What It’s Like
Originally published at lianhua.nu. Please leave any comments there.
“I have to work the day after Christmas, I’m so depressed!”
“If this game goes into overtime I’m going to kill myself.”
“Waiting for the next episode is going to give me an anxiety attack!”
“I’m totally OCD about spelling! I can’t leave a misspelled word alone!”
While I realize that Twitter is practically a huge bucket of melodrama - everything seems to be exaggerated when compressed into 140 characters - quotes like the ones above (which are pretty much direct quotes from random people on Twitter) really frustrate me. And not just on Twitter; practically every day I hear someone lament how depressed they are or how they’re going to kill themselves or how they’re practically having an anxiety attack or how they’re suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It’s just people exaggerating, Jess. What’s the problem?
Well, those are some pretty powerful phrases people are throwing around. Depression, suicidal thoughts/tendencies, anxiety and OCD are not really very light things to deal with, especially if you actually, truly deal with them.
When I get depressed, people don’t know about it. I don’t tell hardly anyone that I’m depressed. Why? Because, for me, depression is like a huge weight that’s laying on top of you. You can’t get out of bed. You can barely move. You ache all over and you feel like just sobbing because it’s crushing you. You don’t go to work. You can barely tell the people you love what’s wrong - and even if you do, you have no idea how to explain how it happened. It hurts to be depressed. And chances are you don’t talk about it openly on Twitter - or anywhere, for that matter. You don’t want everyone to know.
Anxiety is pretty similar. Usually I can function a little better when I’m just feeling anxious, but there have been a few times when I’ve gotten halfway to work, started to freak out and had to summon every ounce of strength in my body to not turn around and run - literally, run - home. Again, you feel like sobbing. You can feel the adrenaline gripping every muscle, and they start to ache from being tensed so hard. You can’t catch your breath very easily. It’s terrifying. And this time, you can’t tell anyone, because you’re so terrified that you can’t even speak.
And in both cases, you feel like a failure. You couldn’t get out of bed, so you just laid there and cried, and then you cry more because you just laid there and cried through the entire day. Something negative caught you off-guard at work and you had to excuse yourself and hide in the bathroom, and then you didn’t want to come out because you knew you’d just run away to hide.
And, while I’m not personally OCD nor do I have very acute obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and it’s been a very long time since I felt like I wanted to die, I know the feelings are similar. You can’t control it. You can’t easily get past it. You’re stuck in that moment, in that feeling, and it’s so hard to get out of it - but only you can do it, and you can only do it by focusing so hard on everything else - if that even works at all.
Especially if you’ve been going through some sort of treatment for your issues, when you relapse you feel ashamed. You don’t want to have those feelings anymore, so when, uncontrollably, you do, you feel like you’ve failed yourself. You feel hopeless - like it’s never really going to get better.
Mental illness is a disability - reasonable accommodations for psychiatric issues are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. And those of us who have to deal with it on a daily basis - and it really is pretty much a daily basis - know exactly how disabling it can be.
Sure, tiny little things can set it off, but generally the relapses/attacks/episodes/whatever you want to call them are literally disabling. A spelling mistake is not likely to make most people fly into a tizzy where they can’t think straight and nothing is right. It’s rare that someone commits suicide because of a game going into overtime. Anxiety attacks usually are triggered by something a little more gripping than the season finale cliffhanger. And, although there are exceptions, a missed phone call is not going to be the only reason one spirals into a depression.
So please, think before you speak…
It’s not that bad. Trust me.