[Big personal rant about the mess that is my mental health incoming. I'll be talking about heavy anxiety and heavy depression. So please be careful if you are sensitive to these subjects. Don't expose yourself to things that hurt you that you can't handle. It's okay. 𖹭]
How am I really? Well, I'm gonna be honest with my dishonesty. I would usually say meh. Because I'm too anxious to actually be opened about how I'm really feeling. Because I'm just terrified of dragging people down or having them hate me for not being well.
When I'm depressed, when I'm deeply self-hating, I don't call for help. I hide away until it goes away. Because I am too afraid that this will give people a reason to hate me. That people will tell me that I am too negative and that I drag everyone down. I'm too afraid of losing relationships, because I'm too much to handle. And these mechanisms apply themselves on the internet too. For every post, comment, or message I send, there are three others that just either never make it out or are deleted instantly by me.
I'm a transfeminine bunny-thing in her late 20's. I've been diagnosed with chronic depression and chronic anxiety only last year. Although, it is very much obvious and evident that I have been living like that since way before I was even 10. Same thing with the fact that autistic has only been diagnosed last year. For all of these, every step of the way, I've met either gatekeepers who didn't believe me, or people who looked at me and wondered how the fuck is it even possible that I have never been diagnosed.
I will never forget the look on my psychiatrist's face when I told him about the shit I was thinking about doing to myself when I was around 7 years old. Telling me that I should have been hospitalized back then. And that wasn't spite. That was complete empathy on his part. I will never forget that because finally somebody gave a shit about the kid I was for the first time ever. And yet all I'm left with is just bitterness and anger because no one gave a shit until then.
I oscillate between falling down depression pits or rising up anxiety spikes. Medications that are supposed to help that have only fucked me up more than anything else so far. My self-esteem is so fucked that my former psychiatrist described it as a form of anti-narcissism. I constantly switch between being depressed to the point of just wanting to sleep, all day, every day. Absolutely fucking hating myself to the point where I feel intense urges to just burn every relationship I have around me. Because I feel like it would be best to hurt the people who I love now, than to let relationships fester, because I'm that convinced that they're going to start hating me.
Feeling joy makes me anxious. I burst into tears when I laugh too long. I'm completely incapable of handling people loving me. I isolate from social groups out of fear of being outed. I'm reaching a point where I find myself going to sleep after sunrise every day because I am either afraid of insomnia preventing me from sleeping again or facing nightmares that I can't wake up from.
I live on income that I get for disability because I am completely unable to work because I'm just that fucking mentally ill. And that income is less than minimum wage in my country. I have to live with that and still endure people fucking seething at the fact that I'm getting that income because apparently I don't deserve it. I have problems and people and society and politicians and everyone's just telling me that no, I'm the problem.
I'm a fucking mess. That's how I'm doing, really. I'm not well at all. I try my best, I keep going. I don't have any other choice. The alternatives that my brain come up with are not worth listening to. Even at the worst, I want to keep living out of spite for all the people and institutions that would rather have me dead.
There you go. Funny thing is, I actually didn't intend to go on this tirade. It just kinda happened. Originally, I just wanted to say that most of the time I don't want to talk about it. I just say "meh" to hide that I'm cripplingly unwell. But I guess this rant is appropriate considering the post.