My Mental Health Journey (so far)

My Mental Health Journey (so far)

(Originally posted June 4, 2023)

 

Content/Trigger Warning: The following blog post talks about my mental health journey where I talk about going to the hospital for suicidality and mental health treatment, mentions of physical and chemical restraints, self harm, rape and domestic violence (no descriptions). Descriptions of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and intensive (outpatient) mental health treatment. 

 Resources are listed at the bottom of this post 

 

My therapist gave me an assignment recently: write what you’re too afraid to say. 

I have often said that I must have been born with a pen where my mouth should be; I have always had this urge to write, and keep writing – especially when things get hard. I have also had a decidedly complicated relationship with the spoken word, never quite sure of myself or the words. Here, I can be sure, I can be authentically myself, I can trust myself and my words. That’s part of why I write; I crave that contentment that basking in my own self-trust brings. 

I started my first blog when I was first beginning to navigate life with a disability and chronic illnesses, shortly after my Ehlers Danlos Syndrome diagnosis (but years after the onset) at about sixteen years old. I had been writing throughout the whole ordeal and began sharing it more widely because I so craved not only the warmth of self-trust but community. I was so alone, in white sterile walls that smelled of rubbing alcohol and rubber gloves. Sharing my writing then, it wasn’t a cry for help, I was just crying out; I was crying out for anyone who would listen genuinely and offer gentle words in return. 

I’m so lucky that my cry was heard and returned tenfold. I met a group of people who not only changed my life but saved it for long enough for me to get steady on my own two unsteady legs and to accept that sometimes I need wheels and that’s okay! My blog’s motto at the time was “save yourself;” pretty sure I lived up to that one.

I stopped sharing my writing a long time ago. I stopped my old blog because it was under my deadname and because college was threatening to drown me already and because I didn’t think I had anything good enough to say and because I was depressed and so many other reasons. But those don’t really matter, because I kept writing – that’s what really matters. 

But lately, I’ve felt this pull, much like the one I felt at sixteen to share myself again. Maybe last time the pull came from the need for community; this time I think I am grasping for resiliency. I’ve learned a lot about resiliency lately and I’ve learned that it is not born in nor can survive in isolation, with only one voice speaking it into existence, one person writing it into existence. It is contained in multitudes, in communities and collectivity – we must only have the courage to reach in and reach out to find it. 

So I write to survive. I always have. I always will. It’s the only way I know how.

***

The first time I remember wanting to die was when I was six or seven years old, listening to the slamming of doors or objects on the walls on my barn-red childhood home, peering out my bedroom window at the Aspen trees; I wished I could be dead and buried under those trees. I imagined the roots growing around my bones like I knew they must have done around animals since my cousins and I used to find bones and roots all mixed up in that forest all the time. It must have seemed like the closest thing to a tender embrace I could get at the time. 

I don’t even know if I really knew what death was – I know I had never been to a funeral – but I imagine that being buried under a pile of dirt and trees felt more relieving than anything in this life. Something deep down inside of me, something I am afraid has always been in me and always will be in me told me that there was no escape in this lifetime – and my god, that thing is so fucking convincing. 

It wouldn’t be more than two years, not being able to dig and bury my way out of the hurt and darkness, that I would turn to self harm as an outlet. 

This feeling, of being cornered into death for escape, has never really left. I don’t know how or when my survival instinct was replaced with this darkness but something must have gone terribly wrong in the evolutionary line as survival has not always come natural to me. There have been many long stretches of my life almost solely characterized by wanting to die, to not exist. I have made attempts to make that wish come true and I’m still trying to let go of the guilt and shame around that fact. 

Now, I burn down my childhood home in search of myself. 

***

“Do you think you can keep yourself safe over the weekend?'' This became a routine parting question during therapy sessions in the last several months of 2022.

“Yes.” A tremor in my voice betrays me. I can see she sees and hears the deepest wellsprings of my soul, even if I can’t – because, the thing is, sometimes, you just lie to yourself about your feelings, too.  “I’m sorry, no, I can’t.” I admitted through quiet tears, “Why did this have to be my life? I want a different one or none at all. I have a plan.”  

During this time I was struggling immensely with my mental health, in particular with depression, PTSD, suicidality, and self harm. My sense of hopelessness was growing and my will to live shrinking. This became an ever tightening and eminently dark spiral pattern of (self) destruction that sent ripple effects that are still in motion today. If you saw me, you'd probably have thought I was okay, that’s because I was surviving the way I’d done for a very long time. 

