Sometimes it is all just too much.

The walls come crashing in and I feel like I'm drowning in my own thoughts. It's like I can't escape my own mind, my body has trapped me in and I loose control. This feeling comes and it goes, leaving me with a sporadic jumble of some good days and others bad. I can't plan for it. It is not something that comes a specific day for a certain amount of time however often. I can’t plan what life will throw at me, or what my brain will decide to think today. If I could plan for it, believe me, I would be more than ready. Sometimes I just need to sit alone in my room, the door shut and the feeling of darkness overwhelming my presence.

Sometimes I just need time to figure out myself, and by time, I mean hours, sometimes even days. Because honestly, I can not even figure myself out, so the only thing to do is wait and hope I become normal again over time. They say time heals everything. That is why I am still waiting around for my brain to get itself together and function like a brain should. Instead of making life harder, it should make life for me want to be lived, so I do not care how long I have to wait to be healed, I just want to feel ok again.

Mental illness is not something that I use as a token for people to feel sorry for me about, or something that I am showing off, like an award I just won that makes me more significant than everyone else. Mental illness is real, and it is something that I struggle with every single minute of every single day. For those who do not suffer from mental illness, it can be hard to comprehend what it means to be a part of this epidemic. It is easier for those who do not have a mental illness to judge those who do, and make assumptions about people who do struggle daily with these issues. But that does not give you the right to place a label and a stigma on those of us who live our lives in fear of what our brain will do next, and what irrational behavior that we may display at any given moment. I can't help who I am, and neither can anyone else. No one should have to feel this sense of disunion with themselves, or the overwhelmingness of wanting to be alone but not wanting to be lonely.

Life sucks. People suck. And mental illness sucks. But you know what doesn’t suck? That we are in this together, fighting one of the hardest fights there are.

A professor I admire very much told me that If we do not talk about these issues, then they will never go away. He was right. We need to talk about these things, and most importantly we need to realize that we are not alone. It is not easy, but the more we talk about it and realize we are not alone, then the easier it will become. And in time, we will be healed. We will feel human again.