I’ve never been one of those people that thinks my mental illness is a gift. Sometimes I get on a kick to clean the entire house at 2 in the morning. But this is less of a feeling of being on top of the world and more part of my own mental illness. It’s a compulsion. I don’t feel on top of the world, I don’t feel like I’m a superhero, I don’t feel like I’m winning or anything.

I feel like if I don’t get this done, the entire world will crumble at my feet and worst of all, everyone will know and see that it’s all my fault.

Imagine your trigger as a monster

One of my friends is training to be a therapist and writes a lot of useful things in his Tumblr. One of things he wrote recently was:

In this exercise, you imagine your trigger as a monster…. You ask the trigger what it wants — for you to never love again, for you to die, for you to starve yourself, for you to isolate yourself from everyone, for you to never let down your guard, etc — and you talk to the trigger to figure out why it wants you to do that. Often, the answer is something like “If you were dead you wouldn’t feel bad anymore” and “If you were thin people would love and take care of you” and “If you had no friends no one would ever hurt you again” and so on. So what it is often trying to do is protect you, albeit in the most backwards and counterproductive way. So you imagine feeding the trigger as much comfort, safety, or love as it wants — till it bursts, or is satisfied, or whatever you want to imagine.

This trigger sounds like what I have coined as my Gollum voice, and it seems to be something a lot of people with mental illness deal with. It’s a near constant presence that never seems to go away, just chooses when to speak. And it’s at my lowest when this voice speaks the loudest. I did something similar to the exercise referenced above when I was seeing a therapist and at first it was really, really hard for me to imagine that voice wanting anything but for me to commit suicide.

The nature of the way my anxiety and paranoia work is that when it rains it pours. When the voice (and for the record I don’t actually hear it but I am terrified of the idea that one day I might begin to actually -hear- a voice) starts, it doesn’t stop. It finds me when I’m at my weakest point and it takes the bluntest knife and the most sensitive place to stab. And it won’t go away. No matter how much you try to outsmart it. No matter what logic you use. No matter how hard you try to fight it. It will stay. And when it’s there, it feels like it won’t ever leave.

One of my obsessive interests, the topic of my favourite horror films, and even the theme of the novel series I’m writing is demons and demonic possession. I see it as an allegory for a lot of different subjects and one of them is my mental illness.

I’m not a Christian, but I can completely understand why people would think they were possessed by a demon. Even if my head isn’t spinning, I’m not speaking languages I don’t know, or coughing up split pea soup in a priest’s face, I can understand wanting to blame something on a demon.

At least, if it’s a demon rather than a mental illness, you have the chance of it being exorcised and rid of. Even if it does mean that Satan is real and there is a Hell and it’s all very frightening, it gives you the chance of getting rid of your problem, which is a comfort that therapy doesn’t always provide.

Planning around anxiety

I don’t even know when a full fledged attack of self hatred and anxiousness can happen and it can ruin plans that I’ve made for ages. A seemingly innocuous and innocent action from someone else can trigger me into a downward spiral of hatred and abuse.

It makes making huge plans even more anxiety provoking than they normally would be. What if I make plans and pay for a holiday and I spend most of it telling myself how completely and utterly horrid I am? And I hate the idea that something as simple as a thought could dominate my mind and ruin everything for me. It makes it the knife twist that much more.

Mental illness is often referred to as an “invisible disability” and it says a lot that I have a hard time categorising my mental illness as part of what makes me “disabled” even though my anxiety, paranoia, and obsessive compulsive disorder have way more effect on my day to day life and moods than my disorder does.

Sure, my disorder makes me tired, especially if I forget my medication. And if I didn’t get any of my medication eventually I would die. But anxiety makes me feel like I’m already dead or that I don’t deserve to be alive.

In ‘Chain of Command II’, Picard is psychologically tortured by a Cardassian who tries to get him to say there are five lights. Repetition of a lie is the easiest way the anxious mind gets you to believe and feel things you know to be untrue.

