TW: A mention of suicidal ideation
I am not very nice to myself.
This may come as a surprise to those who have known me my whole life as the firecracker kid who always hogged the microphone during family parties, the little dynamo who wouldn’t shut up, or the honor student who constantly had something to prove.
I’m 27 now, and I don’t feel like any of those things. It’s weird; I have been thinking about this often, especially when I look back at photos of my younger self. Who were they? Why did they do the things they do? These are things I’d ask myself. One may say it’s due to the natural progression of life and becoming an adult; I would say it’s a bad cocktail of previously unaddressed mental health issues and the rest of the bullshit that comes with growing up.
Nowadays, I do not feel like myself a lot of the time. I thought a long time ago that finally getting formal diagnoses— giving names to the rapid heartbeats, the void in my brain, the executive dysfunction, the heaviness in my body every morning when my alarm goes off — would be the end of it. That I’d be like, “Okay. I’m living with all of this. Now I shall deal with it.”
Therapy has helped so much, especially with the “dealing with it” part. I’m able to vent my frustrations, find the root cause of the many thoughts that raced through my head, and it’s nice. I feel like in the last year, especially, I’ve developed some healthy coping mechanisms that have especially aided me throughout the pandemic. I am eternally grateful for my therapist. I still see her weekly.
I’d recently also been diagnosed with ADHD, which I suspected I had a long time ago. I have the absolute pleasure of having ADHD along with an anxiety disorder and depression (which I’ve learned come hand-in-hand as byproducts of ADHD). Fantastic! I finally received an answer for all the times my brain decided to shut down and not do anything, the ease and randomness at which I’d get tired, my intense distractibility, and all the hoopla that plagued me in past jobs and threatened my current one. I thought I’d just go on, as usual, try out medications, and that would be it.
That was not it.
Quite frankly, lately, I feel like my brain machine has broken: it’s been stomped on, thrown into the garbage with rotting, festering things, broken. My therapist says otherwise, and I am thankful, but sometimes, I genuinely feel defeated. I feel it when I’m sitting at my desk at work, ready to finish things, but my brain doesn’t want to, I feel it when I look at the bevy of unread messages on Facebook Messenger and iMessage and feel absolutely guilty for forgetting to reply to people. I feel it when the brain fog gets so intense it feels like trying to physically walk through a thick, layered cake. (Aw, fuck, now I’m hungry.)
I have been talking to one of my friends about this new sense of grief — grief for my younger self who had direct resources (thanks, mom) so that my symptoms weren’t obvious, grief for who I was and who I wanted to be. I thought I’d be working at a movie studio right now, or something, but I never got to do any internships to lead me towards that path. I feel like I’m going through five hundred stages of grief instead of the typical seven. I’ve mostly felt the guilt, anger, shock, and depression the most. My friend told me that this grief is normal and that it’s valid to feel like you’re not yourself.
I really don’t feel like myself. It’s strange, it feels like I’m looking at myself in the mirror every day and thinking “Hey, bitch, who are you?!” I’ve been feeling more nostalgic than usual lately, going through old photos as I used to, and thinking back on past relationships with people. I wonder: how the hell did I get through that? Or, ah, that explains it. It’s started to frustrate me when I sit at work and try to work on something, but I can’t. It made me mad before, but it feels worse now that I know why. It’s like there’s a part of my brain that loathes being helped, that absolutely hates it when I realize that I need assistance in some areas.
Honestly, it’s made me want to fucking die sometimes, if I’m being honest. With everything else going on in the world, dealing with this on top of it all has felt like the icing on the proverbial depression cake — because I don’t feel like myself, I feel like my past self was a “fake,” and yadda, yadda, yadda.
My therapist and I have come to name this feeling “Goblin,” which works for me, because that’s what this grief feels like, a stinky, bald goblin that just wants attention, and not in the best of ways. It constantly reminds me of most of the things I hate about myself (this list has shrunk significantly, woohoo), and tells me that dealing with my neurodivergence and mental illnesses is just a burden too much to bear.
It is a lot. It’s so much sometimes, and it feels very heavy to write this out, too. Sometimes, I want to take a god damn carnival hammer and play whack-a-mole with the little Goblins in my head.
However, my therapist sat me down (well, virtually), and asked me: what do you think Goblin really wants? I said what I immediately thought: attention, to not want me to do things that would help me. And she prodded me further and asked me what I thought Goblin needed, what could help Goblin get out of their little cave and see the light.
I sat there, my ring light making me feel all-too hot in my sweater, and said, in a stupid little voice, “Reassurance. A hug.”
Reassurance. A hug. Two things I — and Goblin — so desperately needed. Hugs are hard to come by because of the pandemic, but reassurance is there if you seek it out.
I am starting to properly reach out to friends one by one, starting to be more candid about what is going on with myself; I’m making Goblin slowly come out of their stupid cave. I’ve been met with kindness, empathy, and support, which means the world to me. It helps to hear that what I am feeling right now is justified, that I am someone people care about, and that I’ve been treading opposing currents my whole life only to find that is just how my brain works.
For now, I’m letting myself sit in my grief, but with the knowledge that I will eventually come out of there, and that I need to be much, much kinder to myself and allow myself to feel these feelings because even though I’m not sure about who I am yet, I know that I am worth something to others.
Very often we are kind and empathetic to others going through similar situations, but not kind to ourselves.
I really am not nice to myself, sometimes, but I’m learning to be. It is a radical act, to be kind to all parts of yourself, even the stupid little Goblins.
