“I Just Have A Head-Ache”

When people are depressed, you often hear them say “I’m just tired”. I just realized recently that people with Misophonia have their own official quotes.  It’s really easy(in a way) to say you’re depressed because everyone knows what depression is. They may not understand it but the questions that follow can be answered in a timely manner and can be “understood”.

When you have Misophonia,  you can’t just say: “I have Misophonia”. They will ask what it is, how do you get it, what does it entail, is it real, is there a cure, is there a treatment and let’s not forget the age old disbelief that you aren’t kidding.  For this reason, most people prefer to just lie or deviate the question. I caught myself lying in order to not say I have Misophonia. Currently, I work in a warehouse environment. Here, no one has to wear earplugs because the place is nowhere near loud enough to mandate you wear them. You have to ask for one, should you want one.  Yesterday, I was being triggered a few times a minute(not exaggerating). There were a couple of people chewing gum who liked to pop their gums, people coming up to me to ask me questions chewing gum and being really close to my face. Almost needless to say, I was almost in tears.

I started messing up on my work and decided enough was enough. I asked a co-worker of mine to ask for earplugs because I had a headache. He got me earplugs and when I put them on, my body calmed down so much…it was incredible. However, throughout the night people kept asking me why I had earplugs on and all I could muster to say was that I had a headache….which wasn’t technically a lie. After being constantly triggered, I always get a migraine(without fail). I was always tempted to tell them about my disorder though. I will have to see these people pretty much every day. I think I’ll tell the people I talked to the most but I don’t know how to approach the conversation without looking crazy. It’s probably impossible but at least by telling them and them thinking I’m crazy, they’ll stay away from me and I’ll keep my sanity.

🙂

Depression & Food

My relationship with food has always been an up and down roller coaster. As a toddler, I used to be way more petite than other girls. I was of little height and had a small body frame but I could down two plates of rice, beans and plantains like it was my job. I thoroughly enjoyed food and back then, nothing affected my eating. It was amazing to watch me eat and not gain weight. After the age of 10, my depression started to reach its peak. Looking back I do remember how erratic my eating was. I was hungry all of the time( at least I thought I was). I would spend most of my day eating and laying down on the couch. I quickly started to gain weight and gained about 50-60 pounds in a year.

I became a little ball. I would stay that way through middle school. At the end of eighth grade and beginning of ninth grade…I decided enough was enough. I started to starve myself. I would eat portions way lower than they needed to be for me to lose weight. I ate only when I remembered I needed it to survive and I ended up loosing all the extra weight within a few months. After that, food just became this thing I needed.

I still have a complicated relationship with food. Sometimes I want to eat the world and other times I forget that I need to eat. It really does depend on my mood. This morning, I felt like eating unhealthily. Because…metabolism….

Anti-depressant High

I’m missing my anti-depressants, so I thought I’d write about my experience with the only one I’ve taken: Celexa. I was truly so skeptical about anti-depressants working on me. Why? Because I’m weird and medicine and substances don’t work on me like they traditionally work on other people. A good example is I have to take pain medicine in larger amounts in order for the pain to go away. Caffeine in any form makes me sleepy not awake. You know, the usual weirdness. Also, the fact that I’ve had recurrent depression for soooo long.

When taking anti-depressants, it usually goes one of three ways. One, you feel no different for the next three to four weeks. Two, you feel numb and indifferent. Three, you go from nothing, to numb and then to happy as can be. I was the latter. It’s not general knowledge that some people can make themselves think they’re getting better or that really getting better so early on is not a good thing.

In my case, I don’t really know what happened in those first few weeks. There’s too many things to factor in. I had just gotten out of the mental hospital, people that made me feel unloved were not taking treating me like shit(that would change later on), etc. At first, I still had plans to kill myself and was trying to find a way to do it so that there would be zero chance of survival. Then, I became indifferent to anything and anyone. Then, I became happy and optimistic. Then…I crashed from whatever cloud I was on and lost my job. It happened way too quickly.

The negative parts of taking anti-depressants was that I felt ridiculously tired all the time but yet I couldn’t for the life of me fall asleep. I am generally a very caring person but on them I didn’t really care for people that weren’t people I loved. Even then, sometimes I would look at loved ones like they were strangers. I didn’t let them see that but it’s just how I felt. On them, the world was different. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad…it just was. Let’s also not forget how they didn’t keep me from losing the love of my life.

So I bet you’re wondering why I miss them. Despite it all, they did keep me from killing myself. I still had suicidal thoughts but had no intent to carry them out. My anxiety lowered for a while. I also had this incredible concentration that I didn’t know I didn’t have before. I realized on them that the reason I didn’t carry out things I wanted to do had a lot to do with depression. They also helped my neurological disorder(Misophonia) and I don’t know why and I don’t know how but it did. At first, I was very sensitive to sounds on them, but as time passed while taking them my triggers were lessened in severity.

