Where Have My Days Gone?

More and more so recently it feels like my days are escaping me and I’m simply sliding from one to the next.

For the past two weeks, I have been in constant go mode as my life has been split between going to daily group counseling, keeping up with friends and writing with the little time I have left over.

My usual regimen of exercise, yoga and meditation has fallen to the wayside and even my diet has started to slack as cold pizza slowly replaces my midday salad.

Finding time to properly take care of yourself, while doing all the things you want to do, can be a challenge.

However, this is no admission of defeat but rather a time to prioritize.

Because there are certain parts of my day, such as the time I spend at group counseling, that I can’t change, I’ve decided instead to take full advantage of the “gap times” in my day.

I’ve begun to carry both my pocket notebook and a book with me. That way, if there is a down moment, I can channel my thoughts for later in my journal or pick up a quick read.

Furthermore, I’ve carved in a 10 minute meditation session into my mornings by waking up just a few minutes earlier. I’ve also managed to get in a half an hour yoga session right before the van comes to get me; leaving me just tired enough to take a light nap on the drive over.

Finally, I’ve found time to squeeze in my exercise at the end of the day as a way of reflection and release.

Despite the challenges to make time for myself, I’ve found that no matter how hectic life becomes, I can always find time to do the things that I’m passionate about with a little ingenuity and careful scheduling.

And while this may not be how I want to spend my days, it is the way that makes everything work.

And that works for me.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

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Let me know about your struggle with finding time for yourself in the comments below.

My Grades

Prior to this year, I was a bionic kid on an unstoppable path towards achievement and improvement.

I was active in multiple parts of my community and I never stopped working harder at being better at each thing I did. I was always caught up in doing something and serving others where I could.

Throughout my formative years my parents had always stressed the importance of working hard and having and education. And because of that what mattered to me more than anything were my grades.

My grades were my life.

My grades were something that I had control over: If I studied hard for a test I could always come home at the end of the day and watch the direct result of my hard work.

My grades were also something that I was able to bury myself in during troubling times. No matter what was going on in the world around me, I could always choose to focus on schoolwork and my grades to escape the chaos.

My grades validated me. They reminded me that I was worth something because my number was higher than someone else. They told me I had achieved something, even when those closest to me didn’t notice.

My grades were a huge part of who I was.

However, at the start of this year, everything changed.

Going through my first depression made it seem like everything was caving in.

Suddenly my grades didn’t matter, and the homework I had seemed insignificant against the monster that I felt was within me.

I began to slack on my schoolwork, doing it in class instead of at home, and even began missing large chunks of school.

My loss of interest in schoolwork became so bad that even going to school became a challenge and I would often spend my time by counting the time until I left.

Losing my interest in school was one of the most difficult things for me to deal with as I no longer identified with this version of myself that I thought I was.

And worse yet, losing my interest in school only worsened the feeling that I was losing myself entirely during my depression.

But, I found out along the journey, that it’s okay to lose yourself sometimes, because you come to learn that you were never lost at all.

Through losing my grades I saw the amount of value that I put into a number of external factors instead of placing it on myself.

My depression taught me that I put my value and self-worth in internal things.

By forcing myself to learn that my self-worth is not attached to some number, but to myself and my being instead, I have become evermore aware of placing my self-worth on my self rather than on someone else’s judgement of me.

No matter what things you hold dear to you, look at yourself and make certain that you self-worth is where it should be; within yourself.

Don’t let some external cause, like a grade or even a title, decide how you find worth in yourself.

You are worth it because you are you.

And all is well that ends well, I guess, because my grades just came out and I did pretty damn well.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

Ghost

Head held low,

footsteps too slow.

Creeping around without a sound,

a ghost in a body is not a noun.

Don’t call for me,

don’t look at me.

I’m like the wind,

here one second and gone the next.

At the end of the day I sleep on nothingness,

my mind drifting away to the sound of emptiness.

Losing Yourself

There was a point, just a short while ago, where I thought I had life figured out and the world at my fingertips

I knew what I wanted, how I wanted to get there, when I wanted to get there and above all else I knew myself.

I knew myself. I knew what hobbies I had and what things would make me tick. I knew when I got up in the morning and just how I liked my tea. I knew everything there ever was to know about me; or so I thought.

Being hit with the pile of bricks that is mental illness threw me off my center in ways that I couldn’t have ever even imagined.

The confident straight A student who could handle almost any problem was now a kid with a floundering attendance and slowly degrading self-confidence.

And losing myself in a time of personal struggle, a time when I already needed myself most, felt like being stranded in the middle of an endless ocean, with no shore in sight, no safety raft, and a storm brewing.

