Right Now

     I have never been a person that could say, "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it," and mean it. Even before my anxiety symptoms appeared, I was what my mom and my grandmother called "a worrier". If there is a situation, my default setting is to worry about every single aspect and every single possible outcome of that situation all at once until I'm overwhelmed and exhausted, even if I don't need to worry about an aspect or outcome of said situation. 

    With the current health crisis, with all the other things that have happened so far this year, and with all the changes I have implemented so far, I've been worried about a lot of things. Week after week, I was taking these worries to my therapist in our bi-weekly phone sessions and telling her that I was anxious and then also exhausted from being anxious. It seemed to be a constant stream of, "What if X, Y, or Z happens, then this, this, and this could happen. And then..."

    My therapist, time and again, has had to remind me not to focus on the future in this way. She's told me over and over, "Just focus on THIS moment. The one you're in right now." She'd follow that up with the questions that I needed to ask myself to pull myself into the present moment. Questions like, "What are you doing right now? What do you have to deal with right this second? Is everything okay in just this moment? Are you okay RIGHT NOW, in just this second?"

    Usually, as I answer those questions, I'm able to say, "Right this very moment all I have to deal with is this phone therapy session. Everything is okay in this moment. I am okay in this moment." Then I'm out of the future and all the possibilities that something bad could happen, and I'm firmly in the present, where I don't have to worry about anything except my current reality. 

    It's super easy to do that while I'm on the phone with my therapist, when everything actually feels fine. It's between the phone sessions that I have trouble stopping myself once that ball of worry starts rolling around in my mind and getting bigger and bigger, like a rubber band ball, as it collects more and more worries that are littering my brain at any given moment. It takes considerably more effort for me to stop myself and ask, "What do I have to deal with, right now, in just this moment?" And, "Am I okay right now?" But...once I can break myself out of the future-centered worries and realize that, in the current moment, I am actually okay, my anxiety tends to drop.

    After being a worrier for my whole life, learning to stop myself when that ball starts rolling around in my brain is taking a lot of practice, but I can eventually get there. I still forget to do it sometimes, but learning to use new coping strategies always takes time. The point is that I'm working on it. 

    I'll end with this: Learning to focus on only the present moment when our anxiety constantly wants to take us into the future isn't easy. However, asking certain questions to pull yourself back to the present can make it less difficult. Asking yourself, "What do I have to deal with right now, in this moment?" and "Am I okay RIGHT NOW?" can be helpful ways to get yourself to a calmer, present-focused place.

Feeling All the Feelings

    Since I've been in therapy, I've slowly gotten more and more comfortable with showing emotions that aren't always positive. I've had to re-teach myself to just feel all my feelings without trying to bury them like I did for years. In the process of re-teaching myself how to actually be okay with feeling all my feelings and expressing them, I've learned that I'm a person that cries easily. If I get sad, frustrated, angry, stressed, too happy, too sentimental, or too overwhelmed, I'm more than likely going to cry. Apparently, that's just who I am as a person. 

    After I started to more openly express the emotions that aren't typically perceived as positive emotions, I noticed something about the way that people tend to think about people with mental illness. In a way, people with mental illness almost seem like they aren't allowed to express unpleasant emotions without some kind of extra judgement. The extra judgement usually falls into one of two categories. One: we're having a mental health crisis because we're expressing "negative" emotions, and our loved ones are VERY concerned. Or, two: our negative emotions are dismissed as less "real" emotions because we have a mental illness and therefore our "negative" emotions are just a symptom of that condition. Both judgments typically come with a "You need to take your medications" kind of statement.

    Recently, I felt a whole mixture of emotions because of an external situation that I have no control over. I was feeling grief. I was feeling frustration. I was feeling a deep, burning anger akin to rage, but quieter. I was feeling a deep sadness that was separate from the grief. I was also feeling a bit hopeless. And, yes, I was crying. Of course, I was crying. How could I feel all those things and not cry?

    As I was upset and crying, someone suggested that I needed to take my anti-anxiety medications. That wasn't helpful...or healthy. One of the the only things I WASN'T feeling at the time was anxious. I was a mess of emotions, yes, but anxiety wasn't part of the mess. 

    The emotions I was experiencing had nothing to do with my panic disorder or OCD and everything to do with the fact that I was a human in an unpleasant situation that I had no control over and that I couldn't change. I didn't need medication. I needed to feel what I felt and to be allowed to cry it out in order to process it, to feel better, and move on.

