Too Far Gone

    There seems to be this idea around dealing with mental illness and mentally ill people that some people are so mentally ill and have been for so long that those people can't be helped. It's this idea that some people are so far lost down the rabbit hole of darkness that mental illness creates that nobody can ever save them. I hear that idea supported more often than you'd think when people say things like, "Well, that person is too far gone. There's no help for them now."

    The people that live with mental illness often think this about themselves, too. We often simultaneously believe that we're "too far gone" to be saved while also praying that what we believe about ourselves isn't true. Believing that you're too far gone into the darkness created by your mental health condition to ever be saved from it is a scary place to be, and it's made even scarier when we hear people saying our fear out loud, even if it's about somebody else they believe can't be helped. 

    The whole idea that I was "too far gone" to be saved was one of the reasons I was afraid to go to therapy. I was afraid the therapist would confirm my worst fear and then send me packing to continue a life of misery that I wouldn't be able to fix or escape unless I did the unthinkable. But...then I went to therapy, and neither of my therapists ever thought that I was beyond help. With the help of my therapist, I was actually able to pull myself up out of the mental illness rabbit hole.

    I wasn't the only one that was able to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat. I saw other people that I cared about pulling themselves out of the rabbit holes of substance abuse and mental illness, too, after they had been described as "too far gone". That reinforced the idea for me that nobody was ever "too far gone" to be pulled back out of the darkness. Many of them had even spent more years than I had being down in that rabbit hole, and it still wasn't too late for them to be saved even from themselves. 

    The thing with mental illness is that it lies. I know I say this a lot, but it's true. Your mental illness will make you think terrible things about yourself, including thoughts of how you're too far gone or have been mentally ill for too long to be helped. That's just not true. That's never true.

    Let me put it like this: Before you ever think a person, including yourself, is ever too far gone to be saved, ask yourself, "Is that person dead?" If the answer is, "No. That person is not dead." Then they can still be helped. As long as you are alive, you can still be pulled out of the dark rabbit hole of your mental illness. It doesn't matter how long you've been dealing with that mental health condition. It's never too late. You just have to be alive. 

    I'll end with this: A lot of people think that there is some kind of limit to how far somebody can go out into the land of mental illness and/or substance abuse before they can no longer find their way back. A lot of people living with mental illness and/or substance abuse often think the same thing about themselves. If you're thinking that, your unwell brain is lying to you. It doesn't matter how long or how severely you've been struggling with your condition. You can always be helped. As long as you are alive, you're never "too far gone" for help. 

Proud Work in Progress

    I've always been the kind of person, that when somebody compliments something I worked on, or even when my therapist praises the progress I've made, I'll say something like, "Yeah, I did that, but I still want to/need to (insert goal or desired amount of progress)." I've always sort of felt like, whatever progress I made didn't deserve recognition because I hadn't reached as far as I wanted to go yet, and I could only truly be praised or celebrated or complimented when I reached the goal I had in mind. I mean, you can't say how great something is while it's still in progress, you have to see it finished to decide, right?

    I do that sort of thing a lot when it comes to dealing with my OCD and panic disorder triggers. I'll do a small exposure, and then if I don't feel like I exposed myself to whatever the trigger is for as long as I imagined I would, the mission feels like a failure. My therapist is always quick to correct me. She always points out, "Yeah. You got anxious/left/turned off the thing, but you still did it. It doesn't matter that you didn't do as well as you expected yourself to, the main point is that you did it. Then you recognized your limit, and you stopped. That's good. That's progress, and it deserves to be acknowledged."

    I actually say things like this so much in my sessions that my therapist says things like, "Did you hear what you just said?" Or, "Do you realize what you just did?" Then she always goes on to explain to me that, any progress at all, even if I fell short of a goal I had in my head, still deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. She always lets me know that, even if I know I still have work to do in an area of my life or in dealing with my mental health, I'm still allowed to be proud of how far I've come.

    I've been in therapy for six or so years at this point, and that idea still feels weird to me. I'm supposed to be proud of and happy with how far I've come when I still have so far to go? The answer, according to my therapist, is yes. YES, I AM. 

    Here's the thing about progress for most of us, but especially for those of us that live with mental illness: progress is an ongoing journey that continues for our whole lives. Humans usually don't reach a point of progress at which they say, "Okay, I'm finished with this growth business. I've made all the progress I'm going to make in my life. I'll stay like this from here on out." When we usually begin to see growth in one area that we identified and have been working on, we pick out other things that we want to grow about ourselves or in how we deal with our mental health, and we begin work on those areas. This process goes on and on, because the more you grow, the more you can find other areas that you want to work on and improve because improving generally makes us feel good about ourselves. The goal or desired level of progress and growth just keeps changing. So, if we're not proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves while we're growing, when are we ever going to be proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves?

