Sobering Up from Toxic Feelings

When I was 19 years old, I started exhibiting severe mental health issues that I completely ignored.

I remember the exact moment they went from mild to severe too- not a pretty minute for me. I had built up anxiety, depression, un-faced conflicts, confused feelings, and denial of the situation I was in until one day I woke up covered in sweat and tears, with a fever and immediate symptoms of projectile vomiting and body aches. Naturally, I thought I had the flu...

Let me give you some back story first. I had always been a "weird" kind of kid. I preferred to stay at home playing video games or watching movies instead of hanging out with friends. I had unexplained stomach issues my entire life, vomiting in the mornings before a big test in school or getting sick when I was at sleepovers at my friend's houses. I started pulling my hair out around the age of 10 and continued to pull it out, on and off, for years. I had also harmed myself, in more ways than one, every time I faced a failure- specifically in schools- including behaviors such as cutting myself with my mom's kitchen knives or banging my head up against a wall and crying occasionally when I got home from school. My mom, who does not believe that mental health is a real-life concept, would pass these behaviors off as "growing pains" and "hormones." She would call me "overdramatic" and ask me questions such as, "Why are you hurting yourself? Why are you pulling your hair out? Why are you anxious? Why are you depressed? You have nothing to be depressed about. Just stop crying."

Just stop crying. The words that manifested my entire livelihood of adolescence. What a time to be alive, right?

Although I say these things about my mother now, I also want to clarify that at the time, she had no idea what kind of thoughts were occurring in my head. She also had an upbringing of a very similar approach to mental health conditions, and had never received any type of education on how to deal with someone- nevertheless her own child- undergoing a mental health crisis, so my amazing mother is not to blame for anything.

Fast forward to about 8 years later, and years of these symptoms getting worse on and off, I am just now entering college and excited to be my own person and move out of home into a new city. The amount of understatement that mental illness and mental health conditions occurring in college students is so extreme that to this day, even after all of the national and even GLOBAL efforts to raise mental health awareness, it still makes my eye twitch. That first year of college was extremely difficult for me, not only because I was away from family, friends, and rebuilding my identity, but because I had a pre-existing condition that hadn't even been treated yet.

After my first year, I began to feel more situated and comfortable in my surroundings, and my attitudes started to turn more positive. That was, until February 14th of 2018. My roommates and I at the time were throwing a big Valentine's Day Party at my apartment and it was a day to be looked forward to. We were going to bake and decorate treats, decorate our entire apartment, put together goody bags, drink fancy pink drinks, have all of our friends over- it was supposed to be fun. That morning, along with waking up with the sweat, tears, vomiting, and fever, I had an impending sense of doom and anxiety that I had never felt before. My roommates urged me to go to the doctor, but I was also uncontrollably crying every time anyone spoke to me, which made my friends frightened and uncomfortable. I ended up spending the day locked away in my room in the dark and avoiding all social contact until the fear and pain left my mind, and I was not crying anymore.

And the craziest thing is, the following day, I felt fine! I was back to my happy-go-lucky self, smiling and doing homework and wanting to go out to dinner with my friends. Naturally, I told myself that my "day of doom" was just a 24 hour bug, or the beginning of my period, or "just an off day."

After this experience, I was fine for a few weeks. Then I started feeling depressed again, but this time slowly and progressively. I would start to feel annoyed if someone asked me to hangout. I started feeling resentment towards anything that took time or energy, such as taking care of my dog or my boyfriend wanting to go on a date. I would cancel on friends just minutes before I was supposed to meet up with them for dinner or to hangout, and I would prefer to stay home for the weekend in bed watching television rather than go home and visit my family for birthdays or holidays. Around August of 2018, my roommate had moved on with her life and I had moved into my own apartment, which I thought would help the situation and make me feel more at ease given my previous living situation of people constantly coming in and out of our apartment at any given time.

Living alone did. not. help. Lol. Word of advice to anyone going through serious mental health issues or trauma- do not isolate yourself. It will manifest your depression drastically and quickly.

At first, I started having lucid nightmares of people coming to kill me in my sleep because I was scared of being alone. I would come home to a barking dog that I had to take outside on walks, when I did even want to face the sunlight. Every day it became harder and harder to pull myself out of bed and get to work on time, and most days I would be so tired and worn down after work that I would just go home and skip my classes. I started calling out of work more and more, and screaming at my dog to shut up when I saw her at my front door. The lucid nightmares became more realistic, and many nights I would falling asleep begging a higher power to make the nightmares real so that I could just die in my sleep that night. It got to the point where I took my dog back home to live with my mom because I couldn't stand taking care of her, and told my family I was "just too stressed to deal with an animal right now." I started ignoring people's calls to check up on me, and isolating all my time to being either alone or with my boyfriend. I even quit dancing, which should have been the greatest red flag at the time, because dancing was my favorite thing to do in the universe at the time (and still is).

