The Right to Feel – How I Stopped Blaming Myself for My Mental Illness
I’ve felt like I don’t have a right to be as broken as I am. I grew up with a loving family. We weren’t wealthy, but I never wanted for necessities. Growing up, the largest trauma I thought I faced was my parents’ amicable divorce. My mom moved several times, remarried, and my brother and I had to change elementary schools, but I actually preferred the new school. I can’t look back and spot significant hardship until high school.
Lately, I argue with my psychiatrist – that others have had it worse. That I don’t have a right to feel this emotional turmoil.
Yes, I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder at 17. Yes, I went through emotionally abusive relationships and I’m a rape survivor. But that doesn’t explain the depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that began when I was a young child. I tell her that I cannot think of an experience that validates the reason I would cry for no reason and lie, latching on to whatever reason adults offered because I didn’t feel like, “I don’t know,” was an acceptable answer. I can’t validate my desperate need to touch a wall four and one more times to keep my world from crumbling. Even though I feel that others do not need a reason to validate their mental illnesses, I feel like I do not have a right to this pain.
As I grew up, rising through the years of schooling, I began to recognize my need for control, primarily over information.
I needed to know exactly what we were doing and when. Spontaneity was allowed so long as I was a part of the decision making process. My friends humored me and my OCD. They would stir the cookie batter in the opposite direction when I asked to even out the number of laps of the spoon. They would give me piggyback rides when I couldn’t handle keeping track of the cracks on the sidewalk that I had stepped over or on. But I never felt like I had a reason to have OCD beyond genetics, and that didn’t feel like enough.
I brushed my depression off for years.
One day, in fifth grade, my classmates and I were outdoors practicing skits. At one point I paused and became fixated on the road that ran past the school. As my young mind began to calculate the odds of me being able to time it just right, a friend put her hand on my shoulder. I turned, wide-eyed, and thanked her. At that age, I didn’t understand depression, but felt strongly that I should not talk about what had happened.
In high school it was easy to dismiss. Everybody felt like no one cared at some point right? And thoughts of suicide weren’t uncommon, right? But no one needed to know about the self-harm. I spent so much time internally confronting myself, telling myself this was not depression. Your life is not bad enough to justify this. You’re just being overdramatic.
Flash forward several years and I’m sitting in my psychiatrist’s office.
I talk and we slowly extract the meaning behind my stream of thoughts. At this point, my line up of diagnoses is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), OCD, and depressive-type schizoaffective disorder. Rape justifies the PTSD. It took an agonizingly long time, but I don’t blame myself for that anymore. Schizoaffective disorder was entirely out of my control. It was built in and just waited for the trigger. But I still can’t figure out the cause of the OCD or depression. What comes out of my mouth is blame. On me. That somewhere along the line, I had made a choice that caused them. I felt like it was the only explanation.
Despite trying to drift to more imperative topics over the months, it bubbles up from deep under water.
It felt like I did not earn these feelings and symptoms. It’s not that I’m upset that I’m feeling them, I feel like I stole them from someone who really went through hell and back. Not me. Not my simple childhood and loving, supportive family. That’s not real trauma. I’m the one who caused this. I am at fault.
Validity has come up in therapy often. It came up today. And my psychiatrist comes back at me with something new. It is a basic human right to have feelings. You have a right to feel whatever you feel. It is a basic human right.
It knocked the argument from between my teeth.
I counter that I don’t know what caused my mental illnesses. She stops me – why does that matter? You are human. You have a right to your feelings and experiences. That is validation. After my appointment, the thoughts swim quietly in the back of my mind. A right. A basic human right. Whether the source of my mental illnesses are something I consider “worthy” or not, I am allowed to feel what I feel. It doesn’t fix the self-esteem that’s been dragging on the floor my entire life or the times where I still tear up for no apparent reason or the fact that I still leverage information and evenness in an effort to control my world. But I am allowed to feel these things and the why doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am aware and we can work on them.
Such a simple idea, but it broke through a longstanding barrier and resonated with me.
It is your basic human right to have feelings and experience them in any way that you do. There are no tiers, no charts, and no qualifications. You are allowed to feel the way you do. And it does not make you any more or less than someone in different circumstances. It is not your fault. Your emotions and experiences are real and they are valid. No matter what they are. No matter who you are. You’re experiences matter. You matter. No explanation needed.
You can find more stories about my recovery journey here.
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