It’s hard for me to say what everyone should do if they have a person who’s dealing with this. Everyone’s needs are different. This is the best sort of list I can come up with while I’m going through a feelings of anxiety at present to give people a guideline of how to handle it when someone you care about is feeling this way:

1. Don’t tell them that what they’re feeling is illogical

Sometimes it is hard for me to distinguish between reality and my paranoia, not because I’m incapable of realising the difference between fantasy and reality, but because the things my paranoia tells me feel real. I know they don’t make logical sense. I know that when I’m telling myself that the people who love me hate my guts that it doesn’t make logical sense. But here’s the thing. When it comes to mental illness and emotion, logic doesn’t matter.

We’ve tried logic. We’ve tried playing a game of intellectual chess with our anxious demons. it doesn’t work. So the last thing want to hear when I’m feeling what I feel is that it’s not logical. I know it’s not logical.

2. Do tell me what I do right or what I have done right

When I’m in an anxious spiral, I begin a process of thorough self cataloguing of everything that could possibly be interpreted as a personal failure. That time you were too tired to go to the cinema with me? It’s all my fault because I bore you. That time when I tripped and fell in the station? Everyone remembers it and tells their friends about how stupid I looked. My biological father has disowned me and if he ever came back he’d never want a child as disgustingly pathetic as me.

Anxiety is the best, most detailed hyperbolised record keeper known to humanity. From the worst things that have happened to me in my life to things that I know logically have absolutely nothing to do with me, it knows exactly what memories to bring up and just how to do it and it’ll do it in a place or time when you have little to no defence.

And you can never escape it, never stop it, never change it, and it knows you inside and out because it IS you. It’s unsurprising to me that when most people are faced with themselves as their worst enemy, self-destruction seems like the only option.

What helps me more than anything when I have this behemoth to face is hearing the things I do right. It’s capable of making me think that everyone hates me, but if people that I love and care about tell me they don’t, it throws a curveball that my anxiousness can never really seem to anticipate. Yes, it will still kick. It will still scream. It will still tell me you’re lying just to shut me up. But it’s at least something that will trip it up and stop it in it’s tracks, even just for a second.

3. Don’t tell me it’s all in my head

Of course, it’s all in my head. When you get hungry it’s in all in your stomach. I don’t see how something existing within one body part suddenly makes it any less difficult to deal with.

4. Do ask me if there’s anything you can do

This works not only because different people have different needs and different ways of coping, but because even if I have no idea what someone else can do to stop it, it helps at least to know that they would do something if I can think of it, or that they’re trying to help. And if one of the things you can do to help is just not being around, then don’t take that personally.

5. Give me time, but don’t set that time for me

One of the things I tell myself when I’m going through anxiousness is that I know that it will pass and that it won’t last forever. It’s the one comforting thought that’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if it feels like it will never stop, I’ve never spent my entire life stuck down in the bottom of anxiety’s oubliette. But sometimes, that’s something I need to tell myself, not something other people need to define for me.

When other people tell me “This too shall pass” or “It’ll get better, just wait and see”, it triggers a second layer of anxiety that makes me feel like I have no other choice but to get better and to get better pretty darn quick. Even if that’s not what someone means.

Even if they’re just trying to help. Even if they’re trying to remind me of the same damn thing I tell myself. It could be the exact same wording but from someone else it means something completely different. It means that the process of escaping from the pit I’ve been thrown down is a race to not disappoint everyone around me, which just gives my anxiety even more ammunition.

Riker becomes unsure of what to believe in ‘Frame of Mind’ when he begins to get flashbacks of being in a mental institution. Riker feeling alone is crucial to him believing he is crazy.

There’s always a lot more to address when it comes to mental illness and I can only speak from my perspective, but I feel like at least taking these five things into account is helpful for people reading this who have friends, family, and/or people they love who are going through this. Or maybe if people who are going through this can read this and know that they’re not alone.

Another weapon I keep in my arsenal against my anxiety are reminders that I’m not alone. Ironically, one of the most terrifying things about having a mental illness can be feeling like you are crazy, which is why I think so many people with mental illnesses are desperate to avoid diagnosis or treatment.

Because admitting you have a mental illness means that you are crazy and crazy means being alone. Mental illness already makes you feel like you’re the only one in the world who has these issues and the crazy confirms it. Crazy feels like a singular adjective. Knowing that I’m not the only one helps and it trips up my anxiety even more.

Seeing other people’s demons and letting them see mine, as scary as that can be, makes me feel like my anxiety is like a Weeping Angel and it if it catches the glance of another one, it will freeze forever.

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