So this week was hard mentally for no particular reason other than my brain is an asshole. Yesterday I felt incredibly low and my shrink was like, “Go get a ketamine booster right now” so the clinic fit me in late last night, which was really nice, but then I had a full-blown panic attack complete with projectile vomiting in the middle of a psychedelic trip where I was pretty sure I was stuck forever in another plane of existence, so basically I paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of throwing up while off my tits on a bad drug trip.
And I will do it again and consider myself lucky.
Earlier this week I tweeted about my struggles to keep upright mentally and I was flooded (thank you!) with sympathetic people who either are going through the same bullshit or who feel empathy even though they don’t understand it, but there are always a few DMs of people telling me that it’s probably all because of too much gluten, too little praying, a lack of whatever they are selling (so much herbalife), psychosomatic, 5G-based (what), or caused because I’m “just not smiling enough”.
The smiling one is particularly interesting since so many people I know with depression are the smiliest bitches you ever met because you actually can laugh and smile while depressed. In fact, humor is one of my great defenses against depression. That’s the tricky part of the lies depression tells…that depression only looks a certain way. It doesn’t. It can look like lots of things.
And for me it looks like a woman who has her shit together on paper but is pretty sure that she’s failing at everything and that everyone is mad at her. It looks like someone who has moments of great joy and moments of great sorrow and moments of utterly blankness. It looks like someone who doesn’t entirely recognize the depressed person she sometimes is when she’s out of a depression. And someone who doesn’t remember the happy person she usually is when she’s in a depression.
Today I feel limp with exhaustion but slightly better than yesterday and that’s a good sign. But there’s one thing I’d like you know and that’s that people don’t put themselves through this sort of torture because they need to smile more or because they’re just lazy or because they’re weak. It takes an incredible amount of work to fight this, and that work comes from the people fighting, their friends and family who support them and the people who dedicate their lives to caring for the mentally ill. It’s not fun and it’s a hard fight but it is 100% worth it and if you are reading this now and doubting that you are worthy of fighting for, I assure you that you are not alone and you are worthy. Also, maybe you should just smile more.
Kidding.
But not kidding about the fact that you are not alone.
You’ll get through this. So will I.
(Insert unironic smiley face here)
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