Feel All The Feels

Dearest Night Owls,

Right now, at this very moment, I am alive. I am taking every moment, as it comes, with a deep breath and a mantra that it's okay to not be okay. It is okay to not be okay, and it's so important to stay true to yourself and your current feelings. I am thankful to be alive, but I am hurting deep down to my soul. It's not a physical pain, but a very real emotional and psychological pain.

This is one facet of what it is to have and live with a persistent mental health issue. It's a unpredictable, very inconvenient, very uncomfortable side of myself for which I cannot escape. I have tried, oh God, how I have tried. After years of fighting and denying with this part of myself, I am done fighting the truth. My mental health diagnoses are here to stay, and that truth is nothing to ashamed of at all.

Yeah, having major depression coupled with a generalized anxiety disorder is incredibly exhausting at the best of times. Like today, for instance, I was crying for the majority of my car ride home from work. Did I want to cry? Um, no, I did not. Did something horrible and traumatic occur while I was actually at work? No. My first night back at work was pretty standard. I enjoyed my night at work, for the most part. I had issues with completing some documentation, but that had to do with the flaws in the software of the Electronic Health Record system that we use for billing and documentation. Other than that, the night was pretty smooth and uneventful.

The truth is, I was triggered by an Instagram post. The who and what is irrelevant, well, maybe. The who is a "celebrity", and I use this term very loosely because this person's claim to fame is utterly ridiculous. The image that struck deep within my core, was a cake. Yeah, a cake. Can you believe that? Tonight, a stupid image of a birthday cake shattered me into a million little pieces. My sudden turn into a deep-seeded day of depression has nothing to do with a stupid cake, but what that cake represented. A life that I am envious of because this person is living what appears to be the life that I-so-desperately want to live.

Now, anyone worth their weight in salt in the field of psychology would tell you that you're dooming yourself as soon as you compare your own life to that of another. It's true. However, it's definitely easier said than done, yes?

Yeah, it's hard! It's really freaking hard not to do when you're in a place where you are so unhappy with your own life that observing a grand life makes you want to hate everything about your own. How do you escape this pitfall? I am still trying to figure this one out, so bare with me. If anyone else knows the answer to this one, please share your thoughts and resources with me.

I am dissatisfied with my life, only because I imagined having a life so much differently than the one that I have no. Looking at my life, as an outsider, you might think that I have a grand life. I have an amazing job that I love, a beautiful home, cats that I would die for, and a somewhat supportive spouse. Why, ON EARTH, should I be so unhappy about my life?!? I have SO MUCH, compared to others (here I go again). What do I have to be so unhappy about?

See, welcome to my world between myself and my mental health. It is way more complex than this, of course, but you get a little glimpse of what it's like to do battle with oneself. I am so incredibly thankful, every damn day, that I have everything that I have. Unfortunately, I feel like there is still so much missing from my life to feel complete. I don't feel complete at all. Perhaps, even if I traded lives with this so-called "celebrity", I may still feel the same incomplete feeling that I do right now. What I do know, for certain, is that I crave more passion in my life. I feel like my life is definitely lacking passion, and I crave passion like an asthmatic person craves air. Does that make sense? I guess I need to do a great deal of soul-searching to find what I feel is missing. What ever that ends up being...I feel like I should know it when I see it because my heart and mind will tell me.

For now, just know that anyone out there who experiences mental health challenges are not alone in this fight. I know that I am not alone in this fight, and that feeling of kinship keeps me going from moment to moment.