THE DEPRESSION RABBIT HOLE

When you come out of the grips of a depressional episode, there is an incredible relief.  Not one you feel allowed to celebrate.  Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again.  Not to mention the amount of shame and vulnerability you feel, when you see how your illness affected your family, friends and your job.  It feels as though life left everything untouched while you struggled to survive but in reality - nothing is the same.  

We come back to life, thinner, pale and weak but, as a survivor.  Survivors who don't get pats on the back from loved ones or coworkers who congratulate them on making it.  Survivors who wake to more work to catch up on and more ridicule by others for the time they missed why batteling.  At times, these stigmas can make you just spiral right back down the rabbit hole of despair because no one on earth gets what you're going through.  There is also a certain level of guilt when you resurface, I find.  Answering questions or apologizing to family and friends because they too are utterly exhausted from helping you fight a battle that they don't even truly understand themselves.  

Every day that I wake up, my wish is a simple one.  That, I get up feeling calm and at peace, rather than the anxiety and fear that wait for me to open my eyes.  Or some sort of sign that the world is changing and that people are actually beginning to understand the battles that are fought each day in secret.  Each time I try to believe that there is hope out there and that people are becoming more compassionate and aware.  Then, some idiot says something stupid about mental illness and I die a little more inside.  Knowing that perhaps my truth is real.  The truth that the world will never really change, that there will always be laughter and ridicule surrounding mental health - solidifying the fact that I am not like them because I cannot fight my battles as easily as they do.  

Sometimes monsters are invisible and sometimes demons attack you from the inside.  Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth, doesn't mean they aren't ripping through you.  Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.  Telling me to breathe, relax and that I'm selfish, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.  It means we have a bigger problem than you know.