This morning is one of those mornings where I’m allowing myself to wake up slowly. Out of habit, I woke up around 7:30, my coffee already brewed for me. I went downstairs to get a cup for myself and instead of staying down there I crawled back into my bed. I decided that this morning I wasn’t going to do too much of anything. I suppose I’m considering this a kind of self care weekend. Yesterday, instead of lying on the couch all day after the gym and taking my son to his art lesson, I cleaned. I made jewelry. I went upstairs and read my book. I woke up feeling refreshed, but still needing to relax. And that was ok. I used to be a big proponent of routines, and it used to be difficult for me to break them. I’m slowly starting to become more flexible with myself. I don’t consider it a failure if I need to relax on a Sunday morning.
I was scrolling through Tik Tok, this is the only social media app I go on now. I don’t even have Facebook or Instagram on my phone anymore. I stopped scrolling when I came to a girl talking about her psychotic episode. My FYP is filled with thrifting and books, but it’s also filled with healing and information about mental illness. I did spend two weeks in a psych ward at the end of 2020 after all. She said some people have drug induced psychosis, some have stress induced psychosis, etc. And I stopped right there. That was never explained to me before, but that resonated with me deeply. Before what I like to call my mental breakdown, which was really a psychotic break, I had not only a lifetime of unhealed trauma but stressor after stressor in the 10 months leading up to it. My mom constantly pushing her QAnon agenda, literally telling me people were going to come back from the dead with conviction, obviously COVID happened. I had just moved to my sales manager role 6 months before COVID hit and I had to transition my team to WFH. I still barely knew how to do the role myself. It was incredibly stressful. My son was home from school all of a sudden and was depressed. I obviously had no support or help with that. A “friend” called me one day and begged me to move in for a few weeks, his boyfriend has just beat him up. Of course I didn’t know what to say except yes. My oldest “friends” mother suddenly passed away. I was there to pick her up at the airport, sat outside the hospital as she said her goodbyes. She stayed with me, I accompanied her through everything. And then the election of 2020 was happening in the background. I remember during the time of the funeral, I was making apple crisp for my “oldest friends” family, and I was peeling the apples in the kitchen feeling almost detached from my body. It was an exhaustion I had never felt before. Around this time I had also started to find some solice in making jewelry and listening to music. And then my mind started bringing me to a different world. Just a few weeks after the apple peeling incident. I of course couldn’t see the correlation. There was no one around me that was concerned enough about me to intervene. I stopped being able to work. I started getting migraines every single day. I believed wholeheartedly that a dead celebrity was coming to save me. I descended into madness, into my own made up fairy tale, away from the stress of my reality. It was beautiful. It was frightening.
Of course when I realized I was locked up in a psych ward and was away from my son I was furious. They wouldn’t let me out until I played along with whatever medication they gave me and diagnosis they told me I had. At first I refused all the heavy medication, but I soon realized if I wanted to leave I had to comply. So I did. It taught me another level of resilience. It taught me how to bite my tongue through agony. How to cry in my room silently and show progress in the Cafe so they’d let me leave. They told me I had Bipolar I even though I’d never shown any symptoms of this before and I was 33 years old. I left and continued the medication for 6 months. The whole time wanting to end my life. Stopping the medication they gave me was the only thing that gave me relief from those thoughts.
So today, when I heard that a stress induced psychotic break was a thing, it made complete sense to me. The past few years I’ve had to heal my past from childhood to now, cut off toxic relationships including my own mother, and that year I think my brain and my body had just had enough. Honestly, my brain was likely just protecting me at that point. Yes, I still have anxiety and depression. Maybe I have some other things too, who knows? But the thing I know is the medications they forced me to take in order to leave the hospital were part of the problem. I also know that no one really tried to talk to me to understand what brought me there. To them I was a number. A checkmark on their list of things to do.
I don’t say that spitefully, I don’t blame them. The ratio of patients to workers doesn’t make any sense. They have their hands full. They likely don’t get paid enough. The thing is understanding what happened to me is in my hands. There was a time when I desperately wanted a doctor to give me validation. I no longer need that. I know what happened. I was carrying too much, I found my breaking point, and I snapped. The good news is my brain took me to a fairytale and not a dark place. For some reason that comforts me. I suppose the point is, this could’ve happened to anyone in my shoes. If I look at the circumstances I’m lucky it happened when it did and not sooner. The knowledge that this was induced by stress also reminds me that it’s so important to rest. To take breaks. To not be so hard on myself. Look what happened when I gave everything I had. The saddest thing of all, once I left the hospital I’ve been alone ever since. Those “friends” rarely, if ever, check in. When they do, it’s updates on what’s going on with them. I was killing myself for people who couldn’t care less how I am. I learned an incredibly valuable lesson, in one of the hardest possible ways. Always put yourself first. And it’s ok to have a lazy Sunday.
The Girl Without A Face 