Triggering…

I find a lot of mental health focused blogs and people on Twitter to be triggering.  Anxiety will well up as I read the desperate cries of a fellow mental illness sufferer on Twitter – some of the more frantic Tweeting can be overwhelming.  I will wince in pain at the ponderings of some of the lady’s blogs I read as they write about being bipolar and various other dysfunctions.  Mental illness frankly sucks.  It destroys lives and takes away your humanity.  It effectively took away my manhood for years.  It made me this scared shell of a person. 

I still struggle everyday, but I don’t write about it much.  I want this blog to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative to quote that 1940s song.  Today, as I was mowing a lawn in my neighborhood this wave of panic overcame me.  “I can’t do this today,” my mind screamed. “I just want to crawl home and escape to the bed.”  It is during these moments that I have to face my fears and my anxiety head on.  I am not saying what works for me will work for you as each mental illness seems to be a distinctly different case as in our abilities to function in society.  I just find that I have to face my illness with the brute force of a charging rhinoceros.  “Carry on,” as the ever stalwart British would say in the military during the second world war.

I have also been cringing at the way many people on Twitter with mental illnesses obsess over their medications.  Lately, I am becoming less pro medication.  I shy away from taking pills, but I am forced by my family to do so.  It is inherently in my psychiatrist’s best interest that I take these pills.  Without pills there would be no modern psychiatry.  If we could only solve all our problems through therapy then the world be a better psychiatric place.  I have found this past two weeks for my job and my social interactions to be the best therapy I have received in years – working wonders for my perceived illnesses.  I am building lasting bonds and relationships.  I am forming a foundation for a resume and gaining working skills lost over eight years of idleness and unemployment. I am also getting out in the world and experiencing life for a change – not constantly sitting at home dwelling on my mind and it’s ailments.

Next week, I could be a quivering mess of man.  Unable to work or function in society again.  That’s the nature of true mental illness if I actually have them.  I am under the extremely strong suspicions that all the medications I am taking are the problem and not the solution, though.  What kind of doctor would be fine with a patient that is sexually dysfunctional when sex should be a healthy and normal part of life?  Procreation should be a basic human right. All animals do it except me.  I can’t.  I can’t look at Kim and think, “Boy, I sure would like to jump her bones and get her in bed.”  I am ambivalent on the subject.  It holds about as much interest to me as baseball does.    

You know what scares me the most? My father. For years, he has gone about his life un-impinged as two of his closest family members suffered in quiet acquiescence.   Medications are forced upon us to keep us sleepy, quiet, and complacent.  “I can’t deal with you un-medicated,” he will tell my mother and I in moments of anger.  It wasn’t fair that he got to live his full life while my mother and I sat at home with nothing to do.  No real friends.  Little ambition to get out of the bed.  We couldn’t even take even the most basic satisfaction out of life for being so heavily medicated for decades.

Well, enough of  my ranting.  I just felt the need to vent and blogging is therapy for me.  I hope I didn’t embarrass myself too terribly by writing this.