Tag: depression

Conversations From the Road – Coming Out of Hiding (or trying to, anyway)

Poem – Coming Out of Hiding

Today is another two-for-one day here on the blog: the word ‘hiding’ came into my mind this past week and of course I thought about it and came up with some stuff here, too in addition to my poem.

All too often, I’ve felt like I’ve run and hid myself away from the world. I know I did that a lot to escape from bullying, alienation, insensitivity, cruelty, and being frozen out. In those hidden places I used to retreat into books, music, movies, tv shows, and fiction writing. But over the last few years, when I’ve retreated into those hidden places, there was nothing waiting for me there but my thoughts and feelings.

I know I spent a lot of time, probably too much time with books, music, movies, tv shows, and writing fiction. But when I started using writing to get my thoughts and feelings out of my head to where I could see them with my own eyes, I began to lose touch with the other things (books/music/movies/tv shows/writing fiction). I feel like I can’t really settle down and get into things as deeply as I could before. I feel like my mind keeps telling me to focus on my own thoughts and feelings and not to run away from them.

But I’m not running anymore. But it seems I can’t hide anymore either. So what I think I have to do now is create a new way of doing things. Because right now my mind is telling me if I try to get back into books and stuff, that I’m abandoning my recovery. I know that’s bullshit but my brain is fucked up in a lot of ways and it takes time, a lot of time in some cases, to change the way I think and feel about something. Because I have to tell myself a hundred times NO ONE will come at me for getting into books and stuff, and if by some stupid chance someone does, fuck them.

I know in the past I ran and hid because of overload, an overload of thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t let out in any way. I had no real outlet for this as I’ve always tried not to spew out all that I want to say because I’m like a spigot that gets stuck in the ‘on’ position when I start to talk. Hence the reason I give myself two pages typed double-space Times New Roman fourteen-point font here to write and no more to do this.

But now I realize this is yet another issue I have to face in my personal recovery: I can’t go back to the way I was. I’ve known this for a long time because as I’ve said before, once you start asking questions you might not like the answers you find, and sooner or later you have to deal with them. There is a voice inside me that says I’ve dealt with so many of my answers and now I just need to organize all of them into my book projects.

Yet anxiety and fear still rear their ugly heads along with my fucked-up ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) brain that makes focusing a challenge.

So what do I do?

Take it one step at a time.

Identify the problem.

Ask the questions.

Work through the answers

Tell the asshole-voice in my brain to fuck off.

And start to deal with the possibility I won’t be able to retreat back into my blanket fort and just block it all out like I used to do. That I will have to get it out of my system once and for all then hopefully, see a better way forward.

But I’m mourning the loss of that retreat, and it’s not an easy loss to deal with. The old saying of ‘you can’t go home again’ is real and for me it means I can’t be the person I was, and I can’t run and hide anymore.

I have a lot of catching up to do, though. I’ve denied myself so much because of the thoughts and feelings that my mind keeps shoving to the forefront for me to deal with. I have to tell myself not always being with those thoughts and feelings is okay and that NO ONE will have a problem with it, or if someone does they can just fuck off.

Because what I’m looking for are those stolen moments of getting away from the pain, from the icy anger, the screaming matches I had to listen to, the awful words that could never be taken back. I need to learn how to let myself get into things again without letting something pull me out.

Most of all, I need to learn that it wasn’t wrong to run and hide, and immerse myself in my imagination and things instead of talking shit out. Because in the past I couldn’t talk shit out like I can now. But just because I can talk shit out here in my writing doesn’t mean I can’t get back into my imagination, into things that make me happy, indulge my curiosity, and make my heart soar.

Conversations From the Road – Emotional Physical Healing

I know today’s blog title may sound a little ‘woo-woo’ but I was recently thinking in the last eight years, I haven’t had that insane level of pain like I did when I walked away from my last call-center job. I know sitting as long as I did and not always in the most ergonomic way wasn’t good for my body, but now I’m seriously beginning to think how much of my physical pain was caused by my emotional and mental silence.

As I look back at April 2016, the month before I left my last call-center job, I almost see it through a haze. In all my fifty years, I can’t remember a time like that month because I felt like I was in a god-awful amount of pain whenever I was awake. I felt like I could never get totally comfortable and sitting in the chair became a nightmare. By the end of a shift on the phones I almost wanted to scream or cry. It was so bad I had to take a break between almost every call some days just to catch my breath.

I told no one of this at the time because pain doesn’t make me think completely straight and I also didn’t trust my employer at the time not to manage me out the door if I asked for any accommodation because of this. So once I began to think I needed to walk away from that life, my pain began to let up almost immediately. And when that happened, it further strengthened my resolve to follow through on my decision to walk away from that life once and for all.

I’m not discounting any physical causes for pain in any way, shape, or form here. If you go to a doctor for a specific pain and they blow you off without running tests or trying to locate the source, then find another doctor. I was diagnosed with scoliosis when I was thirteen years old so I know I’ve done damage to my back and the disks from that misalignment of my spine. And yes, I know sitting for long periods of time in a not-so-ergonomic way wasn’t good for me either.

I believe there is a relationship between your physical health and your mental and emotional health, too. I’m not saying there is a one-size-fits-all approach to it, or that if you just do this or that, or the power of positive thinking or anything like that. Because there are causes of physical pain no amount of mental or emotional work will ease off or cure. But getting your head together and dealing with your emotional baggage is worth doing, not for a cure, but because it will help you feel better in some way, shape, or form.

In the last eight years as I’ve uncovered the origins of how I think and feel, I have dealt with massive bouts of anxiety. I’ve had some absolutely vicious anxiety attacks and days where I lived in what I call an ‘anxiety spiral’, a time where I was functioning on the surface but inside my mind was focused entirely on something else in the worst possible way. But in the last few months, I haven’t had this level of anxiety because I have spent a lot of time working to change the way my mind works, to find and implement new ways of dealing with things. The human brain is very adaptable, but you also to have to work your ass off to make it a reality.

Yes, there will be people in this world who will not like you when you break your silence and change yourself for the better. That’s for them to deal with, not you. Because if you’re not causing harm physically, mentally, or emotionally, but yes, maybe being more honest in the way you speak and live your life, you’re not a bad person for changing like that.

Too many people still try to medicate against mental and emotional issues and dysfunctional patterns with alcohol/drugs, food, bad behavior, or just trying to numb themselves out and not feel anything. You can’t live like that forever and yes it’s hard to do the work instead of medicating or numbing out. But the results are worth it, even if you feel like you’re all alone. You’re not alone because other people have done this work, and are doing it now. It’s why those of us who have done this work share our stories in order to reach out to people who want to break their silence, and do the work to heal themselves as much as they can.

And yes, there are physical results to doing mental and emotional work. For me, it’s not being in as much pain as I used to be, and also not feeling as poorly as I have. Yes, I’m going through perimenopause but I can identify when I’m having those funky symptoms and deal with them. And yes, I still have allergies but again, I can deal with those. But I believe I have finally learned not to bottle my mental and emotional shit up and hurt myself physically for it. Because when I realized I needed to stop punishing myself mentally and emotionally, I stopped punishing myself physically.’

I know I spent way too many years beating the shit out of myself mentally and emotionally when I shouldn’t have. When I stopped doing that and started telling myself that I wasn’t a bad person, and if anyone didn’t like that about me to ‘fuck off’, I felt better physically. So don’t beat the shit out of yourself in any way, shape, or form, for anyone or anything. And be sure to tell anyone who doesn’t like that to just ‘fuck off’. Take care of yourself first. It’s worth all the hard work and working through all the pain.

Break your silence.