Hi everyone,
I am new to the support wall and I need to say that I appreciate all of you who opens up and to those that swoop in with words of comfort or just a giant shoulder for someone else to lean on during a time of struggle and need. This community has served as a great inspiration for me personally, to endevour to reach out to more people and have more of an impact with people in both my personal and online life.
A little about my journey, it’s all about mental health and I might as well open up as well. I have been depressed since I can remember, with constant feelings of suicide, self harm and the harm of others plaguing my life. Luckily, throughout the years, I have taken the steps to heal from the wounds that I have caused myself mentally through multiple means, including therapy and self reflection as well as creative outlets such as music and writing, trusting that I am the person that others tell me that I am and finding that same image in the mirror that they see. For a long time in my life I was very blinded by my self inflicted perceptions of myself, my dreams, my goals.
Back in 2014 I hit my rock bottom, everything went completely sideways, both me and my wife’s fathers lost their jobs, my father got 2 heart attacks (and survived), family members got strokes, we had financial troubles that threatened our existence, some of our family members got murdered and a few months after that some more deaths in friends and family occurred. All this mixed with me working in the Oncology ward as a nurse through a very bad time, 13 people that I learned to love and cared for unfortunately passed due to the disease, which really threw some question marks on life for me.
I wrote a letter to my computer screen, just letting it all out, letting out how I felt, saw the world, how hopeless and pointless existence was, how absolutely doomed I was in life with all my dreams and goals shattered. I sent this letter to my computer screen to my wife on a whim. It’s then the therapy started, the medications prescribed made me sick, sicker than I have ever been in my life and the medication they gave to fix the anxiety and other side effects, caused further feelings of despair and the cocktail I was drinking was not doing me any good.
Every single day I was searching for my purpose, for the reason why I should exist, thinking about all the existential crisis topics. Through talking with therapist after therapist, doctor after doctor, almost being forced into an institution at the stage. I found my aha! moment. I woke up the next morning and I flushed all my medication. (PLEASE DON’T DO THIS EVER, it was reckless and stupid to do and the side effects of just jumping off all those things was terrible, always consult with your health care professionals for any such decisions).
Oh, as a side note, I am all for medication, I believe in hindsight I wasn’t committed to the process of finding the right medications at that stage and my wife has never been better with her current anti anxiety medications.
In any case, I quit nursing seeing that I would either go completely off my mind, even though it was the most rewarding experience of my life thus far, or I would turn into an emotional stone. For a couple of years afterwards with a LOT of introspection and follow up therapy, I discovered that I am valuable, I am worthy of love, I am a good human that can follow dreams and fail, get back up and learn from everything. Some days are a little harder than others, but I have learned the techniques and tools to disruptively dismiss the feelings that just aren’t true and to recognize as soon as the roller coaster starts moving and I can take pro-active steps to keep myself stable.
Throughout the years, I have found my purpose in other people, to help make dreams come true, to make someone smile in a dark time, to help someone going through the same darkness that I am walking through. In my case it’s not something that will ever go away, but I am proud of what I have become throughout the experience and I wrote that more for me than anything else at this point. I’m focused on being a positive influence to those around me and to help ease the pain that so many of us face.
Interestingly enough, I also can’t “hear” my inner voice or my thoughts, my life is on autopilot, which adds a layer of complexity that isn’t quite welcome in the mix. The inner voice being, like when you are doing math or reading, I can’t “hear” myself. I operate on feelings alone and it makes it hard to find out what’s going on in my mind, what the triggers are etc. And that’s where writing came into play, my pen shows me what I am thinking and I learned to utilize the creative space to talk to myself and tell me what’s going on with me.
I’m happy to say that I am not in need of support and have been stable for the last few years of my life, but I look forward to being a shoulder or an ear to someone that needs it, obviously not as a health care professional (I wish), but as a fellow human that has been there before and is currently going through it.
Hopefully, my experiences and my ever living story will help someone to see that it is possible to get out of the REALLY bad space and get to a place where you are happy with who you are and inspire confidence to move forward from the doomed, lonely, and dark feelings towards self acceptance and ultimately your definition of happiness.
I’m happy I found you all, it’s really cool to be a part of the community. You are loved, strangers can care, you are worth it, your dreams matter, YOU matter. Stay strong and hold fast.