The biggest reason though is that after a certain point, I didn’t feel as deeply.

I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare

In other people’s eyes my life is just beginning. Most people can’t comprehend why I am the way I am. Hell, I don’t even understand why. I do know that I’ve been depressed since I could communicate and I can’t help you understand that. It doesn’t make sense for a “spoiled” kid to be depressed. Mind you, I was spoiled in the sense that I had more than most kids in my vicinity but I still lived under the poverty line in my country, so there were things I wanted that I couldn’t get; but I digress.

I also know that I was way more anxious than a kid should ever be. I couldn’t help it and I didn’t know it. I was the child who refused to eat before she finished her homework, who cried because she wasn’t top of her class, who cried for family members she didn’t know and had no attachment to. I was ridiculous and I still am. When you have depression and anxiety, I feel like they can fight against each other. Having anxiety about things can sort of be a motivator to do things but then depression comes in and tells you to leave it for another day.

If had to choose from my severity of depression and my severity of anxiety, I would choose to live with anxiety. Anxiety, I can deal with…heck it might even help me out in life in some ways. It’s easier for me to treat my anxiety than my depression. The fact that I have anxiety makes sense. My personality is kind of a funny story. I am a planner, I like results and  I like structure. Even when I’m not anxious, I am still that way. Having anxiety doesn’t mold the way I am(I know for some people it can). Depression on the other hand, twists and turns my sense of self. I always joke about not knowing what came first, depression or me. I don’t know who I am entirely because I can never tell when I’m depressed or just me being me.

But hey, I’m still just a kid right? But life is still a nightmare.

Memories Burn

I’m sitting here at the usual time when insomnia takes over and I can’t sleep. I started thinking about my uncle and realized I have never really talked about him. I have never expressed what it was like growing up with him. My uncle was mentally ill. His mental illness was so debilitating that for as long as I lived with him he never had a job, never had a girlfriend or showed any interest in women, he never wanted to explore and he was never quite like other people. Looking at him, you would never know that he was mentally ill or where his mental illness came from.

I don’t remember much from the first time my parents talked about what happened with him. At a certain point his “story” came up in conversation and I found out why my uncle lived with us. In my culture, this is not typical. My father built an extra room separated from the rest of the house but attached enough that it didn’t look like a separate room. It wasn’t decorated, he had nothing that made it his own. Looking back on it, it kind of looked like a prison cell on a really low income prison. But I digress…whenever the topic of my uncle came up, it was never sad. When people talked about my uncle it was almost in a comedic type of way.

It was said that my family tried to get him admitted into an insane asylum but they refused for the simple fact that he simply wasn’t insane. Whenever they told this story they made it a point to talk about how bizarre it was that the behavior that they described wasn’t enough to get him admitted. He passed all their tests because while they could see he was a troubled man, he was not insane. It was always a cause for laughter because they saw it as almost a cosmic joke that he would be so sick in the head but yet not sick enough to be insane in the eyes of doctors.

After that, usually came the story of what happened. My dad said that he was always “sick” to an extent but he was very social in the sense that he always liked to be around people. He never had a professional job but he would find ways to make money doing general labor jobs and such. People around our town knew him very well and would always treat him with dignity because they just thought he was peculiar not necessarily sick. One day, he was attacked and beat up. It was a combination of trying to rob him and also just attacking him because he wasn’t fighting back. After that happened, he refused to leave the house ever again. He would walk around our very small backyard but he never left our house again.

I don’t want to make this post too long but there’s a reason he came to mind and why I’m talking about him. When I was little, mental illness was definitely a word I didn’t know. I didn’t understand he was mentally ill and I didn’t understand that I was mentally ill. I just knew that if they didn’t like the way my uncle thought, they wouldn’t like my thoughts. My uncle was never beaten, was never denied food, water or shelter but in various ways…he was denied a life. He slept in a grey room, he never got medical help, he ate and drank out of separate glasses and no one ever hugged him(this was in part due to his lack of hygiene). He slept most of the time and I could tell he wanted his life to be different but he just couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t help it.

I guess tonight, now I understand why he always asked about me when I left the country and when he was close to death. He and I could see through each other. I just didn’t know it. It makes me so sad that I never got to have deep conversations with him, that I didn’t understand before he died that we were the same. It makes me sad that I couldn’t help him. He could have gotten better, even been able to leave the house at some point. Maybe he wouldn’t have died. He was so young when he died and if he would have taken care of his own body, if he wouldn’t spend most of his time laying down, if he wouldn’t have been so void of life…he might still be here. I know it wasn’t my responsibility to keep him alive but If I ever became him, I’d want someone to save me.

