What I Wish Someone Told Me On My Darkest Day
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Health and Wellness

What I Wish Someone Told Me On My Darkest Day

Lessons from hard times.

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What I Wish Someone Told Me On My Darkest Day
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The most surprising thing about going through difficult, extreme, or traumatic experiences is how difficult it is to find a way to tell your story. There is no way to be honest about what you experienced without risking isolating yourself from others. When you go through things that are intense or terrifying, sometimes you ignite those emotions in others just by sharing your experience. Whether online, in person, or just by being around others, the reality is that having spent time close to difficult topics (especially suicide, depression, death, terminal or sudden illness, or bereavement) can remind others of mortality, create fear, overwhelm, or leave someone speechless. More often than not, it has been my experience that people just don't now what to say.

Often, when struggling, we look to others just to be heard, or to find empathy, or even to find guidance. Other times we struggle with how being private is isolating, while being too open is a socially difficult and complex situation. At times, we become concerned with how we are impacting others with our grief, struggles, or tragedies. Self-awareness is never a bad thing, but fear of how we may be judged for experiencing difficult things can also be a harmful inhibitor to the healing process --- especially when what we are going through necessitates getting help but is heavily stigmatized, such as depression, PTSD, or suicide.

From my own complicated life story (worthy of a fragmented biopic someday, somewhere, I'm sure), I know intimately how difficult communicating your experiences with others can be.

By a relatively young age, I had been through struggles that most only see a few of in their entire adult lives. I don't say that with any sort of arrogance -- this is not a competition, and if it was, it isn't one I'd want to win -- but rather because acknowledging it is a source of strength at the heart of resilience and grit. As Jared Padalecki was quoted for the Always Keep Fighting campaign, "[you have] to be proud of your day to day struggle."

The first time I remember thinking I was going to die, I was a little kid. It was something any kid could go through - almost choking to death - but traumatic all the same. Ironically, in hindsight, the most terrifying five-long-minutes of childhood was entirely minor compared to spending the better part of two years in a hospital at 14. Once upon a time, I nearly died of internal bleeding while doctors struggled to fight a life-threatening and excruciating inherited disease with inadequate treatments.

Life has been a lot of bumps and bruises, as it is for all of us in the land of hard knocks, and there's nothing abnormal about that: I’ve had my fair share of injuries: broken ankle, dislocated shoulder, subluxed collar bone, collapsed lungs, major internal reconstructive surgery. The reality is, though, that the pain that physiologically can happen to you is very different than what psychological trauma does to you. By age 17, I had cared for a dying parent and a disabled younger brother, and endured the grief of a life-threatening diagnosis to another sibling. The anxiety, PTSD, and depression that often follows trauma put me in a very dark place as well – by the time I was 19, I had survived three suicide attempts. The quiet, unspoken expectation that a shoe will drop at any moment, the unconscious feeling that loss-as-abandonment is imminent, and confusion about connecting to others ("Hi, my name is Miranda. I may be audacious, creative, leather-jacket-clad, and compulsively busy with eclectic artstuffs, but I've got the next 10 years of my life mapped out to the hour and and I don't know how not to be your 'mom-friend'") all gets thrown in there.

Strangely enough, there's the little, everyday things that stick with your psyche too. Whether it was growing up knowing you’d go hungry without the support of a food and homeless shelter that was at risk of closing at any minute, seeing foreclosure notices stack up, not having reliable access to affordable healthcare (or insurance), or being indentured for a decade, overnight, in medical debt, shortly after turning 19, I’ve seen financial hard times that leave traces of terror about security, nightmares, irrational fear about homelessness and starvation and spontaneously losing my school funding or ability to self-support, hypersensitivity to people in institutional or socioeconomic power, extreme spending anxiety and a heightened discomfort with wastefulness an excess, impostor syndrome, among other things. These aren't uncommon in folks from my demographic, but they're straws on the camel's back all the same.

I don’t say any of this to be depressing, but rather, to acknowledge that bad things happen to all of us. Negative experiences are not mutually exclusive to positive ones, in the grand scheme of your entire life. In the face of all of this, I have also been blessed beyond measure in so many aspects of my life: Make a Wish trips, a full ride to college, a wonderful family, amazing friends, the opportunity to study the arts at a top institution, and experiences in travel, leadership, and scholarship.

Having a profound spectrum of two extremes – amazing and horrible – has given me a great deal of perspective on life and the human experience. The advice and friendship of others was a profound part of that understanding. Sadly, it took me a long time to be open to love and healing that was being offered to me through companionship, empathy, and support systems. I was self-conscious about how well I was dealing with the difficulties I faced and terrified of scaring people away.

No matter how difficult a situation was, I was afraid of looking weak and flawed. Our minds are more powerful than we think, and all the love in the world can't stand up to that.

This is what I wish someone had told me when I was at my lowest point:

Don't worry about how you look when you're going through hell.

Maybe gardens are nicest in perfect weather, but a flower is still a flower, even in a rainstorm. A flower is still a flower when it's soaked and wind-whipped. A flower is still a flower when it's too dark to count stems and petals.

The world knows it's raining.

No one's expecting the trees to say dry - they know the ground needs to drink.

No one's expecting leaves to stay green before they fall - they know winter comes before spring.

No one's expecting planes to stay in the sky forever - they know gas only takes you so far, and travelers have destinations.

No one's expecting you to go through something like that and come out unscathed - we're all sharing in the human condition, and struggle doesn't have a reputation for "easy".

It's the way things work: machines need to refuel, nature has seasons, there is a time and place for everything, there are perfect days and bad days and a spectrum in between.

People will understand, more than you think. Life isn't easy and it's not always fair, but even when hope is a shot in the dark, there is love for you in being human. There is empathy. Everyone has a shared experience, no matter how small. In the precedent of the human race -- or even as one the 7 billion people living on this planet right now -- there is nothing that has never been suffered before, and there is nothing that you suffer alone. Someone, somewhere, is going through what you're going through. It is a road long walked again and again across time. Heed Terence: "Nothing human is alien to me."

It's okay. You can't expect bullet wounds not to bleed. Accept the damages, focus on healing. Denial won't put you back together again.

People will understand.

The world will be waiting for who you'll be when you're okay again.

Trust me.

If you or a loved one is struggling, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has 24/7 help available to you: 1-800-273-8255

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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