fromjunia

A warning: This article discusses serious mental and behavioral health issues in blunt terms.

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This year, around mid-September, my mental health sharply declined. Since mid-November, I’ve returned close to my usual baseline. This has given me some time to reflect on what happened and lessons learned.

During therapy, I realized that my eating disorder issues were fueled by a personality trait I used to get myself through really hard moments: extreme perseverance. I can do anything I want to do. Sometimes, this is good. More often than I realized, this is bad. Like when I starve myself for months on end. This realization dealt a huge blow to my confidence, because most my hope for improving my life came from knowing that I have a will of iron.

My internal dialogue got dark, fast. I spent hours every day thinking about hurting myself. The worst days had me spending upwards of 6 hours straight ruminating about suicide and self-harm. I’ve had depression for a long time, but never like that.

In retrospect, the interesting part is that I didn’t recognize how serious it was. I knew it wasn’t normal, and that I needed help. But I can see now what I couldn’t then: It was a volatile situation. My therapist and psych were justified in how alarmed they are, and while I was getting quite sick of people saying they’re worried about me, I now think I was toeing involuntary hospitalization levels of crisis.

So lesson one is that I need to rely on others more. Both so that my own will doesn’t drag me into the mud, but also because I can enter mental states that distort my judgement of reality. For my own safety and flourishing, I need a village.

There were two things that helped. The first is that I got a new prescription regimen that made a lot more sense. Less medications overall, and medications more tailored to my present problems. That seemed to make a big difference.

The second thing that helped was existentialist philosophy and learning the concepts of existential therapy. It gave me the conceptual framework and language to work with my experiences and emotions in an empowering way. And what I needed was empowerment, because I felt like I was left without any ability to make my life better in a reliable way. What existentialism gave me, in a nutshell, was affirmation that improving your life is damn hard and that, at the end of the day, you always have a choice you can make.

Lesson two: I sometimes need to stop pressing forward and branch out to find something that’ll work. This was a new kind of mental health crisis for me which needed a new means of dealing with it. My usual supports collapsed until I introduced new ones (conceptually, as well as materially: I entered an intensive outpatient program for depression that I’ll be wrapping up soon). I wanted to believe that I had everything figured out, and that produced hopelessness. So no more of that nonsense.

The third and final lesson I’ve drawn from this: I need to be ready for next time. Because there will be a next time. The question for me is if I’m going to be able to bounce back quickly, or if it’s going to be a nearly five-figure detour into debt like this one was. (Or both. Both is possible.) Being ready means having supports already in place and a habit of openness about my mental health with others, so that they can flag for me when I’m going to a bad place.

So that’s my project in the meantime. That, and paying off the debt. It’ll be a good reminder of what I need to work towards.