    I can tell you that I'm still not where I want to be in terms of progress and growth. I'm still a work in progress, and I'm probably always going to be a work in progress. That's okay. I'm still proud of where I am today because, I can tell you, it's a far cry from where I was five years ago, or even a few months ago. 

    I'll end with this: If you're anything like me, you're probably too hard on yourself sometimes (or, a lot of the time). It can feel so hard to celebrate yourself and be happy with yourself and the work you're putting into yourself when all you can see if how far you have left to go instead of how far you've come. The thing is that, especially with mental health, the whole process of progress and growth can be lifelong. So, if you're not celebrating yourself while you're a work in progress, when are you going to celebrate yourself at all?

From the Outside

    I had always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of experience with mental illness. Both of my parents had clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. I watched my grandmother take anti-anxiety medication for the entire part of her life that I knew her, and I watched her still battle her anxiety even with her medication. I had other friends and loved ones who had checked into in-patient treatment for mental health concerns, many of them more than once. I also personally knew people that either struggled with suicidal ideation or had actually attempted to take their own lives. 

    Up until my own struggle with OCD and panic disorder began, I felt like I understood what it was like to have a mental health condition. I had seen my loved ones struggling and suffering with mental illness, and I thought that since I had also struggled and suffered with difficult things throughout my life, that meant I understood what they were going through. I thought all suffering was the same because from the outside looking in, suffering just looks like suffering, if that makes sense.

    Prior to the beginning of my own struggle with mental illness, all of my "experience" with mental illness had been from the outside looking in. As you can imagine, when I suddenly found myself on the inside of that struggle looking out, it was a completely new experience. Sure, I had seen mental illness in other people. Sure, I had a basic knowledge of the causes and symptoms of various mental health conditions thanks to my bachelors degree in psychology. But...neither of those things prepared me for what it was like to feel a mental health condition wreaking havoc on my mind, body, and life. 

    I had ideas of suffering and mental illness, but I honestly couldn't wrap my mind around how this "thing" could interfere so much in the lives of people so as to make it nearly impossible to get out of bed, to leave their homes, to be a functional human being, or to stay alive even, no matter how hard they tried. From the outside looking in it's so easy to mistakenly just see people that maybe aren't trying hard enough or to see people just "giving in" to their mental health condition, or people who chose "a permanent solution to a temporary problem" instead of people that have expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to be as functional and as normal as possible until their stores of energy are depleted.

    Then, it happened to me, and like many of my friends and loved ones, I found myself thinking, "Other people really don't understand what this is like. I didn't...until now." From the outside looking in, I had never experienced the kind of suffering that comes with mental illness. (Nobody tells you that it's a different kind of suffering. Not worse, better, or more traumatic...just different.) I had never experienced that kind of fear that comes with not knowing if I could trust myself and my own thoughts. I had also never experienced the kind of prolonged anguish that can make a person think it would be a blessing not to wake up the next morning until I was living in it. 

    From the outside looking in, it's so easy to pass judgement on the way people deal with their mental health. When you aren't trapped on the inside of that struggle it's so easy to say that you would have handled something differently or that you never would have allowed your mind to run away to whatever place someone else is in. You don't know what you'd do though, until it's happening to you. None of us behave as logically as we imagine we will in any given situation where fear and pain are the dominant emotions or when survival mode is activated. 

    I'll end with this: As cliché as it sounds, mental illness is one of those things that it's impossible to truly understand until it happens to you. Sure, you can have experience dealing with other people's mental health, but that experience is that of an observer watching from the outside of the struggle and the suffering, untouched by it. That experience is completely different to the experience of the person with the mental health condition who is trapped on the inside looking out, who can't have distance from it. From the outside looking in, it's so easy to view a person's struggle with mental health through the societal lens of the stigma that tells us that those people are lazy or dramatic or attention-seeking instead of simply seeing people that are trying their best with the internal and external resources that they have at any given moment. 

Just Listen to Us

    Figuring out life with mental illness can be hard, especially in the beginning. We have to figure what our triggers are. We have to figure out how to manage symptoms. We have to figure out what treatments work best for our brains. We have to figure out how to have difficult conversations with loved ones, bosses, and even potential partners about our mental health conditions. We have to figure out what bits of our old lives we get to keep and what bits we have to change for our own wellness. Basically, we have to figure out how to navigate life all over again with this new, scary thing that we have to take into account for practically every decision we make.

