My mental health and where it’s at right now.
I tend to be a quiet person, who keeps things inside my head. I don’t open up well, and often times bottle up my thoughts and feelings without expressing them. If I unleash them, I typically do it very privately, usually only to myself. On occasion, I share with friends how I’m feeling. But even with friends I don’t usually share full details. It’s hard for me to open up and express myself.
But why am I like this? Why do I never open up and say how I’m feeling, or reach out to the people around me when I need to? The answer is, because I’m afraid to lose people. Because I’m afraid to drive them away. All my life, I can’t name a moment where opening up and expressing how I’m truely feeling didn’t lead to loss of a friend or a significant other.
When it came to a significant other, I would open up and say how sad I was feeling, or try to approach a problem in the relationship with the goal of solving it and moving forward with happier interactions. Some times my previous relationships would ignore me for days or weeks on end. Some times they’d choose friends over spending any form of time with me alone in private. When those situations became upsetting, I would usually express to my partner that I wanted to be spoken to more. Or maybe instead of ALWAYS spending time with friends, I wanted a moment to spend time with just us. These are just small examples of things I encountered in previous relationships and opened up about. And when I expressed these wants, my significant others would typically ignore me again, or tell me it was my own problem.
When I expressed again how sad I was, they’d give me an ultimatium, or just tell me they were ending the relationship immediately. My heart would shatter. My trust was broken in an instant. This became such a common occurance in my life that I started to swallow my feelings, thoughts, anything at all. I stopped telling people things. I would try to turn to friends, and those friends would either snap at me in frustration over how I was feeling and turn me away, or some of those friends eventually evolved into bullies who further destroyed my mental health and made me feel like less of a person.
I can’t tell you every situation I’ve ever been in where things went south. Because honestly, I blocked most of them from my memory. It effected the person I would become. They always say communication is important. But how do you communicate when you’re afraid due to past expierences ending terribly from doing so? It feels like life taught me that the more you express yourself the more likely you’re going to lose people. I’ve never had somebody turn to me and say, okay. It’s okay. We’re going to get through this. We will work this out. It’ll be fine. We got this.
I was alone in always thinking and trying to make that happen for me and my relationships with people. I was eventually left to just try to support myself. And when you’re in a dark place like I am, it’s hard to support yourself without the help of a friend or someone you trust.
Now take this and imagine yourself as a young girl, in her mid 20′s, who has lived a strictly scheduled, regular life. She lived with her parents for her entire life, in the same exact house, same neighborhood, same town, same state, without ever once moving. Her parents worked 5am to 4pm-5pm every single day for 20+ years, except on Monday’s and Tuesday’s. On Monday’s and Tuesday’s, her parents often didn’t stay home on their day off and usually went out to window shop from 10am till as late as 8pm. Imagine a girl who grew up without siblings in this household. The house was silent, all the time. If a tv came on, it was quiet. The tv’s were usually only on for maybe an hour or two a day, 3 at max. Her father was so obsessed with noise that he would yell and panic in the house if anyone was being too loud for his own sake.
So everything, all the time, every moment, was quiet and had to be. Imagine not being allowed to have friends over in this household except maybe once or twice a year. Because your father was too paranoid to have strangers in the house. So when strangers did come, it was almost this anxiety inducing moment of, am I safe? Is this stranger an okay person? Am I allowed to do what I want in my house if this stranger is here? You’re almost taught to feel like strangers are a threat if your parents react in a negative way towards them.
Now also imagine having a very messy mother, who doesn’t care where things are, and has zero organization. But your father is loud, angry, irritable, and over the top OCD. He comes home every single day, and he yells and rants about how messy everything is. Wether that meant clothes on the floor, or cups on the counter, or dishes in the sink. It didn’t matter the number, but usually the messes were large. So he pushes you in pure anger to clean constantly and to stay clean. Everything has to have a place, and be taken care of, to avoid anger and even physical hitting. My father used to get so angry that he’d hit me on the head, bite his tongue and yell in my face, and demand that I take care of messes or listen to what he’s saying or he’d take away my hobbies - video games, the internet, tv, you name it.
My father was always angry. Always. And he was quiet, too. Hardly ever spoke. If you tried to talk to him, he’d try to shrug you off or get very angry and very loud and tell you to go away. Everything had to be his way or no way. He often excluded me from family trips as well, because for some reason my presence alone, my breathing, my exsistence was absolutely annoying.
