*You can read Part 1 of this article here*
After I became too comfortable, I started to have a drink, or smoke pot before heading in to work. At first, it took the edge off; I wasn’t anxious or lonely. Then it started to seem all wrong (which it totally was); I quit before I could lose myself anymore.
How many of you know what a pet peeve is? It’s something that really grinds your gears; like nails on a chalkboard.
Now imagine the screeching won’t stop. It still hasn’t stopped. Now you feel just so annoyed and restless. You have never felt so uncomfortable in your own skin. Now you’re in a bad mood, and in the words of modern girls everywhere “you can’t even”.
When I open my eyes in the morning, I wake up to nails on a chalkboard. I can’t even. I can’t even keep my eyes open or even begin to think about clunking my feet onto the floor, begin to think about breakfast, about taking a shower; I can’t even move.
A trigger is somewhat like a pet peeve. This bad mood, however, can last from minutes to months. It’s more of a mind-set than a mood. But how can you drown out an unwanted sound? You cover it with something else.
Covering my figurative ears was easy. Ignoring the screeching and pretending it was my short-term coping mechanism! The hands covering my ears were a masterpiece of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll (well EDM). All of my reckless and impulsive behaviours worsened and I can feel the consequences now.
Not allowing yourself to relive traumatic experiences, or deal with bewildering, depressed emotions only forces your brain deeper into its frozen state.
Let me explain this frozen state: your body’s homeostasis includes a system connected to your adrenal gland that secretes adrenaline. We all know what adrenaline is? Okay, good. When your body senses danger, it automatically induces the “fight or flight” response on your adrenal gland. Basically, it tells your body to prepare to fight a fight, or run away.
Frozen is neither.
Frozen is when your body is a constant state of fight or flight; a constant state of distress. Frozen is hard, and frozen is stuck. I am frozen, and I have been for a very long time. The last 8 years of my life have been so foggy; I mean I know they passed and I have memories but most of the time it feels surreal.
Okay; so, there’s a saying: “every cloud has a silver lining”, y’know, “you can always make the best of a bad situation”?
This is said like it’s a choice. It is a choice. It is a choice that is incredibly hard to make if you don’t have the right tools.
With the right support and resources for you, you can choose how you look at a situation, and therefore how you feel about a situation.
When you cover your ears, not only are the unpleasant sounds blocked out, but the rest of the world is muffled too, right? This is when the sense of reality is lost, and the scariest solution, and it starts to look like the only solution.
Self-harm is coping mechanism for a lot of people with mental illness issues. Self-harm includes drug use, impulsive behaviours, isolation from others, etc.
So, what’s the solution and scariest part of self-harm? The fact that you may actually succeed in ridding yourself of the pain.
Roughly 4000 people kill themselves from suicide related to a mental illness in Canada each year. Too often, I believe, members of society on some level still associate mental illness with “bad”. The dissociation, or “zoning out”, the lonely hospital trips that no one talks about; the shaming needs to end. I hear stories about the happiest people on the planet committing suicide; I wonder how many of those people had lonely hospital trips like me?
If I hadn’t begun talking about my experiences, I wonder if I might have been “one of the happiest people on the planet”.