To be frank: I’d been holding bags far too heavy to carry for far too long, alone. Sadness swam in me freely and clouded my every move, creating an extreme dissonance between who I needed and wanted to be to survive and who I was. I was helpless and destitute, riddled with daily flashbacks of my rapes in high school and transphobic violence at USD. I fell into the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced – all the while feeling like I was a massive burden to everyone around me and thus isolating and bottling up everything going on inside of me; anytime someone would ask how I was doing I would fold inside of myself before I said anything real, throwing excuses around like they’d matter. My main outlet and coping mechanism was self harm. I thought about suicide everyday since about mid November.

I was kind of expecting the appointment to end there or, at the most, we'd go over my safety plan. Instead, my therapist and I kept talking – me hysterically begging her not to call the police over and over again at first, her reassuring me that she would not be doing that, me not hearing her over the panic in my mind. Eventually, though, I was able to calm down and talk with her more rationally (well, as rational as someone can be when that hopeless). We talked more, and I told her my secrets that are not secrets anymore; about how rot had made a home in my body and I’ve been trying to cut it out with a pair of generational scissors. 

Eventually we came to the decision together that I needed to take myself to the hospital for my own safety. At this thought came instant panic. You see, I have attempted suicide a few times in my life and a couple of them have landed me in the hospital. The most recent attempt, in July of 2021 was the most traumatic, as I was restrained after having a flashback due to being touched by a nurse unexpectedly and then given haldol without consent. I still remember the guttural scream for help I let out as they were restraining me; I’ve never heard a sound like that come from me before and I’ve never heard anything like it since. I still have frequent nightmares about the whole ordeal and when my therapist brought up going to the hospital because I was feeling suicidal my mind instantly jumped to “oh my god they’re just going to restrain me.” I also have a whole host of other medical trauma that has nothing to do with mental health so that also did not help me feel safe and secure in the decision. 

Noticing this, and the imminent danger of not going, my therapist offered to go with me to the ER. I’m pretty sure I responded with something like “Wait, what? No. It’s Friday afternoon, you can’t do that.” I think what I was really thinking was what do you do with tenderness when all you expect is fury? She reassured me that she was able and willing to go with us and we chose a hospital to go to and made a plan. 

My partner was already on their way to pick me up since I was at work, so we’d have them come into the room I was in and tell them what was going on and then they would drive me to the hospital we agreed on where she’d be waiting for me. 

When we got there, my therapist was already waiting for us inside. We pulled up and I got out. I stood in front of the giant floor to ceiling windows of the waiting room; I saw my therapist first and a rush of relief fell over my sweaty body as I looked at my reflection in the glass – a sickly shade of green, yet still somehow ghostly white, like you could look right through me.

I honestly don’t remember all that much of the actual hospital stay. Most of what I remember is not getting the help that I needed. I was not placed under psych services because I was having complications with my feeding tube concurrently with my suicidality so they had to “medically clear” me before sending me to psych. I was then discharged with some referrals to outpatient services since most inpatient mental health facilities would not consider taking me on as a client due to the complexity of my medical needs. There’s a lot more to talk about there, but that’s a whole other post for another time. Long story short: it’s really, really difficult to find mental health treatment as a disabled and chronically ill person (and don’t even get me started on the chronic pain piece of it). I am grateful, despite it all, that I did go to the hospital though, because if I didn’t I am fairly sure I would not have been alive by morning. So if you’re ever if that spot, please, ask for help and know that there is a future version out there that is thankful that you did.

After trying a couple of different outpatient centers, I found a great program where I am currently in intensive mental health treatment for major depressive disorder, C-PTSD, anxiety and panic disorder, self harm, and suicidality and this is where I will remain for, I don’t know, a little while still to keep healing. I started in their Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) which means I went to treatment Monday-Friday from 9am-4pm; I am currently in their Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) 5 which means I go to treatment Monday-Friday from 9am-12pm; and my next dropdown is to their IOP 4 program which means I will go four days a week from 9am-12pm – I dropdown to IOP 4 tomorrow; after that there is IOP 3 which is three days a week from 9am - 12pm and then outpatient (OP) at three, two, and one days a week. 

There are still many days though that I lean my head against the oatmeal beige walls and can’t really believe that I’m here, in a mental health treatment center, day after day for most of my waking hours talking about my feelings in a barely lit room – because we’re depressed and insist on leaving the lights off and get only natural light from the windows. I’m also still trying to figure out exactly how I ended up here for myself and where I go.

***

Recovery from severe mental illness does not come with an instruction manual and intensive mental health treatment is in no way a vacation, despite often having to take time off of work and/or school, when able to, and you are not lazy for doing so. This is something I’ve had to remind myself of daily, and on the bad days, hourly. Going back to childhood, I’ve been one to give my time away just because I had it, how strong I was in ways I don’t have to be anymore. I hold so much responsibility that was and is not mine.