    Mentally ill people still have access to the full emotional spectrum, right? People with mental health conditions can experience unpleasant feelings that have nothing to do with their actual mental health condition. Our mental illness doesn't somehow make us incapable of feeling the things everybody else could feel in any given situation. Not everything we feel and think is pathological. Some of it is really just "normal" human, feeling our feelings stuff, like everybody else that doesn't have a mental health condition.

    It's also completely okay that people with mental illness (appropriately) feel unpleasant emotions. It's good. It's healthy to feel all the feelings. It doesn't mean that we're headed for some kind of break down. It also doesn't mean that we need to hurry up and take medication to make the feeling go away. It just means that we're human. People with mental illness deserve the "luxury" of being able to feel all their feelings without the assumption being automatically made that it's related to our mental stability or having the feelings dismissed.

    Here's the thing with that whole "You should take your meds" attitude that is often expressed by loved ones when someone with a mental illness expresses unpleasant emotions: the medication treats a mental health condition, it doesn't stop us from feeling. (And if it does, that might means the medication needs to be changed.) A psychotropic medication won't stop us from appropriately feeling grief, sadness, heartbreak, anger, frustration, and all the other emotions along the spectrum that other people are allowed to feel without the extra layer of judgement, and it shouldn't. 

     If we weren't living with a mental health condition, our negative emotions would be viewed and handled differently. Instead of just assuming it's part of the mental illness, which is either cause for concern or dismissal, the feelings would be legitimately addressed. Our loved ones would say, "What's going on?" And then some kind of statement like, "Okay. Do you want to do X, Y, Z until you feel better?" Instead of, "You need to take your medication." Can you see how, when mental illness isn't a factor, the response is kinder and healthier because the emotions are actually acknowledged and allowed to be felt?

    I'll end with this: Feeling all of your feelings, even the unpleasant, "negative" emotions is healthy. It's good to appropriately feel those things. Appropriate emotional responses to life and its ups and downs don't end when someone is diagnosed with a mental health condition, and all of a person's emotions don't suddenly become the symptoms of their mental illness. Saying, "You need to take your meds" when your loved one is expressing an emotion that is unpleasant isn't helpful. It can actually be hurtful.

But What If it Works Out?

     As I've previously mentioned, I've had a lot of changes in my life so far in 2021. As a person with OCD, those changes have caused me a lot of anxiety, even though I wanted the changes and even though the changes are good things. Since I graduated with my certificate, I've been filled with anxiety. 

    All these worries kept piling on. What if this certificate course was a waste of money that we didn't have to waste? What if this certificate course didn't teach me enough to be prepared for the job I wanted to do? What if nobody wanted to hire me because I had "just a certificate" instead of the more acceptable associates degree or even a bachelor's degree in this new field? What if I did get hired, but then it turned out I actually had no idea what I was doing? What if I made too many mistakes and got fired? What if I got hired, but then it turned out that the job was so stressful that I started regularly having panic attacks again? What if getting this certificate and the job I wanted wasn't the step in the right direction that I thought it was? I was spiraling, my friends. 

    My brain kept taking me to the worst case scenario automatically, and then I would unpack and live there. At one point during my first week on the job, I was so anxious that I cried in the car. I just knew I was going to screw up so badly that my boss would fire me before I had the chance to even correct my mistakes. (That didn't actually happen. My boss is nice and understanding.)

    Again and again I brought these worries to my bi-weekly phone sessions with my therapist. Again and again, she would ask me for evidence that I had to support my worries that I wouldn't do well in my new job. I never had any evidence. In fact, I only ever had evidence to the contrary. So she would always say something like, "Stop that anxiety-inducing thought before it gets too far. Stop it and say: But what if this bad thing doesn't happen? What if it works out?"

    WHAT IF IT WORKS OUT?! What if it WORKS OUT? Asking that question felt like I was daring the universe to make it not work out just because for a moment, I'd had the audacity to think it possibly could work out. Asking that question felt like I was too confident, and too much confidence is never a good thing, is it? So, of course I said to her, "But, it might not work out." To which she replied, "But what if it does?"

    So, for the past few weeks, I've basically had to train myself to stop when I feel the anxiety rising because I'm living in the land of the worst case scenario and ask "But...what if this works out?" My anxiety doesn't really know what to do with that question, it doesn't know what to do with the little bit of confidence that question brings. After I ask that question, I feel my anxiety leveling off as the worst case scenario is replaced by images of things going well, or at least not going terribly wrong. That little breakdown in the spiral gives me the minute I need to be able to get to a calmer place so I can logically realize that everything isn't as drastic as I originally felt like it was. 

