It's Supposed to be Better

When my diagnosis and it's severity was official I became obsessed with reading autobiographies and case studies of other human beings with severe mental illnesses. They ranged anywhere from schizophrenia to dissociative identity disorder and borderline personality disorder.

Maybe in reading about others' lives, I would find something familiar. A thread that wound from experiences to mental illness and I was strung along like so many other people.  I would piece myself together with their stories. I had always looked to others for clues on who and how I was, I could never trust my own feelings. I was a ghost, an empty place setting for someone expected but who never arrived.

I wish I could say it wasn't that dramatic. Like so many other times I felt as if I watched myself struggle to exist, struggle to resemble a human.

I learned to accept that I suffered from major depression and that I also had an eating disorder. I was a human being first, and ill last. I wanted to find others like me who woke every morning to a heavy heart and a never ending fog and yet they still went to work, performed unexceptionally, grocery shopped and completed other mundane tasks that had always made me feel so alone and tragic. Did they also shuffle around the grocery store struggling to make decisions and watching others' faces for any sign that they knew if you were rotting from the inside out? That my stomach had swallowed my lungs and my heart was too big.

I couldn't bare the grief so I stopped eating and started having a reason for the fog, my sadness, lack of energy and the terrifying things that were happening inside of me.

I was always so embarrassed to talk about mental illness or suicide with anyone. I was embarrassed that I had opinions that were based on experience and that experience made me less than a person. Despite excelling in academics, traveling the world and finding love in different faces I was always trying to make up for the fact that I have a pit inside myself. I was told for so long that I wasn't good enough, I wasn't different enough, I wasn't attractive enough, and generally that I wasn't enough of anything.

It was only after a year and a half of intense treatment that I could believe that I didn't have to try and compensate for all of my shortcomings. In fact, there was nothing wrong with me. The very foundation that I had lived on for most of my life was made of sand.

Something I didn't hear at the beginning of my treatment or therapy was that the sadness I felt was nothing compared to the grief I would have after coming to terms with my past. I mourned the loss of over a decade of punishing myself even after I had gotten away from it's beginnings. I had never been a child. I had never truly been happy or sure of myself.

Was it reasonable for me to be angry that no one protected me?