I hope when you read my words, 
that you don’t make the assumption I have all my shit together.
I hope you know that the only reason I can talk about my horrible past is because my present isn't perfect either. 

Nothing in my life is perfect, 

I could pretend it was in a sort of soothing fictional way but I feel like the fantasy would lead to a reality of disappointment. 

These pages,
for now are the darkest part of my story,
the parts I don't like talking about but feel I need to.

I hit it really hard, with absolutely no intention of slowing down. 
I had nothing left. I had no fight to give.
I had absolutely nothing.
I hit rock bottom and I didn’t fucking care.
I was angry at the world, I was angry at myself.
I sat there in that low torturous frequency for 5 months.
In a sick way I enjoyed it. 

I stopped caring how many hours I would sleep a day, what thoughts controlled my mind or the pain my heart created in my chest.
I didn’t care anymore.
It was a pity party and I was the only one invited.

5 months,

my life was very lonely.
my life was all pretend.

I am stubborn and I am proud. I am a fool for hiding my weakness for a superficial strength. I wished I could have been that girl I pretended to be, I wished I could see what other people saw when they looked at me, what that happiness would look like if they couldn’t feel the pain I felt.

I had enough.
I got bored of the party, I got tired of the acting.
My anxiety wouldn’t let me feel depressed, it wanted me to move, quickly, with absolutely no where to go.
I called my mom & the process of healing started.

I tried my best to take care of my body while it slowly destroyed itself.

I have tried almost everything and since I can’t share that all right now, I want to share with you a few that I believe started the largest pattern in my recovery.

Naturopath.

Going to a Naturopath was my first serious approach at seeking help. I remember when I sat down & was expected to tell her what was wrong I couldn’t get the words out. I hadn’t heard myself speak the nonsense I was living out loud. I cried in her chair until I was calm enough to speak. She began recommending and prescribing a series of tinctures, supplements, dietary changes, soothing aids and remedies. "It's going to take two to three weeks to notice a difference” I can repeat that moment in my mind a thousand times. Total and utter defeat, I was vulnerable, I needed something to change, right now. I wanted it to all change.

Two to three weeks for a potential solution seemed pathetic.

I tried, I did everything she said and the tinctures, the dietary changes, the remedies, they did help.

It was the routine, the will power, that made it a hopeless battle.

I didn’t have the motivation to get out of bed in the morning, I didn’t have the motivation to take all these remedies.

Everything seemed too overwhelming for the small relief the solutions gave me. I did my best to stay with it but I starting searching for more immediate solutions.

Therapy.

I grew up in a family where talking about emotions was encouraged, it was something we grew up feeling comfortable and confident to do. I feel like somewhere in my struggle I lost that life lesson my parents tried so hard to teach me, that I slowly turned into another suppressed social citizen. Talking about my emotions was not easy. Every time I tried to talk, I would cry. It was pain, it was embarrassment, it was hurt and confusion, it was everything trying to be heard all at once. For a while that's all I did, I sat in multiple chairs, positioned at awkward angles and I would just cry. I would cry and tap onto my chest to show where the hurt was coming from. Slowly as the tears dried up, my words came out. The main conversation was always the trigger of my anxiety, what caused it. I would sit for hours forever attempting to envision my childhood, shamefully hoping they would come across a hidden event of trauma. I would pray, that they would find the area of suppressed emotion just so they could clear my discomfort. That to this day that has still never happened but it has helped, the talking has helped, it always does. I still go to a therapist, I still suffer but not alone, my pain is acknowledged, my struggle is heard. Talking out loud brings a realness to the situation a severity you have to acknowledge because it is no longer just yourself hearing the nonsense.

Meditation.