    I'll end with this: It's so easy to spiral into the land of the worst case scenario. It easy to get so lost there that we can't possibly see how our worst case scenario isn't the only option for how something will go. All it takes is a second to challenge that thought. Surprisingly, simply asking, "But what if this works out?" has been a thing pulls me back out of the worst case scenario to a more realistic place. 

The Medication Misconception

    People tend to feel one of two ways about medications for mental illness. (1) They hate them and think they turn people into "zombies" or addicts. Or, (2) They think they're magical, fast-acting, simple cures for mental illness. In a recent conversation, I encountered the latter. Someone recently said to me, "There has to be a medication for that," in a tone that suggested I should just take whatever medication is offered up to treat my OCD and panic disorder and be finished with the whole unpleasant ordeal of having mental illness. The person seemed genuinely surprised that getting the right medication to "fix" my mental health conditions wasn't as simple and easy as they originally thought. (And no, your family doctor really shouldn't be prescribing you psychotropic medications. They should actually be referring you to a psychiatrist for that prescription.)

    Yes, there is medication to treat my OCD. It didn't work with my brain chemistry. Technically, there is another medication I could have tried, but, since it's one of the older medications, my therapist warned that it was hard for people to tolerate because of the side effects. I had also been warned previously that, once I go off the medication, the symptoms might come back for a bit, meaning I could relapse, once the medication that was chemically re-wiring my brain was taken away. So, to me, the risks outweighed the benefits at the time, and the risks still currently outweigh the benefits. 

    A lot of people think about psychotropic medications (AKA medications that help a person achieve the right levels of brain chemicals so that illnesses like depression and anxiety are less severe) the same way this person did. Many people view psychotropic medications as these magical cures for mental health conditions. Many people think that, as long as a person is taking the medications, then they no longer really have to manage or even deal with the symptoms of their mental illness, and that the medication is the only treatment the person needs. That actually isn't how these medications work.

    Even when a person is prescribed medications for their mental health condition, that person is still a person living with a mental illness. The mental health condition isn't going to go away, but the whole point of the medication is to get to the point that the mental illness is no longer debilitating all the time. Symptoms and bad days will still occur even with the medication. That's why medication is prescribed (usually) as part of a treatment plan that still requires a person to attend sessions with a therapist and have regular evaluations by a psychiatrist. Therapy and medication work together to make the most effective treatment plan for the person.

    These kinds of medications also don't work for everyone. If two people have the same exact mental health condition, with the same exact symptoms, the medication commonly used to treat that condition might not help both people. Each person's brain chemistry is different and reacts differently to medications. Some people can even have medication-resistant types of mental health conditions. 

    Another thing that people don't tend to understand about these medications is that you can't just pop a pill and feel better that same day, unless you're prescribed something like Ativan or Xanax, which are addictive and not prescribed as often by mental health professionals as they were in the past. Most psychotropic medications need to build up in a person's system to become effective, and this can take at least two weeks. Then dosage and time of medication get tweaked until a person finds the dose and the time each day to take the medication that is most helpful. Then if medications need to be switched or if a combination of medications is needed, the process of finding relief is longer.

    When treating mental illness, there is no magical finger snap moment that suddenly makes everything better. Treatment, even with medication, is a slow, and sometimes painful process. There also is no medication (to my knowledge) that can permanently "cure" a mental health condition. 

    I'll end with this: A lot of people, especially if they haven't experienced mental illness themselves, view the medications that treat mental illness as a quick and easy cure for those illnesses that is easily obtained and effective for everyone. There isn't a cure for most mental health conditions, there is only treatment and then management over a person's lifetime. Psychotropic medications are treatments, not miracle drugs. The point of these medications isn't even to "cure" a mental illness, but to treat the mental illness so that it is no longer debilitating.

But Everybody Does That

    I'm sure all of us that live with mental illness have been in the situation in which we mention our mental health condition and some of the symptoms, and someone tells us, "You don't have a mental illness, everybody does that." I was in this situation recently, and I have to tell you, it took me a minute to try to figure out the best way to respond. As you can imagine, one of the emotions I experienced in the few seconds of silence I had to take was anger. How could somebody tell me that I didn't have mental illness when I was the one that had been clinically diagnosed and had been in treatment for nearly six years after silently suffering with that mental illness for the better part of a decade to the point that sometimes I wasn't sure I was strong enough to keep fighting? 