So what did I do when things got to be too much? I had two real life friends who lived near me that I met in school. Each living 20 minutes or 45 minutes away by car. I’d usually take off for a day or a few days and spend time with those friends. We’d drive out to malls, to the beach, to the park, to restraunts or coffee shops. Anything to get out. Some times we hung out in their bedroom and di arts and crafts or we talked about life, etc. It was a form of escape. It was how I could breathe outside a stressful home life.
All of these situations and moments and things were HABIT and REGULARITY and STABILITY for me. It was all scheduled. I knew when things would happen. I knew what reactions to expect. Everything was planned, and handled, etc.
Imagine working a daycare job in a grocery store for 8 years. It was never busy, and it was usually pretty calm aside from the occasional stupid parent making stupid decisions. But you could be backed up by a manager or a coworker, and felt a sense of safety. No matter the situation, you were protected. And it was a solo job. You’d see your coworker for 5 minutes before your shift started, talk about the shift before yours, and say goodbye and work alone watching up to 8 kids at a time. If you had to go to the bathroom or needed something to do when there were no kids, you could go without hesitation or worry. If you needed something, you had a manager to immediately cover you. Your coworkers weren’t great people, but at least they didn’t say anything to your face to make you feel bad. It was usually in passing behind your back and it was easier to shrug it off then. And then that job closed down.
Now imagine moving across the country. No family to go to. No friends to see. You have no idea really what’s around you in the state you’re now living in. Your town is smaller, and everybody seems wealthier. You never go to the mall. You never take any trips really. You don’t have anyone to go out with to escape from the house. And your household schedules are CONSTANTLY changing. You never know when you’ll have a moment to yourself, truely. You’ll never know where people are or what they’re doing. You’ll never know what to expect from anyone who comes home or leaves. When you try to keep things clean no one else tries, because you were taught to be clean and maintain a organized enviornment but everyone else was not. And so your way of doing things, everything you grew up with and spent your entire life doing, somehow don’t apply here. But you’ve moved to this new place and have to get comfortable somehow. But you can’t. Because everything is so drastically different. You’ve spent over 20 years of your life doing the same things. But now it’s all almost completely opposite. And your job really, really sucks. The customers are awful people. The work is so difficult that you come home acheing and in pain in all your muscles and body parts from literally running, or lifting heavy things, or doing repetitive motions all day.
Your coworkers aren’t afraid to make you feel like shit to your face. They’ll say things to you directly, or around you, and you’ll know it. And it’ll be so upsetting and initimidating and unwelcoming. And you go to higher ups and those higher ups can only help so much because they’re not always at work to protect you or run the place properly. It’s exhausting.
And then imagine getting diagnosed with a bladder disease. You can’t stop peeing every 5 minutes. You can barely eat or enjoy food anymore. You can hardly drink water. All because you’re so terrified you’re going to be peeing constantly. And when you sit down to try to relax, or go to work for the day, there’s almost this annoying buzzy itch in your urethra where you know you can’t hold it and feel like any second you’re going to pee your pants. It’s exhausting, humiliating, and it rules your life. Because no matter what you’re doing or where you’re going, imagine you always feel like you have to pee. And that you could pee your pants without any control.
The bladder condition took away my ability to enjoy food socially. I can’t even drink alcohol anymore. I feel like I can’t go out because I’ll sit bored watching everyone else enjoy things. But i’m losing/sacrificing my abiility to go out and socialize within that itself.
Imagine being so attached to how you used to live, where you always had peace and quiet, that you’re terrified of leaving the house and coming back to a place that isn’t quiet and you can’t say anything about it. No one understands where you came from or your way of doing things.
When you’ve lived your ENTIRE life with family, friends, and a specific way of doing things or expecting things to one year going to something completely opposite. It’s almost mind blowingly overwhelming. And you feel so alone in it.
How do you help someone who is in a brand new place, with no family, no friends, no escape. No car, no socializing, no adventures, no mall trips, no trips in general...no ability to hardly eat or drink anything. Exhausted and emotionally destroyed from a really crappy work enviornment.
Be there for them. Let them know, you love and support them. That everything will be okay. That you’ll help them get comfortable. Make plans with them. Take them out to do things. Help them when they come home and feel uncomfortable by having their back, by understanding where they’ve come from and what they’re not used to. Sympathize in the fact that they’re nervous, and scared of being in a new place. Having no one to go see. And no idea of how to escape or where to go that’s fun around their new space of living. Help make them feel safe. Maybe tell them what you would do to feel better in a new place.