Behind the Smile – The Reality of Post-Breakdown Life

It’s difficult to be at events and with people who haven’t seen you for a long time, like before the January breakdown, who ask you how you are doing.  You say, “oh good”, not knowing how much they know about it, and it feels like they want more from you, more than just I’m good.  In the midst of all kinds of people though that is all you can offer them.  I can’t say well if you have 15 minutes I’ll tell you the truth.  These kinds of encounters make me feel strange, they make me feel alien. Like I am sitting amongst thirty people, smiling and having a beer and saying I am good, but I feel like I am sitting at the table like a green monster with three eyes and antennas poking out of my head. 

They probably don’t even notice that I feel that way, they are probably just genuinely happy that I have made it out tonight and that I look like I’m doing better.  I do lighthearted banter, make some jokes, feel almost like old me but I am old me with a different feeling of what authenticity feels like.  You can’t be authentic to the thirty people in the room and tell them each your life story, so why does it still feel like I am an actress in these situations.  I don’t feel comfortable in my own skin AND I don’t trust myself to interact normally.  Can they see when my eyes go off into a three second glare where I see the large serrated bread knife start slashing into my thigh? For the most part I can make it stop but the fact that it does come at all is disturbing and of course that is what it wants for me, it wants to disturb me enough to get me into a cycle of the thoughts, to get me to doubt my recovery, to doubt myself and to make me think I am bat shit crazy.

All of it just leads to a very exhaustive brain experience, where I am part actress, part my old self, part being infiltrated by anxious and OCD thoughts, and part just trying to stay looking and acting like a normal person to not be noticed for anything out of character that might indicate I’m either too well to have been that mentally sick or too sick to even be anywhere near people. 

I used to love being social and love talking to people but lately it just feels like all I want to do is get out of it. I count the minutes/hours until the social events are complete, and I can just be me…in the safety of my bed. I wonder when my confidence will come back for these social events, I wonder when they won’t feel like my brain has done 7 days of work in three hours.  I try to get some sleep when I get home, all that really keeps going through my head is I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to be asleep, I want to not be here to think about what I did or did not say or do right, I just want to put “her” asleep and rest for a while. 

When does the whole thing end, was it truly better to have a breakdown and get it all out and now write it all out in the open to be shared with anyone and everyone. I’m starting to question if maybe I’m so hell bent on helping others with my story that it may be detrimental to me to do everything that is required to get there.  Mainly I guess my biggest fear being, if at this point, I can’t handle these small social outings how will I handle media.  Or does it change because for the most part they don’t know me or who I was.  Maybe it’s my hanging onto my persona of the past that I can’t quite reconcile with and maybe if I was just the new person, the one that wrote down her deepest darkest stuff, the one that fights my illness every day, then I don’t have to be my persona of the past to anyone, anymore.  Possibly that is why I feel like I need a fresh start, starting something with no past expectations of myself that I need to compare to. 

Actually, I feel more comfortable around my family now, it took a while, but they know the whole story and now I feel like I can just be myself.  I can be weak, I can be strong, I can be funny, I can be silly, and I can be sad and need some time to myself. It definitely feels more freeing around them now and some of my friends who know the whole story and who still love and want to connect with me.  With these people I feel I can be both, I can have been the broken one, but I can also be all the other things that I am. There is no actress persona at those events. 

Although it is hard to tell everyone the story and get it all out there, maybe if it works for my family and friends, maybe it will just make me feel more authentic in front of the people who only see the outside me, the business me, the busy mother, the one leading meetings and trying to check off all my performance appraisal boxes.

There are some things though that you just can’t tell people and that is why my illness is so hard.  It is so incredibly socially unacceptable to see the things that I see in random moments in time. For absolutely zero reason, the speaker of an event comes close to my table, and I look at her shoes and then in a flash thought an axe comes out of nowhere and cuts her feet off? Why? What could be so wrong in my brain that it does shit like that? So, I tell it to stop, and it stops but the damage is done as now I have this vision in my head of why I see her standing there with bloody limbs. Then the cycle as I have explained many times repeats itself, what is wrong with me, I am regressing, I am bat shit crazy, I will never be normal, these are unrealistic thoughts trying to trick me, but why? Why me?

I am grateful though that these thoughts are only 1 or 2 a day now compared to hundreds and I try not to attach my compulsion to the thoughts, as my compulsion when I have those thoughts is to immediately turn the axe on myself, shoot or hang myself in my thoughts to stop the first horrendous thought from repeating itself.  So, I know I have made progress, yes! However, I still live with this, how do you ignore something that is so brutal to you. You know if you don’t let it pester you, it will go away and become less and less but how do you just ignore when your thoughts bring these automatic images of violence and pure gore to your attention, while you are interacting with questions as you have group work to do.

I guess there are a lot of things in life that you have to ignore because you can’t be everywhere trying to save the world.  For example, there is nothing you can do about others’ opinions or actions. So how about I treat my OCD this same way? I’m not changing its mind from existing in my brain and I’m not changing others’ opinions or actions, so as the popular ice queen would say…..”Let it go”.

And there it is, if I can’t change my brain’s mind from throwing this stuff at me even when I am expected to be the most healed, I will let it go. Just like a pimple you can’t stop popping, squeezing, and torturing yourself with pushing its gross insides to the surface, let it go, if you leave it alone for a while, it will start to heal and soon you won’t even know the pimple was ever there. 

Chat again soon,

Michelle