, I would sit at my dining room table rewriting the same pieces of handwritten homework time and time again. Like many who struggle with OCD, I was quite fixated upon a certain number. Three was, and still remains, the magic number. Only when I recopied my homework three times did I receive a feeling of temporary relief. Only then was I able to move on with my life, although it was only a short period of time until the next compulsion came. I would then need to comply to whatever it was my mind told me to do next, or else I found myself in a place of great mental unrest. It was really quite a horrific, invasive way of living.
Certain doorways became off limits, because if I walked through them something incredibly bad would happen to someone I cared about. I could only use some shampoos, as usage of certain ones was practically asking for something bad to happen to me or someone else in which I cared about dearly. At my worst, I was showering five times a day and still not feeling clean. I tried to hide this from those around me as best I could. So how did I manage to sneak in five showers a day, you may wonder. My parents would alert me that they were going to run a quick errand, and while they were gone I would leap into the shower real quick and then dry my hair so they had no idea anything had changed. My parents knew that I was showering more than usual, but they had no idea the actual extent of my issues for I refused to speak openly about them.
The darkness became my enemy and represented all things evil. I could not comprehend how my sister or friends were so at ease with traveling about at night, for in my mind it was nothing more than a death wish. Nighttime was when all the killers were out, and someone could be lurking in the backseat of their car waiting to kill them with a gun. Aside from my nighttime fears, the proper placement of inanimate objects was crucial to maintaining a sense of calm. If said object was even slightly out of place (in terms of where my mind thought it should be), than I was simply asking for my mom to be killed. If I tried to fight the compulsion and tell it that it was rooted in utter absurdity, it would mock me and try to demean me. “Oh, so what you are saying right now is that it does not matter to you if you kill your mom? So now you are a killer too, huh?” I would then start to obsess over the idea that I could indeed be a psychopath capable of killing her own mother. The mental agony was so incredibly draining that I would eventually cave and move the object to a place my mind deemed acceptable. Only then would my mind assure me that I was not a killer or did not want my mom dead for I had taken the proper precautions. The fear was not only fixated upon my mom, I should perhaps note. It was applicable to anyone I had deep feelings for such as my dad or a grandparent.
In the midst of all this, depression set in and I became a rather divergent person in comparison to my younger, out-going self. Between the anxiety and depression, I was hardly venturing out to see friends on my “healthy” days with KTS. I spent hours of my time in my room eating hordes of fast food, alternating between periods of quiet and crying. Isolation seemed to be the only durable medicine at that time, although I did need to keep up appearances every once in a while in order to maintain a sense of normalcy on the outside. Why isolation, though? Why did that seem to be such a viable remedy as opposed to seeking help? Well, for one, that would have required me to admit that something was wrong with me mentally, and for some reason I thought that to be awfully shameful. Even though I realize it is a legitimate sickness at present, I did not then. Also, going out meant I had to fight even harder to cover my well-hidden tracks. Whether I was out with family and friends, it was especially hard to maintain a poker face while being across the table from someone. It was much more feasible to sit behind a computer and type how okay I was while feeling a sense of despair inside than actually have to maintain my composure in person.
Inside, I began to feel as though my future was hopeless, and that nothing about my life was agreeable in even the slightest. I felt as though everybody hated me, and that everything I did (no matter how good my intentions were) was wrong. Even though I was thin and beautiful on the outside, I felt ugly and momentous on the inside. I would look at pictures of myself as a little girl, and feel as though I was a completely different person. I felt like I was someone who had let that little girl down abundantly, and the shame I inflicted upon myself due to that lead me to resent myself profoundly.
Perhaps it did not help that I had my own group of mean girls at school who were utterly horrible to me at a time when I needed them most. But, at that time, I did not have the capacity to stand up to them as I was so incredibly lost on the inside. I didn't realize that I deserved much better treatment, and therefore allowed myself to be treated as an imposter of sorts despite my kind-hearted nature and constant willingness to help anyone in need at anytime.
I realize now, however, that the main issue wasn't the mean girls, but my unwillingness to stand up to them properly due to my own mental malfunctioning. I bought into this concept that I was less than the others for I was already prone to self-deprecating thoughts due to my depression and anxiety.
 |
| Me at Sixteen |
***I will continue on with this post in the upcoming few days. In the meantime, however, I would like to say that anyone secretly or openly dealing with feelings of depression, anxiety, or mental illness of any caliber should not feel ashamed. These are legitimate illnesses and although the road to recovery is not always easy, it is possible to feel reach a healthier place of living. It's more than okay to ask for help in someone you trust, and there should be no shame associated with doing so.
- Arianna
No comments:
Post a Comment