Breaking Point
I’m going to be candid with you, dear readers. I understand this is the internet and there are no secrets and so on, but whatever. Just go with it.
I’ve struggled with mental illness for as long as I can recall. I had terrible OCD and anxiety problems as a child (the OCD triggered the anxiety, so they were pretty mutually exclusive for the most part) from as far back as I remember. I can remember at 4 years old having terrible, horrible compulsive thoughts of my parents dying in some horrible, gory, bloody, painful and torturous death if I didn’t do something to stop it, or at least reassure myself I was preventing it. There was no reason I should have had these thoughts, as the most violent thing I was allowed to watch were Disney movies and Care Bears. Say what you will, but Disney movies were not nearly as imaginative as my own mind was. Needless to say, I was pretty disturbed as a child, but kept it to myself. I like to think I hid it well, as my parents had no idea till many, many years later.
I’d been diagnosed with depression prior but was more recently diagnosed with something known as dysthymia, which is a mood disorder that consists of chronic depression, but generally has less severe yet longer lasting symptoms than major depressive disorder. By recent, I mean the same time I was diagnosed with PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (AKA Shellshock, battle fatigue, etc) which was in the Spring of 2009. I’m not currently being treated actively for any of this, although I know it’s there just under the surface, sometimes closer than others.
That being said, there are times in my life when I just want to get away from it all. I’ve ‘disappeared’ a few times before. Deleted any and everything and if I came back, I just created a new one. It seems like it happens every so often, and as I think of it, it’s been a few years. Some of you know of my pretty regular (by now) absences from twitter. Used to be that I could take a break for a few days and come back OK. Not so anymore. It feels too crowded and I find myself feeling claustrophobic and anxious and wanting to not be on there. I’m hardly on Facebook or any other social network for the most part anymore as well.
I don’t know how to explain it and I don’t expect anyone to understand. No one has hurt my feelings, I’m not taking things personally. I’m not getting upset about things I shouldn’t. I’m just really starting to despise people and myself and hating the way I feel when I interact on twitter, so…time for a break before I end up deleting things. I’m hoping to come back when I feel more at peace than I do right now and not like I’m holding it all together before it bursts at the seams.
Maybe things will get better. Maybe they won’t. I just know that I’m so tired of always feeling alone.