    The whole process is frustrating and painful, and it has probably been a trial and error process for us, but then....we figure it out. We figure out how to identify and handle existing and potential triggers, how to manage the symptoms, how to live as fully as possible while we keep an eye on our ever-present mental health condition and travel along our wellness journey.

    While we're figuring things out for ourselves, our loved ones are also trying to figure it all out alongside us. They see us struggling. They see us at our worst when our mental illness is wreaking havoc on us and our lives, and they hate it. Our loved ones would more than likely do anything to make our suffering stop, but they have no idea how to make it stop. They can't take away the mental illness, and so this might lead our loved ones to try to protect us from our mental health condition. 

    In an effort to help us manage our mental illness, our loved ones can sometimes make mental health decisions for us to avoid certain situations because they assume the situation will be a trigger. Sometimes, even when we insist that we would be fine in X situation, our loved ones will stand firm and say something along the lines of, "No. That will definitely make you (insert symptoms here). I know it will. So we just won't do that/watch that/talk about that."

    While we understand that this protectiveness comes from a place of love, it's not the most helpful attitude to have when dealing with someone else's mental health condition. Just because we have a mental health condition doesn't mean that we're like children that don't know what's best for ourselves or how to take care of ourselves. We've put in the work in therapy to learn these exact things.

    It would be so much more helpful if they just asked us, "Are you okay if we do this/watch this/talk about this today?" and then ACTUALLY LISTENED TO US when we gave them an answer. If we've been living with our mental illness for some time, and especially if we've spent some time in therapy, we know our mental health boundaries. We know when it's a good time to challenge our mental illness and when it's a good time to leave or avoid a situation to be kind to ourselves. So, if we say we'll be fine in a situation, we mean it, because we wouldn't risk creating a bad mental health day just to prove a point. If we legitimately feel like it might be a bad day to be exposed to anything we can opt out of, we'll tell you that. 

    Also, if something has been a trigger for us in the past, that doesn't mean that same thing will ALWAYS be a trigger for our mental illness. We can and do work through some things like that in therapy so that we don't make avoidance the default coping mechanism. You can always ask, "I know this has been a trigger in the past, but how do you feel about it now?" instead of assuming that it's still an issue. We know that if we want to maintain wellness it's best to answer questions like this honestly instead of giving you the answer we think you want from us.

       On another level, just assuming that something will be triggering and then telling us that you know a certain thing will be triggering isn't a good idea. If we aren't careful, thinking about why you think something would be triggering (especially when we're dealing with intrusive thoughts) can create a trigger where there wasn't one before. 

    Loved ones can still be protective, and we appreciate that in the right context. Save the protectiveness for when someone is arguing that our mental illness isn't a real illness or when we confront someone for using our mental illness as a "quirky" personality trait. That's when we need it. We don't really need it when we're just making decisions about what we can handle in regard to our mental health condition. Odds are, after some time in therapy and after we've (mostly) figured out how to navigate life with our mental illness, we don't need you to try to protect us from ourselves or our mental health conditions as much as you still think we do. (But we love you for wanting to.)

    I'll end with this: I know, you want to figure out any way you can to protect someone you care about from the suffering that comes with their mental health condition. However, when it comes to trying to help someone manage their mental illness, making the decision for them to avoid certain things without talking to them about it isn't the most helpful thing you can do. We're so glad you want to help, and honestly, the most helpful thing you can do is listen to us about dealing with our own mental health condition. It's okay to just ask, "Do you feel okay with X?" instead of just assuming you know best because you love them.

Peaceful Co-Existence

    When I was first learning to live with mental illness after my diagnosis, I thought of my OCD and panic disorder as things I needed to control in order to become and then to maintain my wellness. My mindset when it came to my mental health conditions was, "I will fight you, and I will win. I won't let you interfere with my life." I viewed my OCD and panic disorder as some unruly creature that I had to keep on a tight leash, lest it have too much wiggle room and ruin everything I had worked for.

    This "control" approach left me feeling exhausted, hopeless, and miserable more often than not. I was basically just surviving instead of truly thriving and growing because I was constantly on guard, worried that my mental illness was going to break through my carefully held control and undo every little bit of progress I was making. I was never not worried about what my mental illness was doing. (Spoiler: This whole "control" idea I had was really giving my mental illness more control over me and not the other way around.) By always being worried that my control of my mental illness would lapse and result in disaster, I was pretty much consumed by my conditions. This didn't leave enough space for me to nurture my actual self, the person who existed separate from the mental illness that forms who I am as a person with a healthier brain. (Hint: You can't truly heal if you don't nurture your actual self that is separate from the mental illness along with managing the mental illness itself.)