It felt as if the whole world was going to swallow me whole.

The Downwards Slide

The problem with mental illness and your sense of self is the fact that mental illnesses take away the one thing in life that your always supposed to have control over: yourself.

Suddenly, some piece of your mind that you don’t control is dictating how you live regularly. The person you once though you were isn’t anymore because you no longer  believe in your own ability to rule yourself.

From there, the rest is just a downwards slide. You lose trust in yourself and stop even feeling like yourself. You look in the mirror and the person looking back isn’t you but some haphazardly skeleton.

Losing your sense of self is such a sudden and unexpected way is traumatizing; especially as your left to fall endlessly into an abyss of uncertainty.

It’s a Daily Struggle

When you lose who you are, getting up in front of the world and pretending to be someone else is a daunting task; one that can make you just want to curl up in bed and hide from life for the day.

When you don’t know who you are, every movement of your body feels foreign and even your thoughts feel doctored.

When you don’t know who you are, every conversation you have with your friends feels forced and each laugh a betrayal. Connection is not only difficult, it’s impossible.

Everything feels distanced when you feel distanced from yourself.

The Path to Rediscovery

There is no perfect solution for trying to fix the lack of self you feel. And no matter how desperately you want to fight your way back to your old self, sometimes I’ve found it’s better just to rediscover yourself in a new way.

Stop fighting for perfection in yourself and stop fighting to be a past version of yourself. Accept what has happened and look to find a new you; one which you can nourish and grow into your own.

The road to rediscovery is a long and hard journey, but all of our journeys in life began with baby steps and end in leaps and bounds.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

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Tell me about your experiences with losing and rediscovering yourself in the comments below.

No Cares

Blank stares,

no cares.

Paper hearts,

with water fears.

Disintegrate into anxiety,

the rhythm of life beats me.

Put on a smile and walk for a while,

pretend that this is all worthwhile.

A Pile of Bricks

When depression hit me earlier this year, it hit me like a pile of bricks flying towards me at the speed of light. Needless to say, I didn’t see it coming and I definitely did not expect it to hit me as hard as it did.

When it comes to mental health, many people are under the assumption that the symptoms can be felt creeping up on you until they eventually overtake you and, so long as you catch the symptoms before they catch you, you’ll generally be fine.

However, the harsh reality is that most mental diseases hits you hard, fast, and without any warning at all. And, sometimes just as painfully, they can leave without any warning as well.

You see, mental illnesses don’t play by any set of rules. They don’t follow your schedule and come at convenient times – in fact, most times they come when it’s least convenient – and they don’t care if they ruin your life in the process.

In that respect, mental illnesses are like heart attacks; where they suddenly creep up, take total control over your body, and land you in the hospital for the next week.

Mental illness becomes an everyday battle just as much as a physical illness. While a dislocated knee will keep you from walking around your house all day, a severe depression will do just the same; crippling the joints of your mind rather than your body.

Furthermore, many people assume that mental illness becomes easier to deal with after the first impact; that somehow being socked in the face repeatedly by a brick hurts any less the hundredth time around.

Well frankly, it doesn’t.

The feeling of your mental illness dragging you down never becomes any less uncomfortable. The only thing that changes is your reaction to the illness, which allows you to better cope with mental illness.

Finally, one of the biggest misconceptions about mental illness is that the mentally ill person has control over their mind and therefore can control their illness.

This is simply false.

While I might be in control of my mind, I am in no more control over a mental illness than I would be over a broken leg. The only thing I have control over is my reaction to the disease. And even though I am more than my mental illness, I would be a fool to say that I have any true control over it.

In fact, most therapy practices focus on coping with mental illness rather than beating it. That’s because, unlike a physical disease, most mental illnesses can’t be beat. They linger in your mind until one day they don’t or they stick with you throughout your life and you must learn to cope; to live semi-symbiotically with some monster in your head.

And that’s the harsh reality of mental illness. I can never defeat the brick that’s eternally flying at my face. Yes, medications and therapy and coping skills can help me meet that brick less often, or less intensely, but the reality of it is that all I can do is accept the impact and learn to cope with the fallout each time.

And that’s why, even when people who suffer from mental illness have fulfilling and seemingly happy lives, many people with mental illness don’t make it to the ends of their lives as they should.

There is nothing glamorous about coping with a brick in your face, and after years of constant pounding it can become difficult to keep your head up any longer.

It’s why people with mental illness attempt to quit life, and attempt to quit life often.

