Mental Illness. One could describe it as seeing the world through a cloud of smoke. Constantly unable to see reality. Surrounded by what could of been, what might be and what never existed in the first place.
When you don’t feel you are in control of your actions, when you feel consumed by your illusion of the world. There’s a stigma that comes attached with mental illness, people see it as a weakness but what if it can make you stronger?
Yes, mental illness can make you both your weakest and strongest self. When you are at your lowest self, mental illness warps and changes your mind till you are most certainly no longer yourself.
As a kid you never understand the negative effect of mental illness, you wonder why people are acting a certain way, not realizing that sometimes there may be no logical reason for why.
You often hurt the ones you care about most when you aren’t in your right mind. You tell them you care and then the next minute go back on all that, fuck things up and hurt them without always realizing the effect of what you are doing.
What others don’t see are the mental scars inside. More often than not you hear “well if I can’t see it, it’s not there” rather than people genuinely trying to understand what is going on. I say those people can get to fuck with their judgmental opinions.
If they had experienced mental illness or had someone they were close to experiencing mental illness, they would not be saying this. They don’t realize that you genuinely are ill. They don’t understand the mental pain that goes on inside your brain.
You overthink almost every situation and every possible outcome. You overthink what others think of you, you constantly need to be reminded of the fact that people care about you. Someone does one thing to upset you and there you are calling them out while thinking that they don’t & never did give a shit about you.
People tell you they are there for you but then let you down when you need them most because they can’t handle the severeness of your thoughts. You put yourself down, you make one mistake then spend a lifetime blaming yourself for that mistake.
You see the world through a cloud of smoke as if it isn’t actually happening. You do something stupid and it passes over you as if it wasn’t you that did that. You do things then shortly after wonder why the fuck you did that and can’t understand why you did it in the first place.
For example, I once tried to add on old teacher on FB while I was still at high school. Obviously something not allowed in schools. My mind was in such an unwell state that I tried to add then sent her a series of messages on FB without realizing what I was doing. Afterwards it felt like a dream, I did not remember doing it, it took me a long time to remember what I’d done. To this date I still don’t remember any of what I had apparently messaged her. It’s almost like it was a dream, I just have the faint reminder that it happened.
This is what being unwell inside your head is like, you may do things, not even remember them and they will feel like you’ve dreamed it all. You start to hallucinate and your brain mixes reality with hallucinations. You begin to believe these hallucinations to be real and when you realize that they were in fact inside your head, it takes you a long time to work things out.
It is a horrible feeling when you realize that you imagined a whole event or multiple events that you thought were real. It fucks with your mind, it isn’t pleasant to know that you can’t even trust your own mind at times. Your mind is supposed to be one thing you should be able to trust.
It’s difficult to apologize for something when at the time, you had zero recollection of what you had done just minutes after doing it. I don’t know how else to describe the feeling of being unwell mentally other than its like being completely fucking wasted to the point you can’t stand.
Only problem is, you aren’t wasted, there is no hangover. There is no puking your guts up, being hungover for a day, feeling like crap for another few days then starting to feel no better. When you are in a low mental state, its constant, it doesn’t just cease to be. You feel like crap all the time, you may laugh it off as if your fine, but you’re not. People may see you laugh nervously and think “Oh, they are over it” but that’s not how it works.
More often than not, you can keep your mood up only so long as you are in other people’s company, the second you are alone, the pain seeps back in and its like your drowning in a confused state that no one else can understand unless they’ve been there before.
You avoid telling people how you feel because you’re fucked up mind tells you they don’t care, they don’t want to know and that they won’t be able to help. A guidance teacher lets you down big time? You become suspicious of future guidance teachers as if they are going to do the same until they prove that they are there. It really is true that actions speak louder than words. A friend fucks you over? Your trust issues increase whenever you meet someone new to the point it takes you 4 times as long as others to make friends.
When I was a kid I used to constantly not understand why my mother was acting a certain way, she’d do things to hurt me then I’d wonder why she hated me so much. It wasn’t that she hated me, it was that she just didn’t understand the extent of what she was doing and how it was hurting me.
That’s what mental illness does to a person. It twists your sense of reality to the point you don’t know how to love, how to care like an actual human being. You do things for any or no reason and you don’t realize how much you are hurting those that you say you care about. You give up at the first sign of trouble when you should fight for what you want instead.
Smoke
