Relapse
It's time to come clean... I've relapsed. It's not something that I say lightly, nor do I say it for the sake of saying it out loud, but I say it so that others know that mental illness and more specifically depression is something that never truly goes away or is cured for good. It's always going to be a battle and it's always going to be with yourself. The difference is in how you fight back. The difference is in your arsenal. The difference is in how much strategy and insight you have to win that war.
There will be days where everything is sunshine and rainbows. Those are the days when everything is going your way and you feel like you're living on a high that you know in the back of your mind has to end but right then it feels like your life has rebirthed itself. Then, there are the days where you wake up and the moment your existence becomes conscious, you plummet to the bottom and nothing can make you go an inch higher off the floor.
And then, there are some days in between. You're not sure how the day will go but you might have something to look forward to or something that has the potential to start a revolution in your brain. Viva la happiness! Those days can go either way and it really depends on who's there to support and guide you through the mishaps. Sometimes it's only you there and sometimes you're enough, other times you won't be. All of it is sometimes not enough, but on the inbeteeen days, anything can happen.
I find most days now I'm in between. When I first figured out I was relapsing, there were several days where I was plummeting. It felt like I was going down at an alarming rate and everything around me and everyone around me was moving up and farther away from my reach. I was close to my first big weight goal, I had a boyfriend, I had a job I loved, and I had all of my friends close by. All of that slowly went away, minus my job, and so I clung onto that, making it my main focus. Nevertheless, things started to happen for people around me. Weddings, engagements, weight loss, boyfriends, moves, babies... the list goes on and on and I felt like I was standing still in quicksand. Things began to lose their charm. I was starting to be robbed of my hopefulness.
Now it isn't to say that I blame this sadness on the people or the events. I'm still very happy for everyone and happy for everything that happened to the people I care about. It's just a triggering event that I didn't handle appropriately. And as they began to pile up over the course of a few months, I let them fester instead of dealing with them. I forgot to take care of myself and it became an old habit back from the dead.
I made the rediscovery recently in a conversation with someone that I don't do anything in my life for myself. This is kind of a shock to me. I feel like my life is for me, but when I think about it, everything I do is for others. I'm a people pleaser. It's what I do. I never take the time to do an assessment of what I need, not necessarily what I want. What I want is to make people happy, but what I need is to self-love and self-care. That's what is going to make me better at caring for others.
I need to find time for myself. I need to carve out a space in my life for myself. I know what will make me better, but it is a long road to get there after slipping so far. I need to go back to healthy eating, exercise, positive affirmations, self-care, retraining my brain to be nice to myself, and I need to be okay with being alone.
I write this not to notify the public that I'm at this state, but to be transparent. To walk the walk as they say. I don't want to hide this because I know the social stigma is real and I don't want to be an example of shrinking into my illness alone. I want to discuss. I want to have conversations about this topic and hear stories from others. I will not shy from this because I was once that girl that struggled all on her own. Not anymore. I want everyone to be able to have this discussion and it starts here and now.
Even if you are a high functioning depressed person like me, you deserve to get help. Just because you can live like this doesn't mean you have to. I want people to walk away from reading this knowing that it's okay to have these moments of relapse because we all have something we struggle with in this life. The difference in it being okay this time is that you learn from this and readjust. Don't stay down. Fight like hell to get out of this. As long as you're still fighting this, you're still in the game. And as long as you're in the game, you're winning the war.
Thanks for all the support lately. I can already feel this turning around. Mostly because I know I have all of you rooting me on. Let me root you on as well.
Comments