Learning about mental health isn't easy, it's a personal journey.
It was around the age of 10 when I became aware of life. This was the age I learned life wasn’t fair.
Much of the world would be out of my control.
I was too young to understand all I had control over was my reaction.
At 10 years old, I got dosed with my first bought of anxiety, of course I had no idea what this was. But I knew it as a disturbance inside myself. Some thoughts that I couldn’t seem to shake, the nightmares that would occur that left me screaming in agony.
The meaning of anxiety wasn’t even something I was aware of. Let alone what causes anxiety in a person.
It was the realization that life wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. The learning of suppressing emotions, of stuffing away what is existing in my world. Because my feelings especially the anxiety was eating me alive.
Quickly I became very good at stuffing. Stuffing my face full of anything and everything that would reduce this anxiety. And this is what began my journey into self soothing. Finding the ways too numb and cope with the feelings that happened inside myself.
As I grew up there was no talking about mental health. No concept of what it was. Feelings, what are those. I didn’t have them, and they didn’t exist in my world.
There was no place for them to go, so I pushed them away. I didn’t have any concept of what I was feeling, what mental health was.
The truth is I didn’t even know what anxiety was, I had no idea that other people experienced this. I thought it was something wrong with me. The majority of my life I have always thought this, I’ve always known something was different. I knew that my world didn’t blend the same way as other peoples. But I didn’t want anyone to know that.
Sadly I’ve dealt with anxiety since I was 10, and never learned ways to properly manage it or talk about it. Instead I internalized it and let it materialize into a larger problem.
While stuffing with food was great, I entered high school and realized boys didn’t like me.
That took stuffing with food away from me, and now I was forced to find a new way to stuff.
Enter drinking and drugs. Hello my beautiful friend. Substance abuse became my new normal.
Who was food, that was nothing compared to this intense feeling of nothingness brought on by the warmth of my vodka bottle.
This new sensation was one I couldn’t live without. It created a world of peace, of quiet, of stillness. No longer did my chest race, my mind wonder and my world spin.
I was finally able to be nothing.
As life grew more challenging and I became unable to handle what was thrown at me I drank myself into oblivion. I drank away the days. Ending many days blacked out, and eventually making attempts to drink myself to death.
These were my screams for help, to find a solution out of what my anxiety and the emotions. All those feelings I had stuffed so deep away.
At 17 I went to rehab. Going to rehab undoubtedly saved my life, but although it saved me from killing myself, it did not prepare me for life.
I was wound so tightly, holding onto secrets, the secret deep within that I knew.
Something with me was different.
I will never forget having a very heated discussion with my mother and trying to tell her that something was wrong. She had no idea what it felt like to be me.
There has never been a way I could describe it.
Other than I have always felt a sense of chaos. A sense of being completely and utterly out of control.
I didn’t know what it meant to take care of my mental health. Truthfully I didn’t understand what anxiety was, or depression or really anything.
Because although I was sober I was still really good at stuffing. I was still a solid steel wall with no emotion to feel.
All I had was STAY SOBER.
For many many years that was the only thought that has lived inside my head. Stay away from substances. And you have no idea how consuming that is.
Each day I think of what that sip of vodka going down the back of my throat would feel like. That smooth burning sensation, followed by the heat hitting my stomach, and slowly but surely the quiet, the stillness inside myself.
That is the urge I fight everyday. And all I could focus on was sobriety and not falling prey to relapse.
In the many years to come in sobriety I continued therapy and to understand more about mental health. It is a lifelong journey and one that requires constant attention.
This is just one piece of my journey to share.