I often feel like it is me against the world. Mental health is still stigmatized, at least one hundred years after it was first considered a legitimate clinical diagnosis. I feel like people, including my family, look at me and see that I look normal and therefore think that there is no possible way that I could be sick.

I often wish that mental illness was like cancer, where you end up in the hospital or at least you look sick. I consider depression to actually be a cancer, but because you don’t look sick everyone says “you’re fine” and should just “get over it.”

There are times when I feel like crying for absolutely no reason. Or my mood will change at the drop of a hat. One little thing could trigger me, like it did today, and there goes my good or at least, baseline mood and I have to fight to get it back.

Today I walked into work and we have a log book so that each shift can know what major things happened in previous shifts. Unfortunately, this log-book is mostly used to list complaints and to nitpick people’s job performances. I worked my butt off last night, with the hotel being at almost full capacity and I feel like I did the best that I could possibly do. I walk into work today and there is a list of complaints of things that didn’t get done or weren’t done satisfactorily. My mood immediately went south. I was frustrated, I was angry and I felt like I wasn’t good enough. It took me 4 hours to bring me back to baseline. Four hours to come to terms with the fact that they were nitpicking because they wanted to find something wrong. Almost like they had to find something wrong. And now I’m starting to feel sorry for them and I wonder what misery in their lives is causing them to take it out on us at work.

I realize that I make snap judgements about things and emotions. I decide within seconds how I want to feel about something and it takes hours of turning it over in my mind, to change how I feel. I need to learn and I’m trying to learn to take my time to ride the wave of my emotions and not just settle on feeling only one, especially a negative one.

So while I often feel like it’s me against the world, in reality it’s not. I have many people rooting for me to succeed and many people believe in me and believe that I can get better; that I can become a healthier person.

Even in treatment, I feel like i’m struggling to tread water while I’m surrounded by boats of people, all shouting vague suggestions to me, including swim harder. All of these people are shouting suggestions at me rather than trying to help me into the boat. It’s like they’re afraid that helping me might tip their own boat over. But that’s not true. They just don’t understand.

So to that end, I’m writing these posts to promote understanding. Because I want the people in my life to at least partly understand what I’m going through. But I don’t think people understand how stressful it is to explain what’s going on in your head when you don’t even understand it yourself. But I’m going to keep on trying and struggling to promote awareness, progress and tolerance. There needs to be a change. We need to ADAPT!!!