Every day is a fucking battle.
Medication that isn’t doing its job is also causing brain fuzziness, which causes anxiety that also triggers panic attacks which are made worse by having a Parkinsonian essential tremor, and this leads to taking Valium to calm the fuck down, and this works. Still, then there’s the addiction to benzos, which is a different kind of hell altogether. And this brings about depression, having to go through all of that exhausting shit. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.
You try to work the steps. The breathing, the mindfulness, the grounding. It doesn’t work because it seems that your brain is too smart to fall for that shit.
You go to therapy once a week, and the hour goes by too damn quickly, leaving you mostly unsatisfied because, goddammit, we were really starting to get somewhere, and you want to resolve these issues and have some semblance of a normal life.
You miss out on life, mainly because you’re so fucking afraid of having a panic attack in public you just stay home. You rarely see the sun, and that fucks with circadian rhythms, which fucks up your sleep, and then you’re tired all of the time, except those moments of mania, which eventually wane as you get older and more tired.
You try not to be angry or bitter because you know it doesn’t change the past or even the fucked up chemicals in your brain. But your mind is like, “fuck that, I have every right to feel this way,” and now you have inner conflict going on. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.
You’re afraid of nothing for the most part but scared of yourself. You can’t fully trust your mind. And you worry that the proverbial string holding you (barely) together will eventually snap.
You can’t stand the way you look and sound, so you become obsessed with the smallest things, like getting a stain on your shirt or even if one fucking hair is out of place. You grow a beard to hide your face. You’d grow out your hair, too, but it’s become thinner on top, and it embarrasses you to the point of doing your own haircuts because you really don’t want anyone noticing.
You can’t eat normally because it seems everything gives you cramps, which causes you to panic since you’re deathly afraid of having an accident (which is another reason you don’t go out), so you pop Imodium every day like it’s candy.
You constantly worry about being a burden to everyone, so you find yourself apologizing every time you have an episode, which seems to happen more frequently than it used to.
You suddenly leave rooms in your house as quietly as possible when you feel an episode coming on and spend the rest of the night curled up in a fetal position in bed, just trying to keep thoughts of ending it all at bay until you can finally cry yourself to sleep.
This is the life of my illness—every single day.
*This post was written while listening to When The Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin*