DiSoRdEreD

You feel

You never don’t feel

If you could only shut it off for a singular moment held in time

In this huge mess of thoughts and emotions and hurt and pain and uncertainty and

Fear

You can’t turn it off

You have fleeting moments of happiness and contentment and you get closer to peace than you ever have been

You’re on the precipice

You thought you had found some semblance of normalcy

You thought you were the closest to okay you would ever be

And then

It came rushing in like a Northern wind

Like a wave in the ocean that looked near harmless but that slammed you down into the murky depths

Like a brick wall that appeared out of almost nowhere

You had a feeling that something was coming but you had no idea what it could be

You had been going along on the straight and narrow

But no matter how much you tried to stay on the path

You find yourself in a gnarled, overgrown forest with weeds and sharp thorns that cut you at every turn and maim you until you can’t recognize yourself anymore

Your mind has done this.

You aren’t Caroline or Bethany or Jason or Tait or Joshua or Allison.

You are your disorder.

You’ve done everything the doctors have said.

You’ve taken the pills

So many different pills

You’ve tried them all

You’ve tried to keep your spirits up

You’ve told youself you’re not treatment resistant

You’ve told yourself that even though nothing seems to be helping that something has to.

You’ve tried the breathing exercises and the meditation.

You even started exercising and you changed your diet.

You started praying and you began talking to God again.

You took your pain and you started creating something beautiful

It may have been a painting of a far off land or a loaf of bread

Or maybe you started reading again and you stayed up all night to finish Middlemarch

Maybe you began to reach out to your friends that you hadn’t seen in months and whose plans you cancelled multiple times

You apologized and you explained that it was the anxiety

That you weren’t in a good place

Even if you had known them for years

It was too much.

You go out

You take a drink

You have some coffee

It goes okay

It doesn’t go well

It goes okay

It doesn’t go well

It doesn’t go well

It goes okay

It goes great

It goes horribly

You pretend to be eighteen, twenty one, twenty five, thirty two, forty instead of your illness

You try not to think about how much it has taken from you at age eighteen, twenty one, twenty five, thirty two, forty

You can’t walk down the street without thinking about it

You punch the wall

You find comfort in food

You find comfort in sleeping pills

You find comfort in staying in bed all day

You find comfort in using other people for your own exploits

You find comfort in the brown liquor that gives you enough courage to turn off your own thoughts for a few hours

because it’s better than the knife against your skin or the razor blade against your knuckles

You start to feel the prick at the back of your neck

The hitch in your breath

The doom

The dread

The paranoia

The discomfort

The thoughts that don’t seem your own

The emotions that come out of nowhere

You can’t eat

You can’t sleep

Your mind is failing you

Your mind is turning against you

Telling you

You will never

You will never be successful

You will never live a normal life

You will never be free from this prison

You will never be more than your disorder.

You lose it

“It” could be your mind

It could be your confidence

It could be your strength

It could be your ability to cope like you had been able to before.

You have no idea how you’re going to do it

How can you live a life where you can’t even be in control of your own mind?

You live it one day at a time and one breath at a time and you realize

How scary the world and people can be

But you also realize how beautiful and vulnerable and colorful the universe is and how it opens itself up to those us of that walk it everyday

And even though sometimes you want to die

Sometimes you want to leave it

Sometimes you can’t do it anymore

Or most times, you can’t do it anymore

There are times when you can

And those outweigh anything else.

The leaves rustling in the trees outweighs anything else.

That text from your best friend outweighs anything else.

The hug from your parents outweighs anything else.

The worn pages of your favorite book outweighs anything else.

Sometimes, these are enough.

And you begin to realize that even though you may go Down

Down

Down

Down

Into a place that seems like there’s absolutely no escape

That’s so dark, you can’t imagine how anyone could see you or help you, let alone how you could help yourself.

There is always hope

And even in the darkest of places,

One must only turn on the light

And even though life has hardened you

Or maybe it's done the opposite

Maybe it’s made you more vulnerable

Either way…

You’re much stronger than you could ever, ever know and

A setback isn’t a relapse, no matter how bad it may seem

Dust off yourself and get back up.

Even if you fall down and it takes you weeks or months or years to try again

You will try again.

You will feel the colors of the world blindingly

You will feel the warmth of holding the hand of the one you love

And just because you are different

Just because you have a “disorder”

You are not your disorder—no matter how many days in the year it tries to tell you this.

You are Caroline, or Bethany, or Jason, or Tait, or Joshua or Allison and you are invincible.