Trying to better word this / process my feelings, will delete this block once I get there
- I don’t know how to function without grief
- Every good moment in my life has been permeated with a sense of fleetingness and genuine dread that has been impossible for me to evade
- I wonder how much of this is because of my Catholic upbringing, where I had to barter any time for joy. It didn’t just instill this need for human beings to labor to find worth, but that any act of pleasure was inherently sinful and must be atoned for
- The word ‘high-functioning’ feels like it erases my experiences
- Having to constantly offer proof of suffering
- Talking to my school’s mental health service is like proving that I’m not mad enough to kill myself (so this case isn’t urgent) but proving that I’m still incapacitated enough in day-to-day life
- And I can’t even prove this right because I seem way too fucking normal and make jokes and shit
- The way mental health off days are treated like something you heal back from like a cold, not like “this is a terrible dip from something I’ve been facing for decades and everything will be back to normal in a few”
- Does being so visible necessitate this constant need to show proof of my pain
- Every act of healing I attempt to go on will be compared against this vessel of myself at my worst, the one that I’ve existed in for decades. It feels like I have to completely destroy my old self / find new spaces because I am so so afraid of being that dying person again
- Hatred of this trope in the first place. A drastic change and others sensing ‘this isn’t the real you’ when I know myself more than anyone and have been choosing what to present. New every day; wonder how much of my life is just choosing how incrementally to let other people in on this since people can’t process drastic change