I didn’t really have any intention on carrying on with posting blogs but I’ve realised that by doing this I can not only help myself but also help other people, hopefully. In today’s society Mental Illness is a taboo and it shouldn’t be because I guarantee the majority of the people reading this have felt alone and depressed at some point in their life. It’s easy to assume that people with Mental Illness’s are “crazy” or “psychos’” but it’s a lot deeper than that. Throughout my life I’ve definitely been seen as this confident, bubbly person but within the last few years I’ve been dealing with social anxiety and depression. It was something I saw coming but I never thought I’d end up feeling as low as I have.
Don’t get me wrong, I have good days, a lot of them spent with people I love and cherish, but the bad days always seem to manifest more than the good ones do which undoubtedly leads to negative implications such anxiety. Like I said, it was something I saw coming but at the same time it was also something I thought I’d always be able to control. Wrong. I found myself in a state of mind that frightened me, I really began to question everything about myself. I’ve always been the type of person to put others before myself, purely because I get more happiness making someone else smile rather than doing something for myself. Looking back now, I wish I learnt to balance the two. I became insecure and thought the whole world was against me, but as long as I looked happy I knew I could fool the friends closest to me and even my family and it is safe to say it worked for a very long time.
Having parents who were never really exposed to the concept of depression growing up made me anxious about how they’d deal with hearing that their daughter was experiencing it. I assumed that anyone I spoke to about it would just turn to me and say “What have you got to be sad for? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are people worse off then you. Just cheer the fuck up!”. If I’m honest, that was exactly what I told myself whenever I questioned how I felt, I didn’t even consider talking to other people about what I was going through. I didn’t want to be a burden. Again, looking back now, I know that the people closest to me would have listened to me and understood me and it would have helped me deal with what I was going through sooner rather than later.
Whether it’s your group of best friends, your siblings, your boyfriend/girlfriend, being able to open up to someone without feeling judged is the best thing that you can do for yourself. It only took the one person to help me come to terms with my depression and take action before it got worse. My advice to you if you’re going through something similar is to just bite the bullet and talk to someone you feel safe around. Even though you may manically apologise throughout the conversation because you’re still worried about being a burden, just take the chance because I guarantee you it will do better than worse. You never know, you may help the person you’re opening up to open up to you too, which is great because it reinforces that you aren’t the only one that feels shit.
All of us think individually and react to different situations in different ways. We all go through shit times, whether it be with loved ones or just a personal thing. One thing I could of avoided is dwelling on how I felt. For months and months I couldn’t go to sleep without crying my eyes out just because I was so unhappy with who I was and It made me feel alone. In that moment I should have snapped out of it and counted my blessings rather than hating myself, but again in that same moment it’s never that easy. My advice now will be to just keep yourself busy. As someone who loved sports, music and drawing, I neglected all of that in response to me feeling like I wasn’t good enough for anything. I thought that anything I put my time into was just a waste because I knew it wasn’t going to be good enough. I feel like I set myself up. Again, I was wrong. Just being encouraged to spend one hour doing some painting made me feel normal again, I felt like I wasn’t wallowing in my emotions I was just being me. So yeah, keep yourself busy, read a book, start a new TV series if you want, go for walks, surround yourself with people. The worst thing you can do to yourself is be alone with your thoughts when you’re feeling sad. What I gradually came to understand is that when you’re going through depression, you most definitely become your own worst enemy.
This brings me onto confidence. After being involved in certain situations, I felt really self-conscious a lot of the time and didn’t value the person I was and the skin I was in. It’s silly to act as if other people’s actions don’t have an effect on how we see ourselves but the magnitude of that effect is up to you. My mum’s always said to me “ You need to love yourself before you love other people”. I didn’t understand what she meant by this till I found myself being so uncomfortable with who I was that I resulted to self harm. Learning to love yourself isn’t necessarily about being cocky and “gassed” about the way you look and who you are, but more about accepting who you are and being comfortable with the way you are. This was something I definitely struggled to do on my own, but being in a relationship with someone who loved me for me and having friends who made me feel good whenever we went out, really helped me come to terms with the way I am and it helped me be more accepting of myself. For those who have friends or are in a relationship with someone who feels sad and self-conscious, a compliment goes a long way. Actually, even just complimenting someone at the bus stop or at Uni etc can make someones day and could maybe even help change the way they think about themselves.
Depression isn’t something that just disappears over a period of time, it’s a lasting state but it’s a state that can be controlled if you allow yourself to. I’m still trying to figure it out myself as I have for the last three years or so, but I feel more optimistic about my future. I still get sad and I still have moments where I can’t do anything but cry, but I’m learning to accept that. It’s okay to feel down and need to cry but as long as you can pick yourself up and focus on the bigger picture then I think you’re on the right path. I do feel anxious about sharing such personal details about myself but I hope this post helps you understand more about yourself if you can relate and if you can’t I hope it helps you to understand more about other people and what they are going through. Peace x
VINNIE the sailing utopian 