I haven’t spoken about my mental illness to anyone in a very long time until this past week. I’ve been doing great, I’ve been happy and moving along with life just fine. I still see my psychiatrist every few months. I didn’t think talking about my condition to someone new would start making me feel the way I do now, which I really can’t explain what it is that I’m feeling. I know I’m a bit uneasy and my mind is a jumbled mess. I feel like crying for the past couple of days. I just want to curl up into a ball and hide under a rock. Why is talking about it so hard? I’ve come to terms with it and I’ve accepted it so why am I feeling this way? Is talking about my condition a trigger itself? So I can never really talk about it? I thought I was past all that. Is it because I admitted something that I haven’t said to anyone at all? Not even to the person that I confide in. Why I still sleep with the lights on? Why is it such a big deal?

There are things that I notice that I do but never paid much attention to it hoping that no one would notice it. Low and behold, people actually do notice it, they just haven’t said it to me. So I never really took the time to analyze myself after the medication started working. How I act, how I interact, my mannerisms and so on. But now that people are mentioning those things, it’s like reality check! There are some things that are different about me. I have a little bit of memory loss. I tend to look away during conversations. I have a hard time and tend to be slow at processing things. I have a tendency to space out during conversations. I have hand tremors. I still sleep with the lights on. And I still feel like I’m a burden to people. Knowing all these things and finally bringing attention to them is something that I wasn’t ready for and quite frankly am not sure how to handle it. And I thought I was back to normal with all the medication I’ve been taking for 3 years now.

I guess that’s the battle isn’t it? You take medication to fix some things only to end up with other things. So which symptom would you rather fix? The big issue or the little one? Knowing that one change of medication can throw off the entire balance and you’re back to being a guinea pig of finding the right combination of medicine so that everything will be set back to normal. But what is normal? Normal would be not having this thing, no symptoms, no side effects, just back to the normal life with no emotional imbalance. Wait, that’s unheard of. I guess we just have to pick and choose our battles.

I just want someone to hold me and tell me that it’s okay and let me cry my eyes out.