I stopped taking multivitamins, buying groceries, cleaning my bathroom, wearing makeup, dressing professionally for work, and at one point wouldn't shower for a few days at a time- I completely stopped taking care of myself and was so miserable that I would engage in behaviors that I would never even dream of doing at this point in my life. I would hang out with boys who were terrible influences, offering me alcohol and drugs, and wanting to sleep with me even though I had a boyfriend. I would walk around homeless populations late at night just in hopes that one of them would attack me or hurt me, just to feel something, anything. Finally, I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to move in together once January of 2019 came, which he was surprisingly receptive to. But before that happened, in November of 2018, I turned 21 and quickly came to the realization that alcohol was a great way to escape feeling sad or lonely.

Once my boyfriend and I were living together, things were better for a while. I would find myself happy to see him at the end of every day, and on the weekends we would find fun things to do like cook together or clean our apartment together. I started hanging out with him and his friends, but realized that their lifestyles were very different from what I was used to- they drank. Constantly. Like, nonstop. Like, would get together at 12 in the afternoon, immediately start drinking, eat some food while drinking, play drinking games, and then go out to bars. And this was a regular weekend thing.

To fit in, naturally, I drank a lot with them. I got used to ordering drinks at restaurants, following suit in my boyfriend's daily routine of cracking open a White Claw and sitting on the couch to watch television after a long day of work, having mimosas at Sunday brunch, and going out to multiple bars, having multiple drinks at each one during the weekend days. I thought this was normal behavior. I thought this was appropriate. I thought, "They're all doing it, so I guess it's fine if I do." Given my extensive medical history as well as size (5'2", 105 lbs), paired with a severe mental illness still building up with no treatment, it definitely was not fine if I did.

After a few months of living together, things started getting rocky with my boyfriend. The person I relied on for everything, who I told everything to, who I trusted and loved more than I would ever love anyone, became distant and less caring with each day that passed. He didn't do anything wrong, I could just tell that he was slowly pulling away, and I was becoming more and more depressed. I was forcing myself to vomit just to feel something other than the usual deadness inside of my body. I was practicing those risky behaviors to larger degrees because I just wanted my brain and body to feel some sort of movement other than depression. I was drinking a bottle of wine a day just to cope with thoughts that ran through my head without failure- he's going to break up with you; you aren't going to graduate; you're gaining weight and fat; your friends hate you; all your friends think you're a failure; mom and dad are disappointed in you; you don't fit in with your family; you don't fit in with society.

There were multiple times that my boyfriend and friends reached out, telling me that they felt I needed to take better care of myself. My boss at work reached out, asking if I needed any help. My siblings and parents expressed concern, telling me not to drink anymore. My dad even scheduled an appointment with a counselor for me. THE PEOPLE AROUND ME SAW THAT SOMETHING WAS GOING ON AND TRIED TO HELP IN THE ONLY WAS THEY KNEW HOW, AND I DID NOT ACCEPT THEIR HELP. I put that statement in all caps to emphasize the fact that I am not blaming anyone for what happened to me- it was not my friends, boyfriend, or family's fault- but at the same time, it was not my own fault. It took a long time for me to accept that, but after months of therapy and a lot of self-meditation, I will never state that my mental illness and the exacerbation of it was my fault because no one will ever understand what was going through my head at the time that this was all occurring.

Finally, on July 5, my boyfriend returned from work after a day that I had spent in bed, vomiting up bile from liver damage and falling in and out of sleep while watching movies, and told me that he could not do it anymore. He couldn't watch me slowly kill myself. He couldn't keep trying to help me if I wasn't going to help myself. He had fallen out of love with me months ago. He would "always love me, he just wasn't in love with me anymore." He said I needed to find help. He said he wishes the best for me but he just couldn't imagine us being together anymore.

You guys, let me tell you something. It's been nine months since this day and I still couldn't even type that out, nevertheless think about it and relive it, without tensing up and tearing up. I loved my boyfriend- and still slightly do- more than I will ever love any person on this earth. He was my entire world and my very best friend. He was the person I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with and I had no doubt about that in my mind because I had been blind to his feelings and concern for so long, focusing solely on my own depression and downfall. Life without him for nine months has not been easy and I really do not think I will ever feel the same way about anyone that I felt about him. But this is a story of recovery, and my feelings and hurt that he caused me are a very small part of the recovery aspect of my story, so I'll spare the details. That is going to be dedicated to an entirely separate post.

After he broke my heart, I felt as though I had nothing left. Sure, my friends came over and immediately comforted me. My sister offered to come pick me up and take me home. My parents tried to empathize. But I literally felt as though I had absolutely nothing to live for- so basically what I had been feeling for months of depression, just exacerbated by 10 million. I tried to kill myself three separate times in the span of 4 days, one of those times attempting poisoning my body with alcohol, until I was so weak and incoherent, I was almost dead.

