Views from the Bridge

Colin & Mom

Alright! It’s been a while since we posted anything – which is mostly my fault, ger – but here’s an update!

And what about, other than mentality. Everybody has their up days, and everybody has their down days. People get anxious from random shit, depressed from important things, or just blah from not getting enough sun – or vitamin D!

Basically, mental disorders are a thing that vary for every person that has them. I have a friend whose body chemical make up gives her clinical depression, though she doesn’t feel depressed. So when she got put on meds, it helped immediately. It was like she wasn’t fighting with the part of her brain that was saying be inactive anymore when she wanted to do things.

But there are people who become depressed from other things whether it be anxiety, lack of friends, traumatic past, lack of sun, physical illnesses such as cancer, broken bones, or hypothyroidism. Often, people are depressed along with their body’s depressed state, so even medication doesn’t really do much for them for a while, because they are still mentally in that rut even if they’re body no longer is. (Hence therapy is a thing.)

I was in a mental hospital earlier this year because I have a “mood disorder” – number 365 or something like that – which causes general anxiety and episodic anxiety bursts, and I also have PTSD. Basically I was having huge anxiety driven panic attacks which would wear me down and make me tired, but because of insomnia being a horrible things, I couldn’t sleep. Pretty much everything was a trigger. I was always anxious. It made me physically sick. Nothing fit. I went several weeks with having at least two of these debilitating panic attacks a day where I couldn’t control what I did or what I thought, and during which I legitimately thought  I was going to die. I finally turned to my mom for help because I couldn’t do it any longer. I didn’t feel like I could go to school, face my friends, get out of bed, face the world. We put me in mental hospital for a week. I didn’t even get put on meds. But for me, being taken out of the situation that was making me super anxious helped me more than anything else could’ve.

My anxiety stems from my PTSD from bullying I went through at my old schools, and something minutely along the lines of OCD. When I get super anxious, it is OCD through and through. Side effects being, the fact that I don’t sleep well as it is changed to practically never being able to sleep, messes freaked me out, but were too big for me to deal with, and made me more anxious, debilitating panic attacks, hearing voices and sounds as if they were really there that I could interact with even though there was nobody and nothing physically there, and the standards in my head running rampant. It was not a good time in my life.

The standards are the more mental part of the OCD-ish part of my anxiety. Basically, in my head I make standards based off the norms of our society, and I try to meet them. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or anything, but I’m not really the norm of society. Really?  Meeting these standards was hard, because I just couldn’t. Even in the queer community, I’m not the norm – if there even is one? My brain said there was. And me being trans, ace, (asexual for the masses) and panromantic did not fit that norm that I’m not even quite sure what it is. The voices in my head didn’t help. They made fun of me for not being able to make the standards.

But for g’d knows why, they were obnoxiously supportive of my being trans.

Physically, I just had to be even, and during the worst part of my anxiety, everything else had to be too.

Now a days, I take vitamin D because I’m severely low – or was – which my doctor says probably made the anxiety worse. I’ve also noticed, if I go a couple days – between five to seven – without taking it, I start feeling not depressed or blah per se, but like I don’t have the physical energy to do what I want to do and think about what I want to think about. I also start getting kind of anxious. So I take my vitamin D, because I don’t like being anxious.

That’s how my anxiety panned out, but in the mental hospital, there was another person there with the same diagnosis as me, but an entirely different way of it being for him.

Bipolarness is another good example of that. On the interwebs I found a person talking about her bipolarness. For her, it’s that one day she could be presented with a problem and go at it for hours until she figured it out. And then the next day she could be presented with the same problem and go at it for a while before becoming fed up with it. The next day she could look at it and say it’s impossible and go do something else. The next day, she could look at it and burst into tears and have a manic fit about it. Here’s her actual post if you’re wondering.

http://brainbent.tumblr.com/post/17279828752/tengwarsenna-one-day-i-can-see-something-sad

One of my fairly close friends also has bipolar disorder. Basically, it starts at a high with her being very happy, and in a few days time, works it way down being severely depressed, she freaks out, and the loop starts over after a few days of feeling blah.

The two are similar but still different.

I guess this is a lot about how I’ve met people that try to shove everybody that has one thing into one box, when mental disorders are like people. It’s never the same, even if they have the same name.

So, here you go! Hope this was helpful in some way or another! I’ve been kind of into researching this type of stuff lately, so I guess that I could make another post at some later point about other mental disorders, the fact that I dislike that term, and other various things in this subject. I don’t know. What do you want?

The bridge, by the way, has been slow. Traffic from the new construction I suppose. Maybe that’s why we’ve been not updating. 😛 Colin, you’re perfect, you know that?!

See ya!