    Yes everybody will, at some point, experience something that is a symptom of a mental illness. Everybody in the world will have a panic attack at least once in their lifetime. That doesn't mean that everybody who has a panic attack has panic disorder, but it also doesn't mean that panic disorder isn't an actual mental health condition. Everybody, at some point, will have a period of high anxiety or a low period that they classify as depression. That doesn't mean that everybody who experiences that brief period of anxiety or depression has clinical anxiety or depression, but it also doesn't mean that anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and mood disorders aren't actual mental health conditions. Everybody in the world has intrusive thoughts (for people without OCD and certain other anxiety disorders like GAD the brain does a better job at filtering them out so the person doesn't pay too much attention to them). That doesn't mean that everybody that has intrusive thoughts has OCD, but it also doesn't mean that OCD isn't an actual mental health condition.

    So, what's the difference between the thing that everybody has experienced or will experience and actual mental illness?

    For those that experience the thing without having mental illness, the symptom, like the panic attack, anxiety, or depressive episode is often tied to an external event that can be (mostly) clearly pinpointed, and the symptom occurs in relation to that external event. Also, the panic attacks, anxiety, or depressed feelings are short-term, and they often go away on their own as we overcome whatever external situation that triggered them is resolved. Most often, in this situation, the symptoms don't tend to come back again and again, and they don't really interfere long-term with a person's ability to function at their usual level of functioning. 

    For those of us that experience the "thing that everybody does" as part of an actual mental health condition, the panic attack, anxiety, or depressive episode might not always have an external trigger that we can figure out. A lot of the time, we can be having THE BEST time and then BAM...oh, hello, symptoms of my mental illness. For those of us that live with mental illness, the symptoms aren't short-term. We had them over a period of time, probably six months to a year consistently, which got us a clinical diagnosis by a licensed mental health professional, and the symptoms are on repeat, not an isolated occurrence. These symptoms don't go away on their own. In fact, without proper treatment, symptoms associated with an actual mental illness will get worse over time, each time they come back, and they will significantly interfere with a person's level of functioning and overall quality of life. 

    Basically, you can think of the difference like this: it's like somebody taking a vacation to a place versus somebody living full-time in that same place. One person, the one that's just taking a short trip, can return home after the trip. This is what thing that everybody will experience is, a vacation, albeit an unpleasant one from which they can return home, to normalcy and comfort. The other person, however, lives in the place that the other person just took a trip to. That is their home, the place they're in every day, and they don't have the resources needed to leave that place for good (although they can take a short vacation to a more pleasant place from time to time). That's what the actual mental illness is. 

    I'll end with this: Yes, everybody in the world, at some point, during their lifetime will experience a panic attack, period of anxiety, or a depressive episode. That doesn't mean that actual mental illnesses characterized by those same symptoms do not exist. The difference is simple, the thing that has happened or will happen to everyone is a short-term experience that isn't likely to become a regular occurrence that significantly interferes with someone's quality of life. Actual mental illness, however, is a long-term cycle of symptoms on repeat that DOES significantly interfere with the quality of someone's life. Let me also just say that, if you find yourself in the situation in which you keep experiencing anxiety, panic, or depressed feelings that aren't really going away or that keep going away and coming back, don't talk yourself out of making an appointment with your doctor or a community mental health agency to get checked out because you think, "everybody does that". Everybody doesn't do that, actually, and you deserve a better quality of life than living in the land of untreated mental illness. 

Different Versions

     As many of you already know, I decided to go back to school in 2021. This was a decision that came out of a moment of clarity in which I thought, "This isn't how I want my life to be, so what can I change?" And then, a few months later, I was given the opportunity to go back to school so I could actually make the career change I'd been thinking about. (Thanks, Mum!) Now, I've just finished the first half of an accelerated certificate course in an area that I've always felt drawn to.

    I have to tell you, friends, even though I really wanted to go back to school and even though I've always done well in academic settings, I was scared. As some of you might recall from my earlier blog posts, I was secretly and terrifyingly mentally unwell during the years that I was working toward my BA in applied psychology and my sociology minor. During that time, I hated myself, and so I felt like I didn't deserve friends or even the opportunity to go to such a good college. During that time, I also had an unhealthy relationship with school, I guess you could say. I used it as a distraction from my mental health, and so every semester I practically ran myself into the ground trying to avoid dealing with the mental illnesses I didn't know I had. There was also speculation that the stress of going from a high school senior to a university freshman was the straw that broke camel's back, so to speak, and contributed to the sudden onset of my OCD symptoms in the second semester of my senior year.

