Tangled Emotions
Mental illness is cruel. It can take your ability to reason right out of your grasp. It can reach into your head and twist your thoughts until they’re so tangled up you don’t know what’s happening. Mental illness can steal your hope, push every button you have, and fill your head with so many different emotions that you don’t know what you’re feeling. I thought I was keeping up with my thoughts and feelings, but mental illness fed me anxiety, fear, and paranoia until I didn’t know what I was feeling anymore.
It started with my ex moving into my building and my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) soaring to new heights.
I was scared and anxious. Innocent questions meant to ease my fears were ripped out of my hands by mental illness, who tore them apart and stitched them back together into something new – invalidation, self-doubt. I agonized over it, but my paranoia climbed higher, matching pace with the thought that my paranoia was unjustified. Was I wrong to be fearful? And if it was wrong, why couldn’t I stop the fear?
I nearly came undone.
Even though I tried to repair the seams of my mental stability, mental illness released new players in my head. It started with detachment. It was thoughts like, what does it matter if I see him and he tries to initiate contact? Who cares? Does anything matter? I felt so disconnected to my emotions. It was like life was going on while I watched quietly from inside my head.
But shortly after I began to detach, mental illness leaked depression into my mind.
It layered everything with a heavy cloak of dust. I felt lost, alone, and like nobody cared, even as others told me they loved me and that they were there for me. Depression seeps into your mind and settles on top of your thoughts and feelings like a weighted blanket. Trying to rise up from beneath it is exhausting, and sometimes I didn’t have the energy to try to scrape the thick grey mud off of my thoughts in an effort to get back to hope and happiness. I’ve never been able to do it without help from people or medication.
And then mental illness released irritability.
Minor frustrations could trigger a bright flash of unjustified anger which I had to swallow to stop myself from lashing out to the ones I love. I wasn’t angry at others, but mental illness whispered in my ear. It took annoyance and stoked the flames, telling me that nobody respected me or my time. Spinning lies, it assured me that the solution was to respond with something thrown across the room and words dripping in venom, not caring if it damaged my relationship. I clenched my teeth and told it to shut up, go away, leave me alone and take all of these thoughts and feelings with it. But it’s never that easy. Mental illness digs its claws in and clings to you like there’s a magnetic pull.
Now I’m left with all of these threads – anxiety, fear, invalidation, detachment, depression, and anger.
They’re so tangled that I’m not even sure which one I’m feeling at any given time. I will have moments where it’s clear – one thread purely, but it’s usually short lived. Sometimes the heat of so many feelings screaming for attention makes me want to tear myself apart, desperate for a release. I try to fight it, but the noise is overwhelming sometimes.
In therapy, we take the tangled threads and lay them out on the ground and start with one. Anger. We follow that thread, which leads us to a place that seems distant from the heart of the problem – still an issue, but not the one I wanted to focus on. Backtrack. I pick detachment. Feeling like who cares if something happens? What’s one more bad thing? I’m separated from it all – the feelings and the incidents. Out of time – the appointment ends. Even though everything is still tangled, there is a bit of progress. I tend to make more progress pulling away from that magnet of mental illness when I have help. But we knew this would be slow.
The knot still sits in my head.
I’m both mentally and physically exhausted from trying to untangle it, so for now it sits and waits. I steel myself for the next round, mental illness pacing back and forth in my head, eyeing every trigger it hasn’t yet pulled. But I will not give up on untangling this mess in my head. I don’t want to live like this, feeling multiple emotions at once and sometimes none at all, wavering between calm, numb, tears, panic, and anger all in a silent struggle. I don’t know how yet, but I am determined to win – when I’m not feeling hopeless. But such is life with mental illness.
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