I truly appreciate your denigration of all that I’ve achieved in over twenty years of wrestling with this cancer in my soul. Please excuse my feeble attempts to help you by sharing my experiences; I won’t bother you anymore.
I’m just…going to stop before I…
Sorry. Really. I really am sorry.
You won’t see anymore about…
I’m sorry.
I love both of you dearly and I hope we can all get along. No feelings were meant to be hurt I’m sure.
I can see both ends of this. Depression is, at the end of all things, a mental disorder. So, attitude and initiative really do make a difference. It is a battle, and it is hard, and it is up and down. There is no “cure.” Also, doping youself up on medication doesn’t really count as a cure anyway, wouldn’t you say? But, anything used correctly and moderately can help. If it truly is a physical disorder, and not just an attitude problem, then it can and should be worked through. Because it’s holding you back from being who you really are.
That’s my two cents, anyway, take or leave! <3
Right now, I’m so annoyed by the way things were phrased that I can’t really see straight. I’m … I’m bending over backwards, is what I’m doing, to be helpful, to share my experience, to give out parts of my story and my past that are actually a little painful to expose, a little embarrassing.
And what I get in return, seems like to me, is being told that what I’m doing isn’t good enough for that person. That I don’t understand.
Well, fuck you! You’re right. Nobody can understand what you are going through unless you tell them clearly — and when we fall over ourselves to ask, it’s the same “oh they’re stupid small problems I don’t want to put my pain on you I don’t want people to feel the way I feel”. Very noble. Very pretty. Very selfless — not.
Not at all. Those words, that kind of phrasing, to people who are offering to help, to listen, to care, is the worst, most selfish bullshit I’ve ever heard or had come out of my own mouth. Who am I, who are you, to choose what other people can bear to listen to, can bear to carry for you or with you?
The hardest goddamn lesson I ever had to learn with respect to this fucking cancer I have is that there is a huge, universe-spanning difference between a) asking for help, b) being offered help, and c) whinging pitifully. From the inside it is almost impossible to tell the difference, and I finally finally managed to just make myself say ‘yes’ when someone asked me was something wrong, could they help.
I’m not trying to put people off, or say their problems are not important, or small, or whatever bullshit your chemically-addled brain wants to put on it, when I say GO SEE A PROFESSIONAL. When I say TRY A MEDICINE. Okay? That tag I put on these, it’s not a joke, it’s not me making a cutesy tag for my commentary on depression.
It is the literal truth, that I have tried to run away from for damn near twenty years, since I was FUCKING TEN YEARS OLD AND TRIED TO KILL MYSELF THE FIRST TIME.
I have had to accept that while the biggest part of my problem is not me in the sense of being a bad person, it is in fact me in the sense that my body does not work right. And the only way I can deal with the part of my depression that is old habits and low self-esteem and really stupid societal tapes IS TO TAKE THE MEDS THAT FIX THE CHEMICALS.
Because without that I’m trying to bail the ocean, and it will not ever work.
I’m actually, okay, I’m really genuinely upset about all this right now. I have to remind myself that a lot of people with depression don’t have my intellect, or they don’t have my resources, or they just don’t damn have my years and experience, and I fucking KNOW that sounds condescending, but I will by damn not ignore all the stuff I’ve built up fighting this cancer just to make someone else feel better about themselves. So I’m trying to offer this information, I’m trying to listen and to care and to respect and to share.
And I will not … I cannot continue to do so to someone who denigrates all that I have achieved in accepting myself and my disease and what that entails. I fought for years to find a drug that didn’t, what was it, turn me into a “ chemically-induced sunshine-and-daisies-everything-is-perfect Mary Sue, addicted to anti-depressants or, more likely, mood stabilizers, completely devoid of anything that even remotely resembles my true personality.”
And I flat refuse to be guilted, accidentally or otherwise, into taking back what I had to say in response to that, or any of the things I’m saying here, because someone is hurt by my anger. I worked damn hard to get to where I am, and I’m scared to death of backsliding even a little bit, and I hate like poison the things I have to keep doing in order not to backslide, and I am trying with all my heart to make it so that as many other people as I can reach, as are willing to talk to me or listen to me, will not have to go through some of what I went through.
And now it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, and the single biggest symptom I have not conquered is the fucking sleeping habits, so if you will all excuse me, I’m going to go curl up next to my fiance and try not to think about this any more.