    The thing I realized a little bit later than I should have is that mental illness can't be controlled. None of us can control whether or not we live with mental illness, or whether or not it interferes with our lives from time to time, even with medication. We can, however, control how we interact with our mental illness. This realization prompted a change to a healthier, more accurate way of thinking about and living with my mental health conditions.  

    These days, instead of control, I strive for peaceful co-existence with my OCD and panic disorder. My mindset now is, "You're here. I'm here. Neither of us is going anywhere, so let's figure out how we can have a healthy balance within this space we share." (The shared space is my mind and body.) I allow my anxiety to take up an amount of space that I don't feel is frightening or overwhelming (because your mental illness is going to take up space whether you want it to or not) while I exist and function alongside the mental illness in enough space that allows me to thrive and to grow so that healing can happen. 

    With peaceful co-existence my focus is no longer my mental illness and how it can wreak havoc. My focus now is how I can help myself can feel balanced and "human" all the time, even on a day when I'm experiencing symptoms of my mental health condition. It's a much gentler and kinder way of dealing with my OCD and panic disorder, and it leaves me the space and time I need to learn about my actual self as I heal and grow.

    I'll end with this: When we strive to control our mental illness, the thought seems to be, "This can't be here," which isn't healthy, realistic or kind to ourselves. Life with a mental health condition is hard enough, and we don't need to make it harder by trying to control a thing that isn't controllable. Shifting our thinking so that we strive for peaceful co-existence, where the focus is, "Let's figure out how to find a balance between our actual self and the mental health condition in this shared mind and body," is healthier, more realistic, and kinder to ourselves. 

But...That's Not Real

    Part of living with OCD is dealing with intrusive thoughts and the irrational fears that those intrusive thoughts can cause. And I have a few: demonic possession from the years before I was diagnosed; the whole death by cleaning products issue that I mentioned in a previous post; unknowingly and accidently being the cause of someone's death; and most recently, since we've been living through a major health crisis, contamination. (I'm sure I have more, but let's not go down that rabbit hole today.)

    The pattern is always the same: I have an intrusive thought that is triggered by something, like a situation, a person, an event, or something else external. The intrusive thought leads to an irrational (meaning not based in reality) fear of the thing from the intrusive thoughts. The irrational fear leads to a physical response (AKA my anxiety and panic attacks). Then I'm left in a battle between trying to maintain my healthy patterns or reverting back to old, unhealthy patterns that involve compulsions to make the fear and the physical response stop.

    All the while that I'm experiencing the irrational fear and the anxiety that was caused by my irrational fear, I know it's not rational. I know I don't logically need to be afraid of the thing that I'm afraid of. While my anxiety is building up, even all the way to the tipping point, and sometimes even during a panic attack, I know I don't need to have such fear of the thing. I also know, logically, that I don't need to be anxious about the the thing that I'm anxious about. I am fully aware the whole time I'm lost in the land of irrationality that I'm being irrational, and I hate it. I hate that the fear and the anxiety keep happening anyway even though I know it's not a "real" fear.

    I was talking to my therapist about this very thing in my last phone session with her. I was telling her how much it bothered me to be anxious about a thing, and to know, logically, that I was being irrational while still being unable to stop the anxiety. 

    My therapist was quick to stop me from being too harsh with myself. She explained to me that the brain hasn't yet evolved enough in its most primal areas to be able to tell the difference between a real fear and an imagined fear. The brain just recognizes fear, and then it sounds the alarm so my survival instincts kick in. Then, because I can't run away from or fight my irrational OCD fears, I'm left with anxiety since the extra adrenaline, tense muscles, and all the things that go into the fight or flight response aren't actually put to use.

    So, *I* know my fear is irrational and not a thing that is really likely to happen. My brain, however, does not, and my brain, since it controls what chemicals get released into my body, wins a lot of the time. I can desensitize myself to the fear and lessen the emotional response over time with exposure and response prevention therapy, though, but even with ERP it'll take time for my emotional brain to catch up with my logical brain.

