Midnight came last night and it wasn’t welcomed with open arms. Feelings of shame, worthlessness and a lack of hope. The type of feeling where you cannot see any positive outlook for the future, you don’t understand why people would ever like you or even want to talk to you and you wish you was anyone else in this world but you.

The (what should be terrifying) thing is I find myself wanting to be someone or anything else on this big old planet other than myself. Statement of the year: I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be me. This is when I need to remind myself that, no matter how desperately overwhelming everything is, I am ill. I am in ‘recovery’. No one has ever sat me down and told me that I am in recovery, it’s something that I’ve learnt. At the same time that I learnt this those in my support circle also started using the term during meetings, emails, etc.

Often I question what recovery is – the term ‘recovery’ itself has, in my opinion, a lot of stigma. I associate recovery to addiction, to real, hardcore trauma and illness. Recovery to me seems to be a negative term, when in reality it’s actually positive. Maybe this somehow relates to my unwanted talent of adopting a negative relationship with anything that tries to help me regain my health, i.e: medication, journalling, eating better and so forth. 

I’ve seen trauma (that sounds so dramatic…) and I’ve also seen the dark, hopeless, ugly, troubling, agonizing, mooring grasp of mental illness. I’m fed up saying mental illness – but I don’t want to say ‘my mind.’ I don’t want to say my mind because even though it may be my mind that is the driver of all this pain – it’s also my mind that is battling daily to fight the ‘monster’. Yeah, that’s what I’m gunna call it… for this blog post anyway.

I came to the realisation last night, after a bloody awful anxiety attack, that my mind really is fighting so so hard to beat the monster. The constant reliving of certain experiences, the negative thoughts, feelings and my lack of energy is due to my mind trying to heal itself. I cannot make sense of certain things, I struggle to understand certain things, and I can’t even bring myself to think about certain things – yet my mind is repeatedly trying to revisit certain moments, in order to heal from them. I’m not exactly helping myself because each time I’m faced with a painful memory or situation I try my best to brush it aside. I’m afraid I’ll let the monster win. Well, surely I’m letting the monster get the better of me by not allowing my mind to heal. I’m only worsening my emotional wellbeing, and if I saw anyone else doing this I have no doubt I’d try my damn hardest to help them through. So, I guess it’s time to help myself.

We all have our own monster, or monsters. Sometimes it appears in the form of a black dog, and sometimes things are just so damn blurry that it doesn’t appear as anything, but it’s overbearing control and intensity still shatters us. 

hmmm…