I Don't Need False Hope, or Fantasy: Mental Health Recovery

Most days I feel like I'm breaking and entering -in search of a place I fit. A narcissistic fantasy? The inverse reflection of all the pain I've kept on ice... The parts of the story that are hoped for, soon forgotten, and incredibly unlikely to come true.

Living with anxiety: control?

I can prop my life up with all sorts of CBT skills but I can't predict when or what 'well' will be; I can get past anxiety but I can't rely on that feeling.

Can I?

Fact is, I don't know what mental health recovery would look like because what it feels like is closer to the sky is crushing me, than that it's simply falling. Like I should be stripped of all my privileges and locked in a biohazard containment suit.

Mental Illness: Half a history

The world is filled with golden-haired girls and boys. They're laid bare in magazines, on TV screens, billboards, in our longings and dreams.

So sometimes people look at me, and they'll say things, imply things: She's not helping herself, is she? Could be doing better. Room for improvement. Weak. Strange.

Comparatively, I'm sure that's true; Comparing me to the golden-haired girl I'm not.

Maybe I'd run out of options, maybe there are things you can't imagine, living in my head? Maybe I just want what the Joneses seem to have and I don't know how to get there. Anxious. Alone. Because you can't tell what's happening to me, and you stopped listening at "comparatively".

I just think that's one of the set-ups of modern society. What happens next, and what came before -It's so rarely filled in.

People fill in the blanks based on what they already know, or what they'd rather see. It's all the easier, for everybody. What can't be seen can't be that bad, right?

Mental illness is rarely heard

Mental health is rarely seen

We grow up thinking they exist, those golden-haired boys and girls. That they're perfectly perfect, even when that's killing us softly and we're slipping away because we stare far too long.

I spent a long time thinking I could become the best Barbie in the bunch and that would be enough to bring me back from the brink. That's the way it works, isn't it? If we're good little kids, not a hair out of place. Dying ever so excellently.

Waiting for whatever comes next, not understanding how we got here, or what makes us worth saving in the first place.

Anxiety: I do not need fantasy

I need more than the best pill in the batch. I need more than good advertising, and a sales pitch from a well-groomed Harvard degree with the ability to tell me the same things he tells himself to get to sleep.

I can't keep going, and I'll never get unstuck, unless I start chipping away the fantasies that stand in my way.

Stop anxiety

I don't want to stay trapped in the eyes of a stranger. I need substance, and fact: to strip away the layers of who I might be - the ideas that fill me till I can barely think, let alone move because perfect isn't perfect unless you can get there with what you already have.

Because panic takes too much away from me.

Pills, booze, therapy - other people's stories- aren't the same as feeling sure. But maybe I'll learn something from history: my history.

Maybe I can get beyond the packaging, and the promises of a 60-day anxiety free guarantee?

Which is where I think treating anxiety truly begins.