Accidentally cultivated too much resilience and now i can appear functional far beyond the point of paralyzing, torturing suffering, but cannot reach a level of distress that noticeably requires help without ruining my life
trying to figure out how to word my request to take a leave of absence for a semester
Like. My mental health is not outwardly an emergency, but it will be.
There's a level of stress and fear where nothing works. Your limbs don't move. Your mind doesn't move. Rest, a nap, food, none of these things fix it. You're in a room with concrete walls and no doors and no floor, just an endless abyss you're about to fall into. You can't self-care your way out of it. Your entire body is screaming but you're just numb. You can't move. You can't think.
I'm in my mind. Maybe I *am* my mind. That makes it hard to observe my thoughts because I have a conflict of interest.
I used cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to survive. I observe that I have an anxious thought and I go through all the little steps to make it okay. Except they have just smudged together into a single motion, like all things you do expertly: I observe that I am okay. I do not observe that I am not okay. I do not observe that I am not okay.
I think about my triggers, but I filter them out. They're non-thoughts. I've argued myself out of them before I've even thought them. My body feels like a fox chewing its leg out of a trap. I'm the trap. I'm the fox. I'm the slowly gnawing teeth. It's just a feeling, a frozenness, nausea, bedrock hovering constantly above me, a prey animal being dead and being eaten that's constantly realizing it's my body and trying to run away and realizing it can't...
So much of my energy goes to not thinking about how much distress I am in. I keep going. I stay hydrated, keep myself alive with protein shakes and granola bars, shower, somehow I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, even if I have to eat myself alive until I'm just a pile of passing grades.
I didn't feel sleepy toward the end of the semester. I stayed up late and woke up early, earlier than I usually can. It was as if I slept too lightly for staying in bed to feel nice. I was having constant nightmares. I would wake up with my body rigid from stress. Then something happened the week before finals. I missed classes even though I was setting 3 alarms because I couldn't wake up. My body shut itself off.
It was only last week that I've stopped having nightmares every night about missing classes, tornadoes, and fighting with my roommate. My period came back too. I didn't menstruate for any of the days I was in school, four months.
I am very good at surviving. Too good. I feel like i'm about to die, I realize how terrified and stressed and sick I feel, and within an hour I argue myself out of it, convince myself I'm fine and everything is okay, because I've trained myself to do that.
But I feel like I've gotten so close to some kind of abyss. And I know I can't make it across the abyss through another semester with things as they are. Please believe me.
