I needed a Break
We all need breaks from time to time. It can be good for us to take a break, even from the things we love, in times of turmoil.
My house of cards was beautiful. It was a carefully constructed thing consisting of a beautiful wife, three sweet children, many other supportive family members, a good job, and a carefully managed case of bipolar I disorder.
I had recently rediscovered the wonders of writing. I wasn’t sure if I was any good at it, but the joy of creation and sharing was great.
I loved my life and couldn’t imagine how it could get better.
Other plans surfaced, and something in my mind shifted.
Cracks spread through my being.
An unknown storm of strangeness settled in my mind. It took root in all of my sacred places and desecrated the confines of my mind. It had little care for my life or what I wanted.
I didn’t know what it was. It was so alien that I was completely caught off guard by the assault. I should say that it wasn’t entirely new, but had never struck me with any intensity.
It had the ring of a personality disorder. It also shook like psychosis. It could have been an echo of my long-dormant PTSD. I still don’t know for sure.
I tried to write.
I didn’t want to give up this newfound part of myself that writing had become. It made my soul sing, and my worldly problems fall away.
I couldn’t write, though.
At first, I was able to pull some words together to make a somewhat coherent piece. As time went on, my condition worsened, and my writing turned on me.
I was so fixated on the thing that ravaged my mind that the torment was all I could put to paper. My pieces were dark and full of pain. They were a sad echo of my mental state.
My mind trapped me inside of myself, and my writing reflected just that.
It felt as though each phrase was ripping parts of my very soul away, and every keystroke was a cut to help it rip.
I was the truest of fraud when I wrote of good things. There were no happy endings that didn’t seem wooden and faked.
I was no longer who I claimed to be. I was not calm and collected anymore. I was a shadow of what I once was.
So I stopped writing.
It was hard. I can honestly say that I felt aimless for the first few weeks. I didn’t know how to fill my time as everything I tried felt shallow and held no meaning within me.
I tried reading, videogames, various hobbies, and television. It was to no avail. They couldn’t hold me as writing had. I wondered if I was now broken.
It was necessary to quit writing, though.
My writing was doing something that I couldn’t allow it to do. It was forcing me to revel in the darkest of dark places and forcing me to view and dissect it for display.
I was making myself bleed upon the paper.
There was no good to it; only pain and anguish brought to life in the printed word. When I wrote, I took myself inside of my mind and wrote to the most pressing issue.
That isn’t abnormal in itself, but the subject matter was different.
My frenzied typing brought about something that was very disjointed and rough. The text managed to be a thing angry and bitter even as it pleaded and begged.
I didn’t feel the familiar euphoria when I wrote. I felt compounded pain and agony of a mind that screamed for more even as it screamed for me to stop the torment.
It felt wrong to stop.
I’ve always been told to keep at things when mental health crises strike. This is, for the most part, excellent advice. We shouldn’t let our mental health concerns hold us back.
Regardless of what goes on inside our minds, we still have lives to live. If we let it keep us from the things we love, it seems only to worsen the condition.
Further, many of the things we need to keep doing can genuinely help us feel better. I know this to be accurate, as I have experienced it in depression and use the mentality often to push the recovered me.
The experience made me wonder if I should consider that some activities can turn unhealthy through the lens of illness.
My writing was only one such example.
There are times when the things we would ordinarily do will worsen our mental health. It can be difficult to imagine that something vital to our days could pain us, but it happens.
Mine was reasonably obvious, and it didn’t take long to realize what was happening to me.
With other things, it can be harder to see or accept that the activities hurt us. There are times when we feel we need them more than anything else in life. The reality may be that they cause us more hurt than anything else in life.
For that reason, I would propose that the skill of identifying and stepping away from previously essential life tasks and situations is something that I should develop as I learn to recover.
I began to wonder if there was anything else I was doing to worsen my condition. My lesson learned about writing made me search for things and try out this idea.
The hardest part for me is identification.
When we hurt, it’s not always easy to see the things that hurt us more than the day to day grind.
To test my activities, I used a very simple before/after evaluation to judge my tasks and activities.
I made a sporadic effort to test the things I was doing throughout the day by doing this self-check before and after. I’ll be honest; it was somewhat half-hearted.
I did identify something, though. I found that the music I was listening to seemed to be substantially degrading my mental state. I was shaky before listening and almost in tears afterward.
The awareness that something was wrong with this situation reminded me that I had found the artist during a particularly rough point in my past.
Removing this stressor from my life was an easy correction that kept me from avoidable pain.
Most stressors are not that easy to avoid.
Many of them come in the form of tasks that we are required to perform in our day to day lives. If we shirk out of those, we’ll end up worse off than the emotional pain of completing them.
I still believe that I should work to identify them for examination.
I believe that, with the identification of a problem, I can take steps to minimize the effects on my mental health.
Some potential minimizations I’ve utilized in the past included asking for special accommodations or help, trading responsibilities with another, or changing the time of day the tasks are carried out to a time where I have more stamina or drive.
There is also something to be said for having the knowledge that the task is painful and causes duress. There have been times that a simple adjustment to how I looked at an activity, with the awareness that it typically hurt me, made it easier to handle.
No matter the pain, I still had to live.
While I was able to drop the writing and music from my life without any real impact on my day to day functioning, the same would not have been right for many other things that I had going on in my life.
I couldn’t drop everything that caused me more pain than the general average. There were work tasks to perform, kids to care for, and other general tasks that wife and life threw at me.
That is the hard part of mental illness. As much as I wish that life would pause long enough for me to figure things out, it won’t.
There is only one speed, and I must do my best to ride along with it.
Originally published at https://justinjagels.com on September 3, 2019.