Hope makes you do weird things. Your parents make you do weird things. I was slowly feeling better from my assortment of alternative therapies but I was still desperate for an immediate relief that I was not yet guaranteed. My mom, a mother with a suffering child, felt helpless. My pain broke her. She is a hippie, a creature of this earth, the most powerful women I know. With our hopes unrealistically high we travelled together to India for a 21 day silent vipassana. I sat with myself. My horrible insane self for 21 days in absolute silence. It was awful, I would like to say it was amazing but it was not. I had to listen to the nonsense of my brain, to sit and feel my racing heartbeat. I had to sit with everything and just hope it would pass. It never did, the anxiety stayed there, somedays it was unbearable and somedays manageable. Regardless I just had to sit with it, to acknowledge it. I remember one day I wanted to leave, I remember looking around me thinking that everyone else needed to be here more than me, that everyone else was crazy and I was not. I wasn’t allowed to leave. I sat on the bathroom floor and I kicked the wall, I kicked it over and over again, the loud noise was so soothing, a sound to finally drown out my nonsense.

It was in my last week I noticed a shift, not a change just a shift, I stopped paying attention to my anxiety, it wasn’t my focus anymore, its presence was there but it was light. It was something I hadn’t felt since the day it came into my life. I grasped onto this feeling and it stayed with me. I learned many things in India that I will never take for granted, it did not cure my anxiety but it helped my mental awareness, it helped me grow entirely as a person.

Doctors.

6 months after my trip to India that feeling of lightness slipped away. The pressure, the over stimulation of society swept back in and I was on a downward spiral. I stopped my natural therapies as I no longer had a routine. I had tried everything, in-between the big steps I tried all the small steps. I listened, I practiced, whatever they told me.

Finally I just wanted the answers to my madness, the exact reason why I was feeling so insane so I could remove the personal connect to my crazy. So I could blame everything on something else.

I don’t like doctors, I am sceptical.

Desperate for answers, scepticism no longer played any part in my sanity.

I got everything checked, my blood, hormone levels, my iron levels, allergy checks. Everything came back perfect, nothing was wrong. Everything was normal and I had no excuse to be crazy. No hope for a solution because there was no obvious problem. Thats when the doctor realised my personal defeat and said it. When he summed up all my stories, all my attempts, all my struggles into two self labelling words. Mental Illness. The sentence; “your results are fine, you are healthy, your symptoms state you suffer from a sever mental illness know as G.A.D” I knew already, everyone did, my therapists, my naturopath, my family. Everyone knew, just no one said it, and if they said it I didn’t believe them. I believed him.

He knew my story inside and out, he knew everything.

Those words hurt, they felt heavy when he said them.

In silence I accepted the diagnosis, admitting something to myself I already knew.

He prescribed me medication. It took me a week to take it. I threw up, my body more anxious than it had ever been, restless, shaky. I remember looking myself in mirror and my pupils where entirely dilated. I took the pills for 4 days and then threw them out. I stayed away from medication for an entire year after that. Still struggling, still sticking with my alternative approaches I decided to try again, to book myself into a doctor that had been recommended to me several times.

By this point I was entirely broken. I stopped getting my period, I had twitchy mannerisms, my body constantly sweaty, my speech jittery and absent, my hair thin, my skin flushed. Again, I sat in the chair, on that weird angle and I told my story.

She got it, she got it all, she was magic.

She put me on a low dose medication that would give my body a break to let itself get back into its natural rhythm, to let me build up the mental strength to deal with this in my own way. The medication helped, I stayed on it for an entire year. It gave my body a break, it gave me the strength to cope instead of suffer. Once I got myself into a routine, once I felt stable and had completely given my body a rest I got off the medication. Nothing happened, I stayed the same, my routines stuck and I was coping. I kept

persistent with all my alternative therapies, with my training, with my routine and I was slowly beginning to be able to manage my anxiety.

so those are my big steps,

they seem so small written out like that.

they seem so small when they felt so big,

each one taking up months, years of my life.

those are my big moments, I have lots of small moments in-between,

little realisations that have followed me along the way,

I will share these with you too, I do plan on sharing everything with you.

After awhile I decided I had enough, enough of the constant search.

Enough of the testing, the diagnoses, the diets, the advice, the medication the meditation.

I just had enough. I realised what I had taught myself was enough.

I had the tools to get through this, I learnt the strategies to deal with this.

I stopped searching for the exact diagnosis,

I stopped searching for the answer.

I stopped searching for a cure because I accepted my crazy,

I realise now there is no perfect solution,

because life isn’t perfect,

I realise now that I was crazy,

because in our own way,

we all are.