Last night, I came clean to my partner about the state of my mental health.
We were sitting beside each other quietly, myself physical paralyzed by the tumult of angry, miserable, redundant thoughts ravaging my mind, preventing sleep for yet another night. I whispered desperately, "I can't sleep."
A beat of silence. "Why not?" he asks.
"Redundant thoughts." My heart begins pounding. I've said too much.
Sharing my inner emotional state would unfairly put my misery on him, and possibly give him the impression that it is his fault. In any other instance, that belief would've won and I'd have kept quiet.
"What about?" he continues.
"How miserable I am."
I am not a publicly distraught person. While I would never advocate the suppression of one's emotions or the diminishing of the impact of mental imbalance, I've rarely given myself the same grace I afford others. Of course, from time to time I share my frustration with my situation or my disappointment in my performance. I stick to the facts and follow the problem with a solution, even if it's unimaginable to implement in my state of emotional chaos.
For as long as I can remember, I have had an unceasing dialogue in my mind that ranges from eye-rolling frustration and judgment to mobility impairing despair. These thoughts are made-up conversations had between me and a person with whom I'm working, dating, living, or fighting. They're made up conversations where I tell them to fuck off, to be nice to me, to do something they continue to fail to do, or to leave me alone forever. They're often conversations of negativity and hopelessness.
Or worse, they're soliloquies. About my doomed relationships. My failed dreams. My spending habits. My body, level of fitness, state of health, even my mental environment. My brain thinks about itself thinking. It's madness.
I didn't know that other people had these redundant thoughts.
At least, and at the risk of sounding like a real piece of work, I didn't think functioning people had these thoughts. I thought that I was some extremely disassociated case of insanity who had crafted this light and airy persona that interacted with the world while the miserable, small, awful me raged endlessly in my mind.
My partner shared with me that in my telling him what I was experiencing, he realized I might be able to understand him, too. I asked, "You have these thoughts, too?"
"Different ones. I believe different things make us miserable."
I told him how hopeless I felt. I've been like this for so long, I can't imagine it ever going away. I can only imagine coping.
When I look at us, he and I, what holds us together is the most insane, unimaginable glue. We fight. We barely understand each other when we speak to one another. It's as if we are both conversing with our parents when we are conversing with one another and we don't even see our partner in the midst.
"I have faith that someday, after all of this, we will be happy."
"You have faith?" I ask. He chuckles somewhat sadly.
"Yeah. Belief in what seems completely unbelievable."
We're in a strange predicament, preparing for a very rushed move from a place where we once felt welcome and now feel like intruders. We're leaving the city and moving to a rural area, far from friends and family, resources, and strangely-now-importantly, mental health professionals.
I didn't expect to want or need therapy in my twenties. I thought I was fine and that coping was my only option. That moving forward pretending that this existential despair and continuous disparaging state was my life-sentence. But, now I have hope.
And, even though I'm moving away from the opportunity to seek professional counseling and this is the first I've ever told a loved one how utterly broken I feel; and I can't profess enough that I don't know what to do from here... somehow, with support, I have hope.
Hope doesn't feel like I thought it would.
I anticipated hope would feel like it looks in the movies. A swelling warmth in your chest, the sun shining brighter and the world moving out of your way to open opportunities like a hot knife through butter. Nope.
To me, hope is scary. Hope is a huge risk. I can't control hope the way I can control facts, experiments, variables, and equations. I can control the idea that therapy + hard work = healing. I can't control hope.
But, I want to have it. I need it.
I don't know how to end this piece - article, post, whatever I'd call it beyond a babbling entry to my very public diary - because I don't know anything beyond this possibly being the start of something. Learning, healing, growth - I don't know.
But, I hope so.
Hi, I'm Amelia! It's nice to meet you.
I'm a writer, minimalist, tiny home dweller, and maker living in East Tennessee, USA. You might have found me through the Ladies of Steemit curation initiative, showcasing the female voices on the Steemit platform. Let's hang out on the blockchain and see where it takes us.
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