Cycling between anxiety and depression
if you get the patience read this, if you go through the same things, feel free to hit me up, i’m interested in starting a convo on this.
A detail i have come along to realize about myself, is that i cycle in between anxiety and depression. i have no idea if there is a specific diagnosis for this, if it is simply just, i have both and they sometimes overlap and other times appear separate. I was wondering if anybody else is like this. This is not just, one day i am anxious and the other day i am terribly depressed. I have always lived with these two very different emotional states, and they come in waves that sometimes i can’t even predict or control. my therapist has always treated me as being someone who suffers from generalized anxiety, but for some reason i have always known there as a bit more to it. Thing is i hid my depression out of shame, and surely i wanted to do the same about my anxiety, but it is such a more violent and unpredictable state, that sometimes it would just burst out and i could not control it.
So it usually starts with an outburst of anxiety, if i was to put it in the perspective of my worst i would wake up every morning with an impending sense of doom and i would go along my day hyper aware of every single thing around me. My brain can’t stop at those times, it thinks about every single thing that most people do not think about, and then worry about specific thoughts and details of said thoughts, and even in the peace and quiet of my own bedroom i would freak out, burst into tears, have a panic attack, you name it. And usually this general state would go on for a significant amount of time, especially if i was expecting something to happen.
And then that nervous state would either be disrupted by an outer influence, or it would shift on it’s own into, not what i would call the polar opposite, often i would still feel anxious, but it would mostly just shift into depression. and in those times i would just not care, i would wake up not with a sense of doom, but i would simply remember who i am and i would hate it and want to disappear. So there i would go into a period of time where i was mainly depressed.
i will get anxiety about getting depression and then i will get depressed about having anxiety. First i thought that i either had one or the other, and then i would have a smaller percentage of the other illness. Then i thought, well i must have both, but they’re completely separate, and you are just weird like that. But it never felt quite right, and the more i get to know about myself, the older i get, i just believe that they are sort of interchangeable, or even connected in some way. hell, it might even be the same thing. I know one person can be diagnosed with several metal illnesses, but i mean, i only have this one brain, would it not make more sense, since these problems seem to have the same origin, it is not something that i have developed from any particular trauma that i remember, i do have traumas and i have mental consequences and tel tales of said traumas, but analyzing my behavior, even that is separate from my anxiety and my depression.
i mean what am i supposed to say, “oh just let me list all of the things my brain has decided to fuck up on, lets see, anxiety, depression,anorexia AND bulimia at at least one point, technically also orthorexia for around a year and a half, very very likely ptsd from serious abuse, but that’s separate from the other things, have i told you i also get body dysmorphia? oh yeah chronic panic attacks and i get easily addicted to things”.... to me it just seems like i am some sort of grocery list. At one point i started to worry if i was thinking about all these things i had, if i was not just a hypochondriac or an illness collector. Which is completely idiotic, i’ve been diagnosed and treated for all of the mental illnesses above, it was never something that i made up in my mind.
But with a certain amount of psychological knowledge (i mean 8 years of intense therapy gets you some skills in at least understanding what the heck is going on) I ended up to the conclusion, i am neither going to restrict myself into one single problem, neither am i going to list every single problem in the book.
I have a restrictive eating disorder, it shifts and adapts as the circumstances of my life appear, like a parasite trying to resist medication; reasons: biology with a gymnastics background and a perfectionist head
i have at least a mild to moderate form of ptsd, it is fairly recent and it is yet to be completely understood by my treatment teams at it’s fullest extent;reasons: I am a rape victim but previous to that i endured abuse from several “sources”, which built up and eventually burst when a more major event happened.
And then i have anxiety and depression. It show up as mutated sort of mental illness. almost like a bipolar individual (which i am absolutely not); i cycle between these two states as if one caused he other, or just, i have both and my brain gets too tired from one thing and goes to the other thing, or depending on the situation it will react accordingly, but it always has a tendency to find a way to get depressed or anxious and then i am more likely that in a span of a few weeks of that constant feeling, or even months, i will change into the other state, or into normality.
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