But, if you are suffering from mental illness, you must find the strength and bravery to realize that the brick flying at you is only one piece of life; a piece that is skewing your vision and making itself seem bigger than it actually is.

The brick is a trap. It wants you to focus, to use your energy on it and you simply can’t let that happen. Accept the presence of the brick, and chip away at it with therapy and medicines and coping skills, and use all the rest of your energy to focus on life and making the brick seem insignificant against the beauty which you can create with your energy.

Mental illness can feel undeniably hopeless, but that doesn’t mean that hopelessness has to translate into the rest of your life. By recognizing that your life is more than an illness, you can realize that not all of life is hopelessness. Sure, some moments may seem without hope, but that there is life outside of your illness is hope in and of itself. Latch onto that hope and never let it go.

There may be no defeating the brick, at least not yet, but that doesn’t mean you have to let the brick defeat you.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

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Let me know about how you deal with the feelings of hopelessness that mental illness can cause in the comments below.

Just Do It

Today I feel simply and wholly uninspired. I have no desire to write, and no focus to concentrate on any ideas. I feel completely beat and generally drained. Not doing anything has never sounded like a better option to me, quitting even sounds nice.

But I’m not going to do that.

I’m not going to sit here and be held captive by my feelings or emotions or moods even. Those things are just pieces of me; pieces that don’t control me.

At the end of the day, the one thing controlling whether I accomplish something or not is myself. Sure, the other factors such as my mood may help or hinder the process, but it all comes down to whether I choose to mentally challenge myself to put in effort.

Well, challenge accepted mind.

The days where you’re feeling wholly uninspired and devoid of any creative gusto are the days when you need to push yourself the hardest to prove to yourself that you are capable.

You may not, at that moment, be capable of the best work known to man but no matter how bad the circumstances become, you are always capable of doing it.

No matter what that seemingly impossible challenge you face is, understand that you can tackle it because you are the one who holds the power: not your emotions, not your feelings, and not even your mind but you.

Take control of yourself and just do it, whatever it is, and realize that you are stronger than whatever you are going through.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

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Let me know in the comments below about a time when you had to persevere and just do it despite all odds being against you.

Feeling Empty

Sometimes I feel extremely, and other times I feel nothing at all.

One of the most difficult emotions for me to personally deal with has been the feeling of emptiness. While many wouldn’t consider emptiness an emotion, I would; and a powerful one at that.

You see, emptiness doesn’t just suck the charge out of all the other emotions but it makes you long to feel emotion in and of itself. Emptiness plays a twisted game with your head where, no matter how hard you try, everything comes across as being bland and all you want is to cry, or laugh, or to experience any other emotion because at times the lack of feeling from emptiness is simply suffocating.

Emptiness is a complex emotion because it comes with this weird pensive sadness combined with the inability to release. This fragile state can make me super reflective but can also make it easy for me to shut myself out.

Emptiness is so dangerous because emptiness is the emotion of non-emotion and if you already suck at controlling normal emotions, controlling a lack of emotions can really throw you off.

Emptiness digs itself into your soul and each time you go into find it, it digs itself a little deeper. The more empty I feel, the more emptiness I feel as well; and the cycle continues.

Battling emptiness is a challenge and one that I’m honestly not well equipped for. It is difficult to go from the highs of a manic state, or the lows of a depression, and then be thrown straight into a purgatory of feeling nothing while your soul wanders around in limbo.

Compared to the sorrow of depression, or the instability of mania, some might assume that emptiness is a nice break from the crazy emotions I face daily. But in reality, emptiness is one of the most difficult times for me, sometimes worse than periods of depression, because everything simply feels without purpose.

But, like all things in life, emptiness will pass if nothing else.

I may not be able to beat emptiness yet, because throwing myself into work or exercise has no impact on emptiness, but I know that I can at least survive it each and every time.

And sometimes surviving is just enough.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

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Let me know in the comments below about a your experiences of dealing with emptiness and how you got yourself through it.

Finding New In The Normal

One of the reasons that the world is so difficult to experience for a depressed person is that depression sucks the novelty and joy out of everything in life. Things that once could get your blood beating faster now have zero effect on you. Everything becomes one bland collection of things.

This inability to experience the novelty of life is just one of the many reasons that depression can’t be beat simply by being happier. Beating depression takes active participation, and to do it you have to learn, again, how to find excitement in the mundane of the day-to-day.

There are many ways that people have rediscovered their own interest in life, but below are a couple of ways which I found are particularly helpful.

Starting a New Activity

If there ever was one, now is the time to pick up that activity that you’ve been “doing” but have really just been procrastinating on for months now. Dive in for it head-first and never look back. Find yourself in a new activity and allow for a new passion to be born within you.

