I'm Scared

I may lose my battle with mental illness

Trigger Warning: Child Sexual Abuse

I’m scared I may lose my battle with mental illness.

I need to say it because when I don’t, the thought envelops me and tries to suffocate me. I don’t want to lose my battle with mental illness, but I’m scared. I am doing all the right things. I get enough sleep. I see a therapist and a psychiatrist. I eat and move my body, and still, some days make me believe that I may not survive this. If Bipolar Disorder kills me, it would never be because I gave up. It would be because my brain lied to me, and I believed it.

The sick mind is a liar. A sick person believes it.

I’ve been wanting to write letters to my loved ones. Letters that would only be opened if I lost this battle. I am not actively suicidal. I’m just aware of the consequences of my sick mind. I have so much to say to the people I love. I would never want them to feel guilty or believe that they could have done something. I would never want them to think their love wasn’t enough, mainly because it has been their love that has helped me hold on on many occasions.

I haven’t slid into a full-blown depressive episode, but I’m depressed. I’ve eaten very little in days, binged watched the first four seasons of Scandal without leaving my bed…and don’t ask me when I last showered, because I don’t know. I walk my daughter to school in the morning and then return to bed. I hop on a work Zoom and then go back to bed. I’m sitting at a kid’s go-kart birthday party dressed in sweats and a beanie, counting down the minutes I can go home and get back in bed. I’m considered high-functioning, which is laughable because I am barely functioning.

It creeps up like a thief in the night. One day, I am mom-ing, partnering, living like myself, and then BAM! I am out of body watching this shell of a person move through life. I’m not dead, but I’m not alive.

I wonder if it will always be this way. Even when my psychiatrist assures me it won’t, I wonder how she could possibly know that. What if the cocktail of meds I am on stops working? What if the lies are so loud one of these times that I can’t shut them down?

What if the things that have happened to me, the trauma that lives in my bones, require a level of resilience that I can’t muster up?

I hold a dirty little secret. I don’t want to hold onto it any longer. I can’t. I won’t. I’m tired of being a hostage.