Lucid Living

Anyone who has a mental disorder knows that when you get even a day without it, the world is different. I have these bouts of lucidity and I realize just how fucked up/simple my life has been. A lot of times, it doesn’t matter how hard you try. Your mind will not let you see anything other than what you’ve been living with. I have grown up saying I’m “strange”, “weird”, “abnormal”, “crazy”, etc. I certainly am but before that was a family running joke, now it’s just a reality. I sit in my room sometimes and I think about all the little hints I gave to my family about my depression, anxiety, sound disorder, etc. I just didn’t know I was giving them hints. It’s really hard for people to see disorders unless they are in their extreme. Sure, I could have killed myself. Sure, I had panic attacks. Sure, I stopped eating at the table…But I was such a soldier that I followed orders and blended in with the crowd of people that were nothing like ME.

The anti-social child that I was always comes up. I was the kid with resting bitch face who everyone and their mother wanted to say hi to. I didn’t want to and often didn’t say hi back. I realize now, that 1. Yes, I had sort of a bad attitude. 2. It was anxiety! I was legitimately afraid of people. If I sat there and reminded my family members of the things I used to do, they would see now where all this mess of a person comes from. In one particular instance, my mother caught me crying in her room. I hated talking about feelings(even then!). But she wouldn’t let me get out of the room until I told her what was wrong. This single moment told her point blank about my anxiety and my depression. It’s just not a conclusion a mother in a third world country with no education comes to. I told her I was thinking about death, why people die, if there’s a god, that I didn’t want to die but at the same time I did and that I worried….all the time because I didn’t want my thoughts to be true in any way. The same way that sentence ran is the same way I told her about this. I was crying the entire time. Adult me almost wishes she could back and tell my mother to look at me. I mean really look at me. I feel like she felt like I was catching adult conversations and that’s why I was thinking that way.

I had always been known as the kid who was born grown up. I had to be taught social cues(no surprise there), but at the same time I always knew how to read people. My mother prided herself in being my mother. I was the smart kid, the kid who was diligent, the kid who never needed a beating and never talked back. She just didn’t know that half of my behavior came from being scared and sad. I don’t know. My birthday is coming up and I’m having one of those days…where life just hits you. I’m not particularly sad, just thoughtful. Drowning dramatically in the sea of me. xD