For all the sweet talk I do about mental health and acceptance, I am too unaccepting of how I feel sometimes. But don’t peg me for a hypocrite, this is new territory for me, the slow undoing of my mind.
I am familiar with triggers, anxiety, and PTS that come so suddenly that I don’t have time to catch my breath before my knees buckle. Even depression, when I had it years ago, was discovered as one falls in a pit covered with branches. This slow sickening is my first and it showed me that you don’t always fall into an “episode”, sometimes you slip, slowly, such that the dip only shows when you’ve gone some distance.
My Friday meltdown makes sense in retrospect. It is like I went to the murder scene of my mind with the CID crew to look for evidence. We found that while I support and hug someone who is sick, I judge myself for being it. A lifeguard shouldn’t drown, no? My radar did not turn red at the non-life-threatening signals, so I pushed myself in small ways through the week, calling it procrastination, low energy, or laziness. I think I am trying to prove to the world that I am reliable and solid, not in spite of, but because of my struggles. But I am not sure. I am still trying to make sense of the meltdown; I am discovering it like Goldie faced with a new toy/puppy. “How close can I afford to go? Let’s try to smell it or touch it lightly. Maybe I’ll understand it better from THAT angle or if I am upside-down when I see it.”
Here are our observations:
Slow sliding, while it may be coming from bigger potholes of ‘no one asked you to save Mumma!’, it feels smaller while being lived. While I was forcing productivity, it looked like activities that I do while well, as if to bodily feedback my brain into normalcy.
“During work hours” I stared at my laptop screen, embroidered while the excel sheet looks on, still empty.
It may also look like: a messy desk, gradual latening of my sleep time, unwatered slumping plants, blood in my mouth from chewing the insides, new acne because I forget to care for my skin, not bathing (involuntarily), struggling to make a word in scrabble, these pair of earrings, made on a Wednesday afternoon, during a meeting.