Anxiety, Depression & Me
Anxiety and depression.
Isn’t it funny how two words that shouldn’t fit are so constantly intertwined? I mean, you think about the two of them like they are completely different concepts.
Anxiety is that feeling of crazy adrenaline running through your blood like a racehorse. It makes your heart pound, your body sweat, and your head feel weak. You want to laugh and scream and cry and make it all just all stop. You try to breathe but are suffocating so deep in your mind that it feels like a maze that has no exit, and you barely remember an entrance. It keeps you up at night while you try to slow your heart down to a normal rate, which makes it all even worse because how can you live on so little sleep?
Depression, however, is that feeling of sluggish despair. It hurts to move, to get up, to do anything outside of wallowing in your own misery. Everything seems like it’s in slow motion, like time moves at a snail’s pace. Your blood and heart rate feel like sludge, like you’re wading in the thickest tar. A tear is constantly brushed away, a sob muffled, and a broken heart reduced to a shaky breath that never steadies. It’s a bottomless pit. It feels like it never ends, and it just pulls you deeper into agony and bone-chilling despair.
The major similarity of the two is that they both feel inescapable. You feel constantly attacked by your own mind, running in circles around an unattainable goal of sanity and clarity. It’s a rabbit hole, and you are dumb little Alice that went chasing after what is most assuredly a figment of your own imagination. You want to go home but can’t. You’re haunted by visions of things that don’t seem real, like talking cats and painted roses. Sometimes you can never tell what is real - what hearth and home feel like.
You have others that say it gets better, and you just want to smack them. Do they even understand how you feel? Your own mind and heart are constantly at war with each other and themselves. You feel stretched like taffy but twisted like knots. The jumbled feeling in your stomach and throat never completely goes away. You can push it away for a moment but it never really leaves you alone, kind of like a permanent aftertaste to a foul drink or horrid dinner.
Anxiety and depression fit together like a jagged puzzle. They don’t fit, but our own psyche forces them to. They mess with your head and heart, and you constantly feel like you and everyone else are stepping on eggshells around you. You barely understand the triggers except for when they come, and you feel like drowning.
Medications somewhat make it better - or at least manageable. Doctors try to help with their calm smiles and ever-present sympathy. They are supposed to understand, but do they really?
They say it gets better, but are they ever really sure? How can you know if it’s for real?
You don’t know.
You don’t.
You can’t.
Ever.