This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time blah blah blah

I’m glad to be meeting with my therapist again, but in doing so, I’m also having to confront a lot of hard work. Well, hard but simple work, really. I need to organize my life, take more responsibility. FUNCTION, basically.

I laughed a bit during my last session and said, “After all I’ve been through, just living a normal life is the hardest, scariest thing to me. That doesn’t even seem logical.”

In order to fully explain why I’m having such a problem with this, I need to divulge a bit into a backstory. Although before I do, I need to make some things clear. It’s not my intention to drag members of my family through the mud here. Some of them read this blog and overall they’ve mostly been supportive of it. I love my family and I’m not here to slam anyone or reveal every tiny detail about my relationship with all of them. But my relationship with my mother is a topic that I cannot avoid for long when speaking about my mental health issues. Although, be that as it may, I only wish to mention that which is appropriate to reveal in regards to my current issues. I have no interest in bringing out every skeleton in the closet and putting them all on public display. For all her faults, my mother is still my mother, and she still supports me in a lot of ways, even if our relationship is usually fairly turbulent.

Now, disclaimer aside, I can begin.

My parents divorced when I was five years old, and my mom retained custody of my brother and I. At some point, she decided that we were having a hard time dealing with the divorce (keep in mind, I was five and my brother was three), so she put us through therapy. Her reasoning wasn’t because we were showing any signs of distress in response to the situation, but rather that we weren’t; she thought our indifference and happiness was a sign of hidden pain and sorrow. Essentially, she was projecting her own emotions onto us.

My brother somehow eventually weaseled his way out of continuing therapy (and meds) years before I did. I continued on with it all until I was about seventeen. I grew up thinking that everyone lived this way, at least the going to therapy bit. I realized pretty early on that not everyone took medication. Some meds I had to take throughout the day, and when friends would ask what they were for, I’d lie and say I was sick. I didn’t really know what to say besides that because I didn’t actually know why I was taking them myself.

The explanation I’ve found to explain a lot of my mother’s behavior is this: everyone probably knows of Münchausen syndrome (faking illness for attention) and the “by proxy” type (inducing sickness in someone else to receive attention), but both of those tend to conjure up images of physical sickness only. Well, while it’s probably rare, there is a side to this disorder that deals with garnering attention through mental illness as well.

My mom always liked to talk about my supposed mental health issues to everyone in order to show off what a great job she was doing coping with it all, and also to receive loads of sympathy from people. Over the years, I was diagnosed with severe depression, anxiety, and then back and forth with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In all actuality, I felt there was nothing wrong with me, but during my early years, I figured I must be wrong, since I had so many adults saying otherwise, especially my own parent. Then, around age twelve, I hit a brick wall, and all the symptoms I’d been told forever that I had but really didn’t started to actually become a reality. I became depressed and it all sort of spiraled downward more and more all throughout my teens. By the time I received the diagnosis of bipolar disorder when I was in my mid teens, I believed it.

Anyway, the point of revealing all of that was to illustrate why so called “normal” living is still pretty foreign to me. I grew up being told by professionals (and my mom) that I was totally nuts. There was never really any sort of structure for me growing up. I went to school and all that, but never felt I really belonged there. I felt it was all just a giant façade and I was just killing time until I’d inevitably be locked up in a mental institution for the rest of my life. I never truly planned my life because I didn’t think I’d ever get one. I expected to be dead before I was sixteen.

Possibly due to that belief, things really started going to shit when I was around that age. I put myself in the hospital for the first time then, and it inadvertently started a trend of “escape responsibility by having a breakdown.” I’ve mentioned before that my mom tends to do a lot of things for me. That, coupled with my belief that on some level I was crazy as fuck, led to a thought process that I couldn’t do anything right no matter what, so why even bother trying anymore? I’d also been groomed practically from birth to believe that the only way to get any REAL attention was through some kind of crisis.

Essentially, for the past twelve years, I’ve accomplished very little due to the fact that I give up on everything constantly. Almost everything I’ve done during that time frame ends with “and then I had a breakdown.” I seem to be able to function all right for a few months at the most, and then I inevitably crumble and go into hiding for X amount of time until I start a new cycle of the same shit.

The funny part (in a depressing way) is that I felt I was finally overcoming all of this during the job I had prior to my breakdown last January. Then, of course, that also ended with “and then I had a breakdown.” Although that breakdown was completely different than my usual anxiety driven, self-mutilating, too-depressed-to-do-anything types of the past. For the first time in my life, I was totally blindsided by my mental problems. I literally woke up one day and lost my mind. There wasn’t much of a precursor to it.

Anyway, because of my constant pattern, the thought of actually functioning well for a long period of time is pretty terrifying to me because, well, I’ve never really done it. On top of that, I now have the constant fear in the back of my mind that I won’t be able to handle things again and I’ll wake up on a new day and go through another prolonged psychotic episode. I try to rationalize it all by reminding myself that I seem to be able to function without problem while on my meds, and therapy helps in some way as well, so I really should be just fine. But the only real way to calm my fears is to just get back out there and DO IT. And I’m damn well going to–even though part of me would really rather not, and just now even the thought of it is making me want to throw up–because I know I’m capable of overcoming my problems; I know I’m capable of not being defined by my illness. I know I have practically my whole life of feeling that the only way I could get attention was through being fucked up working against me, but my outlook has already changed dramatically in the past five years or so, and I know I really can only keep going forward, even if it happens at a pace that’s slower than I’d like. There is no quick fix for anything in life; it’s all up to how much hard work you put into it.

It’s amusing that the way most people stumble upon this blog is through searching the Nine Inch Nails’ lyric I believe I can see the future / cos I repeat the same routine. That may have been the truth for me in the past, but I don’t want it to be the truth for me forever.