Face the Day

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week out in the real world, and I want to talk about mental health. I can’t really speak to anyone else’s (I don’t use “Crazy” as a term for people anymore), so I suppose that leaves me. the goal of Mental Health Awareness week is to encourage people to remove the stigma of talking about their own mental health issues, since 1 in 5 Canadians suffer from one. I started blogging to get over my anxiety, and this is basically one of the things I get most anxious about. But it’s past time.

I was diagnosed with depression when I was twelve. I took meds for a while but stopped by the time I was in high school, spending the rest of my teen years and early twenties as a grumpy, moody son of a bitch. It’s a hard feeling to describe, like a weight that never goes away squeezing out a constant inner dialogue with myself about how I couldn’t do things. So I didn’t. I didn’t cause trouble or act out, I just didn’t do things. When opportunities approached I’d watch them float by, or I’d prepare for them but my anxiety would get the best of me at the last moment. I’ve heard people say that one of the worst parts of depression is feeling like you’re different, like you’re the only one who suffers from that weight. It wasn’t like that for me back then.

The worst part was feeling that I was like everyone else.

Everyone around me was struggling with something. On the scale of the issues with the people I knew, mine were so minor. All I had to do was be braver, do more, try harder, and that’s what I’d tell myself. I needed to man up and face the day. Sometimes I’d manage, and drag myself out to work or wherever and try to put on a happy face. Some days I wouldn’t, and I’d get so mad. I’d lay in bed or sit in my apartment being furious with myself. Everyone struggles under burdens. What made mine so heavy and unbearable that I couldn’t muster the strength to leave my house? I felt so much weaker than everyone, like I didn’t deserve to have the kind of life they could have. But I couldn’t talk about it with them. Prideful teenage Jim couldn’t bear the additional weight of their imagined pity. Looking back on it though, it was pretty obvious.

I had good days when I could carry the weight, and bad days when it was too much. Good months where I’d be on top of everything, and bad months where I watched it all slide out of my grip while doing nothing. That was just the way things were going to go, I figured. I don’t really know when things started to turn around. I remember days. Sitting at my computer ten years ago, all broken up over a woman I had a crush on who was obviously not into me and debating on spending my last bus ticket of possibly ever to stop by her work and see her, knowing it’d cheer me up but make me feel worse afterward. I had a realization then. She wasn’t making me feel bad, I was making me feel bad. I just needed to stop making myself feel bad. Or the time one of my professors invited me to a discussion group, and on the spur of the moment I accepted. It led to me making great friends, becoming a student leader, and learning a ton of neat things. Something in there started to turn things around.

It’s been eighteen years since my diagnosis, and things are betterish. I’m still not on meds, and I get by alright. I have all these rituals, these words of power that help me focus on the things that matter in my life. I’m much better at talking with people about it, and I know that we all have our own burdens to bear. I don’t have very many bad months anymore, but on bad days I still get mad. When I fall behind for no good reason, or can’t manage to get much past my bed I get angry. I can hear it in the way I talk to myself. I don’t know what you say when it’s time to stop faffing about and get ready in the morning, but I usually say “It’s time to be a person” like I wasn’t before. Pyjama Jim is just some creature of need and impulse. He’s the part of me that I still struggle with, but I’m getting better at accepting that some days are just going to be bad days. The answer isn’t to man up and face the day, it’s to accept it and try to find a way to make tomorrow better. Being angry doesn’t help anyone, least of all me.

I’m lucky enough to have an incredibly supportive and caring group of friends that I can lean on when things are rough, and do my best to be a person they can lean on in return. I want to say it gets better, but as I understand it it isn’t the kind of thing you get better from. I’m always going to have to maintain a kind of discipline to stay focus, and I’m always going to have bad days and good days. But you can get better at dealing with it. I’ve learned to be as open as I can, with them and with everyone else I’m able to. I don’t try and hide it anymore, I just say that I’m in a mood and there seems to be a general understanding of what that means. I still struggle with anxiety and depression and probably always will, but I am braver than I have ever been, and that means being brave enough to stop fighting my depression and own it. It’s a part of me.