My earliest memory is being three years old and keeping myself awake for the winding twenty-six mile mountain-road ride home, head nodding the entire way, to remind my mom to stop at my Uncle Jack’s house. So finally, for perhaps the first time in my life, I am taking my time back. I am taking care of myself and it hasn’t been beautiful, it hasn’t been easy, it hasn’t been secure — it has been unkempt and heartbreaking and chaotic and confusing. Throughout it all, I’ve also had to end relationships that meant a lot to me because these people did not respect that my time and energy was no longer a disposable resource for them. I have had to explain that my going to treatment is not a “relaxing little reset” (actual words) but one of the hardest fucking things I’ve ever done or will ever do, I believe. So I’d just like to make it explicitly, abundantly clear that none of that shit will be tolerated here – time boundaries are just as important as any other boundaries. 

The first few weeks of treatment felt entirely foreign. The only similarity I can draw in my life previously was moving to a new town and feeling like I didn’t only switch zip codes but also universes for the first little bit – until I acclimated and it became the new normal and it was hard to imagine a different life. Mental health treatment was my new town. Those first few weeks, I tended to hole myself away in a corner during any free time, head down, both eyes still black from hitting myself during a panic attack in the hospital, trying to avoid the people that would soon become my friends.

I had no idea what I was doing and I wanted to quit every second of every day. I can definitively say that my time in PHP was one of the most challenging and laborious things I’ve ever done in my life. But it’s not because we’re all sitting around crying or trauma dumping all day – it’s because I realized that the totality of my knowledge was built on sand. I was rebuilding, relearning how to be a human in a way that I can tolerate. I was building a life worth living. It was a time that, for the entirety, I didn’t know if I was the most myself or the furthest from it, and most of the time I still don’t. I just know how to let those two truths live in harmony together now. 

[Image is a photo of Ezra holding the book Building a Life Worth Living, A Memoir By Marsh M. Linehan, the developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. The cover is bright red with a line drawing of a tree dropping leaves behind the title of the book.]

After the first few weeks, I was able to lift my head up. I have to give myself some of the credit for that because some of that was due to my own self advocacy. The center that I’m at has a twice weekly men’s and women’s group. If you know me, you know that as soon as I heard that I said “nope.” There was no way in hell  I was going to put myself in a gendered space in a mental health treatment center because I knew that that would significantly impact my mental health for the worse. So I told my therapist at the center that; and within my first week there, there was now a men’s, women’s, and gender non-conforming group. This group is the highlight of my week and holds a sacred space in my healing journey and I am forever grateful for the bonds I have formed through this group.  

This is what my apartment looked like until my mom came down from OC for my birthday to help us clean it and rearrange it because, even after dropping down from PHP to IOP and having my afternoons free, I had absolutely no energy or motivation to do anything. Then, the worse the mess got, the worse I felt about myself, and the less likely I was to do anything about it – the depression cycle is a bitch y’all. I’ve never felt as ashamed as having to ask my mom to come and help me clean my apartment as an adult, and I can’t say that I’m not afraid to share these photos – afraid of judgment, embarrassment, that it’s a mistake. But that’s also why I’m doing it, because I wish I knew that this is part of the depression cycle and it is okay to ask for help; it is not a personal failing to have a messy apartment and it is not a personal failing to need help getting it in order. My mom also had a great time doing it, so the fears I’d built up around asking that I was being burdensome were for naught so there’s also that. 

***

Right now, in IOP 5, I’m going to treatment every morning. There are different groups each day and I have two groups a day. It’s a lot of DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) and CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and processing. It’s also breath-work and art therapy and somatic therapy and sound bowls and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) and community meetings. Most days, to be quite honest, I don’t want to be there– and to be totally honest, most days, I still struggle to find much will or motivation to be here more generally, even now, after everything.

Some days are easier than others. The days preceded without sleep are always harder, but as are the ones preceded by nightmares, reliving the worst things that have ever happened to me. Some days I come into treatment ready to feel my feelings, having already identified them and knowing what I need to process, those are usually easier than the days that I feel numb. Other days I come in and I think I’m ready to feel my feelings and a therapist gets in there and digs in just the wrong spots and I want to run or fight or freeze or fawn but all I can do is fucking talk about it. Those are usually harder days. Then there are the hardest days, the days where I’m already stuck in my own head when I come in and can’t get out of it to ever come into the room. These are high trigger risk days. The worst days, though, are when I don’t go.

So, I have found that, despite everything, I must stay anyway, and I can stay anyway. 

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