My parents came to pick me up and take me home. I weighed 90 pounds at 5 feet and 2 inches. Every single nutrient in my body was depleted. I couldn't walk without being out of breathe within a few minutes of standing up. I couldn't eat without immediately vomiting it up. My parents realized what awful shape I was in and tried their best over the course of the following week to revive me and get me back into proper health.

On July 13th, I had an alcohol withdrawal seizure in the middle of my parent's kitchen floor, falling down and (my parent's account, not mine) "hitting my headed, seizing up, and foaming at the mouth for about 5 minutes." My parents called 911, and I was admitted to the hospital for 3 days to begin my journey into mental and emotional recovery from the trauma that had been building up for years.

Recovery was quite easily the worst thing that I had ever gone through, and this is coming from someone who had a pancreatic tumor rupture inside of their body about 6 years prior to all of this. The pain was terrible- going through alcohol withdrawal 10/10 would never recommend. I would wake up throughout the night, DRENCHED in sweat but still freezing cold at the same time. I would convulse and tremor uncontrollably for most hours of the day, to the point where I couldn't walk up and down a flight of stairs while standing up in fear of falling. I couldn't drink a cup of water without being worried I would drop it because my hands were so shaky. I couldn't put mascara on or exercise without all of my muscles seizing up into a stiffened grip and forcing me down to the ground. I couldn't eat anything for weeks without feeling nauseous and, more often than not, vomiting it up. I had physical and mental hallucinations where I would hear things at night and in the shower. But above all of the physical trauma and pain, the social and mental part of the trauma was the hardest to overcome. All of these physical symptoms were nothing compared to the shame, guilt, and depression I felt after disappointing everyone around me. Nothing compared to the feeling of anguish and disgust that I faced every time I looked at myself in the mirror, with my swollen face and bony body and general look of defeat. Absolutely nothing compared to the feeling of pain and loss I felt from losing my best friend and boyfriend.

Librium helped the physical side effects subside within a few weeks, but facing my family was the absolute worst part. Having my dad look at me knowing that I had done this to myself- that I had taken advantage of the life he had given me, almost drank myself to death, tried to commit suicide (to this day, I still have never admitted to him that I tried to do this, but I think he subconsciously knows), stopped feeding and bathing myself for weeks without reaching out to him- that look hasn't faded from his eyes, even now nine months later. He still looks at me with those sad eyes as if to say, "I will never see you the same way again." He still treats me like a child who is lost and will never find her home again. He still makes small comments every time I'm around him, mentioning the past and how painful it was for him. I have influenced my parent's view of me for the rest of my life, and that's the most painful aspect of all of this. They will never see me as their daughter again, they will only see me as this damaged, alcoholic, ruined piece of life that cannot achieve great things. Since this all happened, I truly have turned my life around for the better, but the funniest part is that my parents still don't accept the fact that I have a mental health disorder- they only accept the fact that I'm an "alcoholic."

Oh, and for the record, I'm actually not an alcoholic. I've never been diagnosed with alcoholism, and I went to five weeks of intensive outpatient therapy that confirmed that I am, in fact, NOT an alcoholic. It wasn't even a denial thing- I've sat in groups of people, licensed therapists and social workers, telling them how much of an alcoholic I am and what a piece of shit person I am and how I deserve to fucking die and how my life is worthless, and they've looked me in the eye and told me, "You are not an alcoholic."

I don't drink anymore, obviously, but I am also not an alcoholic. I had a major depressive episode, I have panic disorder, I have severe depression, and generalized anxiety disorder, but no where in my medical files does it say "Diagnosis: Alcoholic." That's not even an appropriate term for anyone, ever, in any situation (see: Person First Language).

Nine months later and although I wish none of this had ever happened, I am slightly thankful to how much resilience it has built in me as a person. I now am about to graduate from college with a stellar GPA, a job locked in with a pretty wonderful agency, a more secure and positive relationship with my family, and the potential to do great things. I am more confident in myself as a person, and more aware of my mental health status. I've developed healthy coping mechanisms, the ability to take a "mental health day" on particularly bad days, fall asleep at night with an at-ease mind, and treat others the way that I want to be treated. The other day, one of my coworkers told me that I was "one of the most approachable people she had ever met." I almost wanted to laugh in her face and tell her that a year ago, she wouldn't have said that. But I kept my mouth shut and just said thank you very much.

I do not share my story with those around me. I've chosen a few select friends that I've confided in with my past, but left out quite a bit of details to spare anyone the drama and worry of being friends with me. I have not seen my ex-boyfriend, but very often think about him as I fall asleep at night, wishing that we had ended things on better terms and wishing for a chance to apologize to him and tell him that I am genuinely sorry for taking those months out of his life when I wasn't taking care of myself. I am a happy person now, goal-oriented and focused on making a difference in the world utilizing my past experiences and knowledge of mental health issues. I am proud of who I've transformed into over the past nine months and although my mental health journey is a lifelong one, I certainly am pleased with the way it's headed right now.