Apologies - I came back here for a re-read, 'cos I was worried about 'over-sharing tendancies'....🤪🫣😅..... but now I'm actually quoting my own post so I just look like a straight up narcissist 🤣.
Okay, I wanted to say this in case someone in a mental health crisis ever reads the post above. Sometimes, when you're in a really bad place yourself, you look at other people—people you know have been, or have said they’ve been, in a very bad place—and they’ve managed to get themselves feeling a tiny bit better. And they may start twattling on about meditation or breathwork or whatever. And (if you're me, anyway) you sit there thinking, “Oh my God, that person managed to get themselves better. Why don’t I have the strength to get myself better?”
Just don’t. Don’t ever let your mental health get even worse because you blame yourself for feeling it.
Hating yourself for your inability to stop something over which you have absolutely no control at all—like a severe mental health crisis, depression, postnatal depression, or whatever—just rubs salt into what is already an open wound. That energy of loathing yourself for not being able to fix the impossible is one of the worst parts of it. I’m feeling it strongly today myself...which is probably why I came back worrying about my post. 😅😉
So I just wanted to say: no one gets their shit together really easily. It’s always going to be painful and take time, but it becomes easier when you let go of the part of you that chastises you for feeling that way.
The way I do it is this: as soon as the voice comes into my head saying, “Why the fuck are you wasting your life being so fucking miserable, you utterly useless twat, especially when everyone else seems to be managing?”, I respond, “Because this is what the universe intended for me at this moment. There is no reason why. I will never know how all these feelings that I’ve had at different points in my life—from joy to sadness—are going to intersect to form the imprint that is me on the universe. But I accept them as necessary to form something really intangible, which maybe could be referred to as moral character or a meaningful life. And that is stronger and more valuable than my happiness at any given point.
But what I do know is I am absolutely not causing these feelings. I don’t cause myself to feel sadness or joy. I haven’t made myself feel that way, and it’s not my fault that I feel that way.”
And then I stick one finger up at the nasty voice and say, “And you’re a nasty fucker, because I would never say something like that to someone in a mental health crisis!” 🖕🤣
I guess I just wanted to let anyone reading this know that, for all the twaddle of “ooh, I do breathing” and “ooh, I did meditation” and in the initial post, there have been so many other days where I couldn’t even drag myself out of bed. You know, I had this idea that once people picked up these healthy habits, they suddenly changed overnight into a person who did them regularly, if that makes sense. But it doesn’t even work like that.
So I just wanted to give people heart with that in mind if they’re suffering. The journey isn’t linear.
There’s a really good quote by Martin Luther King, and it’s something like, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s difficult to be alive at this moment in history and believe that, but I hope Dr King wouldn’t mind me paraphrasing: the arc of recovery is long, but it bends towards freedom.
The type of freedom that’s like taking a really deep breath and realising, one day, that you are starting to feel minusculely better. Then you’ll have a few days like that, and that will add up over time. Having those days will give you even more confidence to stop saying nasty things to yourself, and that will generate even more good days. But—I can’t speak for everyone else—certainly in the early stages, it’s always punctuated by some really bad ones.
Here’s a little funny story connected to the post above, to show just how many times I’m not the person getting better that I often otherwise really do know myself to be:
When the lady I was talking about started stripping the person down on Facebook for posting the wrong emoji, it was only my second, third, fourth (etc.) thoughts that were along the lines of, “You awful woman, what on earth are you doing?!”
My first thought—the most instant one—was this feeling of horror for all the times that I must have inadvertently pressed the wrong emoji with a finger slip or whatever. And now there must be people all up and down the country who’ll be furious and suffering as a result, and I was responsible for that because of my massive, horrific, gnarly, careless fingers, which - quite frankly - I should just stick up my own ass BECAUSE I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON!!! 🤣🫣🏆🤯
#notlinear