Madly-in-Verse: Write...Edit...Publish... + IWSG October 2020 : G...: Cutting straight to the chase without the usual preliminaries, in keeping with the spirit of WEP Lite ... Blind Mole in a Black Hole To be...
As someone who struggles with suicide ideation (the planning part is pretty haphazard and so completion is not likely to be imminent) and has finally started figuring myself out (wish I could have done that 25 years ago), I have some thoughts on the matter.
People like me--depressive and not able to remain cheerful despite others' best efforts any more than I'm able to remain thin despite others' best efforts to shame me into being so--are inconvenient and uncomfortable because we tell it like it is rather than lying with a smile.
It's likely that I'd always have been a depressive personality. I think some of it is hard-wired, just like my ADHD is hard-wired. But a great part of my suicidal tendencies and self-loathing are due to trauma. I honestly didn't realize this until just this year, and then I started looking at some incidents in my life that I really preferred not to. I opened some old wounds.
The truth is, I'm no more mentally ill than the next person who has been abused in various ways for much of their life and then had their pain minimized by others. After being sexually assaulted in 1997 and struggling with panic attacks that came one after the other, my own family said to me, "well, you got over this before, you'll get over it again."
In other words, I'm not as crazy as people like to label me, and I talk about my truth. People don't like that. I'll never be popular because I'm not willing to paste a smile over a gaping wound and give the people what they want.
Mental illness is both real and a label that too many people paste on behaviour they find uncomfortable or don't want to examine.
ReplyDeleteDepression can also be an entirely rational response to circumstances.
Certain esoteric beliefs aside, I think that if people bother to talk to me, they'll find me to be pretty rational. I think anyone would have a tendency to be depressed if they'd lived my life.
DeleteIt's hard not to act "crazy" when you're always told not to make waves in response to abuse.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you're not supposed to express anger. But I am angry. I'm furious at what was stolen from me by assholes and scumbags.
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