    I'll end with this: Just because somebody knows a fear is irrational doesn't mean that they can just stop having an anxiety response to that fear. A person can be fully aware they're being irrational, and yet they won't be able to stop the fear and the anxiety because the brain doesn't know the difference between a rational (real) and an irrational (not real) fear. The brain only has one blanket response when it comes to fear, and that setting is, "DANGER! DANGER! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!" So, it doesn't matter if the fear isn't actually a "real" thing because the brain treats every fear as real, which can leave a great many of us left to battle anxiety and panic attacks when we can't run from or fight those fears that live inside our heads until we work to desensitize ourselves.

The Child Inside the Grown Up

     Let me start by explaining something about myself. As a child, I had an irrational fear of "chemicals", specifically things like Lysol, Bleach, SOS scrubber pads, floor cleaners, carpet cleaners, toilet cleaners...anything that you would use to clean something besides soap and water or rubbing alcohol or a non-toxic wipe. I was TERRIFIED of them. If I ever accidently stepped on a freshly mopped floor, a freshly shampooed carpet, or touched a freshly bleached dish or countertop, I just knew that was the end of me. I just knew that "chemical" was going to somehow get absorbed into my body through my skin, and that shortly after, I was going to die. (I could even die by showering or bathing in a freshly, chemically-cleaned bathtub because, what if it wasn't rinsed properly, and what if the steam from the hot water made me inhale some toxic fumes from the cleaning products?!) My mom had to rinse our tub multiple times before I would get into it after she cleaned it. 

    (Looking back at things like this, I can see how I may have developed OCD as an adult...)

    Fast-forward to the present, when I decided to be a "real adult" and clean my bathtub myself, with actual cleaning products instead of asking my mom to do it. (My mom knew I had this irrational fear of death by "chemicals" and so was always willing to do it.) Had I grown out of my irrational fear of being exposed to "chemicals"? Apparently not, my friends. I even had gloves on, but that didn't stop the panic that welled up inside me as soon as I was wrist-deep in blue SOS-colored water, trying to scrub my bathtub. I JUST KNEW that "chemical" was going to somehow absorb through my gloves, through my skin, and I was going to die because I had touched it.

    That fear sounds so child-like doesn't it? I never hear of adults being so afraid of things like Lysol, Bleach, SOS scrubber pads, and other cleaning products that they have a panic attack when forced to touch them. I brought that up with my therapist in our phone session this weekend. 

    My therapist was quick to point out that my fear didn't make me childish. She explained that my fear of the cleaning "chemicals" had resulted in traumatic experiences during childhood in which I was sure I was going to die.  As a result of that trauma, the fear part of my brain had sort of unpacked and lived in that young age in which the trauma had occurred. The part that held this fear hadn't grown up along with the rest of me, so to speak, which is often how trauma and fear work inside our minds. So, during this process of cleaning my bathtub, that fear piece of my brain from childhood resurfaced, and I experienced it all over again. 

    Adult me had to meet child me as I completed my triggering task. I had to be kind and understanding with that child self still living inside the adult if I wanted to be able to process my fear. Believing you're going to fall over dead because you accidently got something on your skin is a traumatic experience for anyone, but especially for a child. I made sure not to think to myself that the fear was silly or stupid. (Although I did acknowledge that it was an irrational fear.) I acknowledged that felt like the real fear that my childhood self was sure it was, but then I told myself, "I'm an adult now, and I even have gloves on. I've touched this accidently before and survived. I'll survive this time, too. I don't have to be terrified. I just have to be careful. I've seen my mother use these very cleaning products for years WITHOUT GLOVES, and she's not dead. So, I can be okay."

    I had to meet the fear on it's own level, and then treat it like the developmental age it was frozen in without judgement. Once I did that, and I talked myself through it, I was able to complete the task. By the time I finished, I had stopped crying, at least, and I no longer thought I was going to die. I was still anxious, but I wasn't having a full-on panic attack.

    I'll end with this: As adults, we often judge ourselves for the fears that resulted from trauma (both "small" and "big" traumas) that we experienced as children, especially if that fear plays a part in a mental illness that develops later. We often feel silly or embarrassed if something happens that triggers the memory of that childhood traumatic experience and the fear in our adult lives, and we try to dismiss it. (I felt embarrassed crying into my bathtub as I battled with the fear that I was going to die because of the cleaning products I was using. I felt even worse when I linked the obsessive way I used to worry about that to my OCD diagnosis from adulthood.) Dismissing it won't heal that child-like fear inside us, though. To heal that child-like fear, we have to meet it at the development level it lives in, and we have to be kind to it, to lend it that feeling of adult-like safety before it can heal.

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.