    So, yes, of course, given that past experience, I was scared of what would happen to me if I took the leap and actually went back to school. Would the past repeat itself? Would the stress be too much so that it would exacerbate my symptoms? Would the similarity of the situation trigger new symptoms or a new mental health condition that would also need treatment? Would I be able to have a healthy relationship with school instead of relapsing back into the old pattern in which I used school to avoid dealing with my mental health conditions? I had so many concerns that were all related to the way I had been before. The fear was almost enough to make me back out before I even tried.

    Then I remembered something that Allison Raskin (YouTuber and fellow cool human that also lives with OCD like me) said in her Just Between Us podcast. (It's on YouTube. Check it out.) She was talking about how therapy changes us, and she said something like, "This version of me has never been in X situation." She said it weeks and weeks ago, but I still think about it. I was especially thinking about it as I got myself ready to embark on a new educational adventure.

    Allison Raskin was right. People don't stay the same. We grow, and we change all the time. We create different versions of ourselves as we heal from traumas. I know I'm a different version of myself than I was even three years ago as I was just starting to heal. I also know that I'm a completely different version of myself than I was while I was in college the first time.

    This current version of myself (from a mental health perspective) has never functioned in an academic setting. It's like a whole new experience with a new person. I don't need to worry about this new version of myself drifting back to the way I had been while I was in college the first time because this newest version of myself hasn't experienced that self-hatred, that same level of fear, and that sensation of drowning in darkness that the older version of me lived in as a constant state of existence. This current new version of myself has never been through a spiral without the tools and information to handle that spiral. This new version of me recognizes the importance of caring for my mental health. That meant this new educational opportunity could happen with a clean slate, so to speak, from a new perspective, with a healthier brain.

    I'll end with this: It's normal to worry about how we'll react when we're putting ourselves in situations that previously had an unpleasant thing or trauma associated with them or that we previously didn't handle in the healthiest of ways. If you've made progress in healing from that trauma, it's normal to be concerned about how the situation might affect your progress. But, remember, people don't stay the same. We change and grow and create new, healthier versions of ourselves as we learn and heal from our trauma. This version of you (probably) hasn't been in whatever situation you're worried about, and, so, it's more like a clean slate than repeating the past.

On Deserving

     When you live with a mental illness, a lot of times, that mental illness can make you feel like you don't deserve things. Your mental health condition can often make you feel like you don't deserve good opportunities in school or at your job, your friends, the love freely given by your loved ones, or even happiness in general. Maybe you think you don't deserve them because you feel like you're not good enough or maybe you feel like you're a terrible person (like I did) who doesn't deserve anything good at all.

    I lived my life for the better part of a decade under the assumption, that because of my OCD, specifically the content of my intrusive thoughts, I didn't deserve anything good in life because I was a terrible person. I didn't deserve the friends that I so desperately wanted. I didn't deserve it when people were nice to me. I didn't deserve to have romantic relationships. In fact, I didn't deserve to be happy at all. So, when something nice happened, anything from someone wanting to be my friend to something as simple as somebody giving me a compliment, I felt guilty because I felt like I didn't actually deserve even the most basic kindness from anyone. My inner dialogue was always, "If you only knew how terrible I really was, you wouldn't do this/say this/think this about me. I'm deceiving you by allowing you to think I deserve this."

    When I told my therapist about this, she asked something like, "You don't want or like or intentionally have these intrusive thoughts, right?" I answered that, of course, I didn't want or like or intentionally think such terrifying, awful things. She nodded and said something like, "Well, these thoughts aren't your fault. You don't like them. You don't want to have them. So, why does this thing outside of your control mean that you're a terrible person who doesn't deserve kindness and things that make you happy?" I didn't have an answer. 

    I still think about what my therapist said that day. Why would experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition or having a mental health condition at all mean that someone didn't deserve good things? It doesn't, no matter what the mental health condition is or its symptoms are. That's just another lie that can be filed under "garbage thoughts your funky brain generated for no reason". I mean, you wouldn't say someone with asthma didn't deserve good things. That thought wouldn't even cross your mind. And mental health conditions are like asthma in that they are chronic health conditions outside of a person's control, right?

    I'll end with this: Having a mental illness is not a default in your character. It doesn't say anything about who you are as a person, even if your symptoms are weird, gross, terrifying, vile intrusive thoughts. Having a mental illness isn't a thing that can define what you deserve. Living with a mental health condition doesn't mean you don't deserve happiness or to have the same opportunities in life as those without mental illness. Don't listen to your funky brain when it tells you that you're not good enough for someone or something or when it tells you that you're a completely terrible person. You are good enough, and you're definitely not a terrible person just because you have a mental health condition.