Inside Out

I just watched the movie inside out and I think it’s one of the best animated movies made this year based solely on the story line. There’s been movies made about beings controlling a person’s behavior from the inside before but not aimed for children. In the movie these “beings” just exist from birth. You have joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. It can be assumed that new emotions join later on since you develop more complex emotions as you grow older. But for all of the movie, these were the only ones there.

These emotions were in charge of this girl and for the most part “Joy” was the one in control. All she wanted was for the girl to be happy and feel as little of other emotions as possible. All the little girl’s core memories were filled with happiness. As the little girl grew older, life got a little bit complicated and change started to happen. As everyone knows, with change comes turmoil. She couldn’t just be happy and being happy and positive about everything didn’t help the fact that things weren’t okay for her.

Her more “negative” emotions start taking over and pretty much ruining her life. In the end the combination of allowing herself to feel all emotions is what kept her sane. It’s a movie with a great lesson. Feeling one emotion all the time can’t let you appreciate all the facets of other emotions. It’s good to be angry, to be sad, to be disgusted, to be afraid and to be happy. You need all of them.

I’m not sure if a small child can grasp that concept completely but the fact that there’s a movie out there that is aimed at mental health is pretty cool. I recommend it for people who have children.

Look & You Shall Find…

Today I found something really cool…again. A few months back I had seen these illustrations that represented well known mental disorders(and a neurological one). They’re described as monsters and have a small description that lets you know what these monster cause and how they affect people. As soon as I saw it, I was in love. Just today though, I realized Misophonia(neurological disorder) was one of the disorders he used as inspiration for the monsters! I am so happy. Not so much about the classification but about the fact that he took the time to make a “monster” for it and to pretty much give it awareness.

He has a blog on tumblr as well as merchandise from said monsters. They are a bit pricey but fair considering these are original pieces. I can’t wait till I start earning money so I can buy mugs and hoodies and such. It’s like a little secret that only me and people who know about the monsters will know.

Anyways, I’ll leave you the link to his blog so you can see the monsters for yourselves. Enjoy. 🙂

http://zestydoesthings.tumblr.com/

Depression, Love and other diseases…

Isn’t it ironic the amount of time I’ve spent mourning you?

That I’ve stopped finding your imperfections and started collecting mine

Like souvenirs that stick to my cells

To become part of my transition into what you want

Underneath tired eyes and sleepless nights

Inside unanswered glances and skipped showers

Near silent tears and loud expressions

Along cracks hugging my eyes for your viewing pleasure

Did you find what YOU were looking for?

Looking for love

I found my food to have emotions

Found pain to be anonymous

Found nothing to be synonymous

With…

You.

Mental Health Day!

Today is mental health day. It is a day that I feel is to remind people that we exist. Don’t get me wrong, mental health day is not offensive by any means…but it can be a little sad if you think about it. The things that get “days” or “holidays” are people or things that the public wants a reminder of. Martin Luther King Day, Christmas A.K.A The birth of Jesus,  independence day, etc. Notice how a lot of holidays are single event holidays. This means that these things happened and will never happen again. By all intents and purposes there will never be another Martin Luther King, Jesus won’t be born again, and in most countries independence day will remain the same. Mental health will always be an event that keeps on happening.

The brain is the most complex organ in the body. Most of it’s disorders/diseases end up with a diagnosis and treatment or no treatment at all. You never hear anyone say “Yeah, I had a brain disease but I’m good now. It won’t come back”. Which is why I feel mental health day shouldn’t exist, instead mental health should be a topic that people talk about as much as cancer, anemia, the common cold, sexually transmitted diseases, etc. The more people treat it like isolated events, the more people forget that mental health problems are common. We’re not rarities.

The Things We Live For…

When I was in High School, I took this test to find out what my personality was. It’s not like other tests because unlike most, this gives you very detailed explanations about that personality type. The test can only give you one of 16 results. There are four categories and four personality types in each category. You have the Analysts, Diplomats, Sentinels and the Explorers. I should also mention that after your personality type there is an A or a T. It means assertive or turbulent.

My personality type is Advocate- INFJ- Turbulent. It says:

“INFJs tend to see helping others as their purpose in life, but while people with this personality type can be found engaging rescue efforts and doing charity work, their real passion is to get to the heart of the issue so that people need not be rescued at all.”

“The INFJ personality type is very rare, making up less than one percent of the population, but they nonetheless leave their mark on the world. As Diplomats (NF), they have an inborn sense of idealism and morality, but what sets them apart is the accompanying Judging (J) trait – INFJs are not idle dreamers, but people capable of taking concrete steps to realize their goals and make a lasting positive impact.”

I’d love to see what other people of other mental/neurological disorders get. Go to http://www.16personalities.com  to take the test. Comment down below with your results.