Why is mental health so hard to control?

 Perhaps it is an easy thing for you, but in my personal experience, everyone suffers with maintaining a good balance of mental health in today’s society.  In some way or another.  But when you add on to our situations, and surround that with an underlying mental illness and/or neurodivergentcy, then things get hard.

That’s what things have been for me the last few weeks.  Hard.  Motivation has been at war with fear, anxiety, Anxiety, and self-worth.  

I’m not sure about you, but a lot of my friends and loved ones are sick, or have been sick, in the last month.  Our Covid numbers in Georgia are no joke, and no, I will not tolerate anyone joking about them or saying this isn’t a big deal.  I have lost people to Covid.  I love people who will be dealing with the long term effects of Covid for the rest of their lives.  I am a person who has several health conditions directly impacted by Covid and it is likely that even though I am vaxxed and boosted, with my health conditions, I will end up in the hospital if and gods forbid when I get it.  No joking.  This is not the place for that.

So our numbers are no joke and it has sent me backwards into a spiral of anxiety.  I spent more than 3 months of 2021 in a partial hospitalization program because of how badly Covid affected my mental health.  I know that I’m doing better than I was doing then, and I can tell that I’m not doing as well as I was doing right after I got discharged.

I’m a lot less optimistic.  I am struggling with those daily tasks.  I’m going through my skills and relying on my support network, but it’s hard to do when it’s not safe to see your support network.  I mean, I could outside, but it’s fucking cold.  The only saving grace is that we’re on the other side of the Solstice, so at least the days are getting longer again.  The lack of late afternoon sunshine hits me hard every year.  If I didn’t hate sand so much, I’d seriously consider moving farther south for my mental health.  But here we are.  

Back to the subject.  Why is mental health so hard to control?  For me, because this whole thing is about being open with my own medical struggles and how they impact my thinking and life, for me, my mental health directly affects my ability to cope with things I cannot control.  And right now, there are a ton of things I cannot control. 

I cannot control if employers are going to look at my application and see how hard of a worker I am and hire me.  I can control what my application looks like, and my online presence, but that’s it.  

I cannot control how seriously people take the pandemic.  I can inform.  I can express my own experiences.  I can try to help, but I cannot control.  And that infuriates me as the state of the Pandemic directly connects to what I am capable of doing outside my house.  And how hard it is to go outside of my house.  Seriously, agoraphobia sucks.  People joke about it.  I have it.  Medically diagnosed.  It sucks.  Fixing it also sucks.  Exposure therapy.  Try doing that with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, medical complications that are comorbidities with Covid, and a global Pandemic in a state that about half of the people don’t believe Covid is real.  Like Marjory Taylor Green is from my state.  Seriously.  This is all piled on top of itself and it sucks.  So hard.  

I cannot control the physical reaction I have while thinking about all of this.  I can do something after the reaction happens.  I can mitigate the resulting effects, but the actual reaction is just that: a reaction.  It happens.  It’s uncomfortable.  It’s nauseating, stomach churning, heart pounding, palms sweating, hands shaking, fast breathing, words studdering, mind racing, awful.  It is a sensation that I would avoid completely if I could.  But I can’t, because it just happens, and so I have to deal with it.  And it sucks.  It sucks so much.

So, I cannot control my mental and physical reactions to my situations, I cannot control my income, and I cannot control the world around me.  And because I’m trying so hard to fight my inability to control the uncontrollable, I am exhausted.  I get stuck in mental loops of what I should be doing so much that it is very hard for me to decide what I actually can do, should do, do do.  So I sit, doing something that may or may not be helpful, while I obsess and worry about all of the things.  

There are strategies and skills I can use to help all of this, of course.  I learned a lot while I was in the partial hospitalization program.  But it is hard to remember why I should use these skills when the world outlook is so bleak.  Did I mention that my Anxiety directly impacts the level of my Major Depressive Disorder?  Like, the Depression is there, a part of my brain chemistry, something I will likely have to deal with all of my life, just like the Anxiety, but it is definitely made worse by how hard my Anxiety is hitting me at any particular point of my life.  

Thank the gods that I have a Psychiatrist appointment tomorrow.  Hopefully he’ll help me play the So You Might Need More Medication Game.  And it is such a fun game to play.  I’ve also been avoiding going in for a urine screening for, like, 6 months, and he’s really getting frustrated with that, so before I go to my appointment, I have to physically go to the location and pee in a cup.  For which I will need to take medication so that I can actually leave my house and breathe air with other people.  I have my n95.  I have a cloth mask I can put over it.  I will be fine.  And I think I’m going to need to medicate myself to be able to actually do it.  At least I can bring that up as a “so I’ve been struggling a lot” evidence.  And it’s medication that he prescribed me, so it’s not like it’s a bad thing.  And it feels like I’m a failure because I used to be able to just leave the house and do things.  Like go to work every day.  But that was in The Before Times.

So yeah.  I’m not doing great.  Which is why I’ve been silent for a few weeks.  Because when there is so much to say, and you’re Depressed with that capital D, it makes it really hard to know what to write about.

So I’m taking suggestions for topics to discuss.  If you have any, let me know.