By taking time for yourself and your craft, you create an environment of creativity, wonderment and general excitement in your head space. This positive head space is bound to pour over into the real world as you begin to see the fruits of your labors.

Not only can starting a new activity and finding a new passion help you rediscover the world, but they can help you rediscover yourself in the process.

Being With Others

The power of being with other people is wholly underestimated. By being with others who naturally find the new in the novel, you can relearn how to experience yourself.

Furthermore, being with others takes your cares off your back for a moment and allows for you to just be. When you surround yourself with the right people, and choose to hold them tight, you’ll find that the world can look a lot different from the view from your pillow.

Use the people in your life as supports and allow them to show you how beautiful life is.

Getting Out of the House

Whether it be with other people or not, there might be no other better way to rediscover the beauty of life than by discovering the world itself.

Go on adventures, take long walks during sunset and never be afraid to venture out into the woods during the sunrise! Simply explore the world and all the little beauties it has to offer and you’ll begin to see those small beauties all around you in the day-to-day of life.

Getting out of your house and back into the world is without a doubt one the easiest and most effective ways of letting life captivate you again.

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At the end of the day, what matters the most is your own openness for experience. Always remember that you are a person, not simply a depression, and you can control where your depression takes you by choosing to be positive and experience. Open yourself to something new, and experience will coming rushing back to you.

With Love,

Manic Inclinations

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Let me know in the comments below your strategies to find the new in novel things.

How To Get Out Of A Rut

Being stuck in a rut is one of the most difficult parts of life for any person to deal with. You so desperately want to come out of that rut, to create and feel again, but something just keeps holding you back.

Going into a rut for a depressive person is even worse, because that rut can turn into habit. Eventually, this repeated “rut” becomes a full on depression that often is impossible to climb out of on one’s own.

No matter the circumstances, ruts rob you of your ability to function and your ability to experience life as it was intended.

If life itself had an enemy, it would have to be ruts.

Why We Get Into Ruts

For the most part, we get into ruts for no reason other than believing in our own false mentalities.

When it comes to being in a rut, there isn’t anything actually there blocking your creativity. The only thing blocking your creativity or ability to experience is your mental state, which is telling you not to feel or experience.

Ruts are entirely self-create and acted upon by ourselves. While things are going wrong in everyone’s life at any particular time, the rut you feel comes from focusing on that negative energy around you instead of looking towards the positive.

Anyone can fall into a rut, but anyone can also free themselves from one.

Ways To Get Yourself Out Of a Rut

Positive Internal Dialogue

Because the cause of ruts is a running, negative, internal dialogue, the best way to combat them is with a positive internal dialogue, even when telling yourself positive things seems may seem like a cruel joke.

There are a few simple things you can do to create a positive internal dialogue:

• Tell yourself three things your happy about each morning
• Write down five true, positive, facts about yourself each day and carry that paper around in your back pocket
• Practice acceptance of your faults and emphasis of your positives

Passion

Passion is what drives people in life. It’s what makes billions of people all across the world spring into action for various reasons and what, to a large extent, makes life worthwhile. The secret that’s been right in front of you is that you can climb yourself out of a rut with pure passion. Passion is the cornerstone of action.

If you want to get yourself moving and acting again, you need to rekindle or rediscover a passion in your life. Take up yoga, or hip-hop dance classes, or baking if it’s a passion you have that will get you moving and interacting again. Passion is the secret to loving life and getting out of ruts.

Sharing

Sharing with others is not only one of the greatest fuels for passion, but its a way to get out of a rut in and of itself.

Sharing allows us to reconnect with the world again, which can feel especially distant during any rut. It reminds you that there are people out there rooting for you, which gives you validation and a reason to at least root for yourself.

Being the social creatures that we are, sharing with others allows us to satisfy ourselves socially and sometimes that is just enough to get you out of a rut and living again.

Experience

The best way to do anything in life is to simply experience it. Ruts suck, but even during the deepest of ruts, life offers millions of other things to experience besides the rut itself; you only have to choose to go and experience them.

If you walk outside your door, which is a challenge in the deepest ruts, and allow yourself to simply experience the outside world again, you are bound to find a reason to come out of your rut and rejoin the outside world in experiencing.

Experiencing life is one surefire way to ignite passion and defeat ruts.

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Realigning yourself with passion, sharing and experience is bound to free you from your rut and create a positive mental environment for you to grow in. Let me know about a rut you went through and how you go through it in the comments below.

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With Love,

Manic Inclinations