The Loneliness of Relationships

I've never dated "normal" girls, as mainstream society would dictate them to be: that's not to say that I'm averse to dating people who are neurotypical but I think there's something to be said in people with mental illness tending to gravitate to partners that share the same problems.

Dating mentally ill people, as someone who has a mental illness, seems appealing. They empathise with your struggles, they can understand your past and help you (and themselves) in bettering one another. But the challenge in dating someone within the same bracket as you is that, when you're both at your lowest, your relationship can become detrimental to your overall mental health.

Now that I'm older, I certainly take offence to the term "crazy ex girlfriend". My partners were never "crazy". They were hurting. And in those moments where I couldn't help them, and where I was emotionally affected by their decisions and words, my friends were there to back my corner...but those friends didn't understand the dynamic that I was faced with.

Dating as a mentally ill person is horrendously isolating. Once one relationship has terminated, you carry that hurt and regret with you into the next one. You might feel like you have to alienate yourself from talking about how you feel, for fear that your new partner will react the same to the old one: you don't actually believe that they're going to be like your ex but learned behaviour dictates that they might be, so you feel a need to close off from it.

Then there's the heartbreaking scenarios in which you are open, you are loud about your experiences and how you deal with things, and then the other person continues to try and love you despite knowing you're hurting them. I used to believe that "love conquers everything" but, the sad truth is, it doesn't. You cannot love somebody's mental illness away, as much as you want to.

A problem I've been facing for the last few years is meeting new people, potential romantic partners, and making sure that my boundaries are set. Sometimes, I yearn for love more than I care for myself and wellbeing: that's a dangerous road to walk down, especially if you're in recovery. You have all of this emotion that you want to share with someone else, but that can become tiresome for them, which might translate as rejection to you.

I'm both blessed and cursed to be hyper-empathetic. I understand my affect on others, therefore I take precautions when going into something new. In doing that, however, I know I'm not being as honest as I should be: that's not to say I lie but it does mean that I am unwilling to be 100% truthful to others (an emotional scar carried on from childhood, unfortunately).

This doesn't just apply to romantic relationships. This is evident in purely sexual ones, platonic ones, even co-habitual ones. How we perceive others is inevitably tainted by the perception of ourselves, which may in fact be warped by depression, anxiety, ED or other variants of mental illness. It's hard to love others when you cannot love yourself, or if people in your past have demonstrated the ideology that maybe you, in your imperfect, mentally ill state, is unlovable.

I think there's an importance in understanding who you are before getting into a relationship. You don't have to love yourself, obviously, but I believe you have to know who you are in order to share that with somebody else. Heartbreak goes two ways: to refuse to acknowledge your own problems and affect on people in favour of producing love is to emotionally neglect whoever comes along next. It's selfish, in a way, to start dating without showing who and what you are because there might come a time where your partner realises and can't stand to be with you anymore: not because you're a bad person, but because they are not emotionally stable enough in themselves to support you.

I do often think I cannot be loved because of my mental illness but I objectively know that I am cared for by many people, and although I'm still single, I know there'll be a time where I won't be: I just have to continue to work on myself and eventually someone will come along and appreciate me for who I am, imperfection and all.

- K

Am I Awake?

You can hear noises: the shrill screaming of your neighbour's 5-year old, the lawnmower down the road, the cars driving past your flat. You can't open your eyes, though. Why can't you open your eyes? You're awake, aren't you?

A typical byproduct of mental illness, especially depression, is troubled sleep. This ranges from insomnia to over-sleeping to everything in-between. Simply put, you don't sleep like everybody else and you haven't done in years.

Today, I woke up at 9am. My alarm went off and, shortly afterwards, my housemate came in to let me know he was off to work. I was drowsy and non-responsive for the most part: I faintly remember groaning and waving a hand to indicate that I'd acknowledged what was going on. Then I fell back to sleep. In the hours following that occurrence, I would regularly 'wake up', except I couldn't open my eyes. I could hear everything around me, I could smell the detergent on my pillowcases (and my terrible morning breath), but I just couldn't bring myself to pull my eyelids back and say "good morning, world!"

This, unfortunately, is a typical day for me. I'm conscious, I can feel that I am, but I cannot wake up. Sometimes, I'm obtusely aware of this and I'm defiantly refusing to get out of bed, usually due to the mindset of 'why should I bother, nothing good will come of me getting up'. Sometimes, I can't control it, and I end up actually getting up hours and hours after my alarm has actually gone off with no recollection of where I am or what's going on.

You might be thinking "isn't that great, though? I always want to get a lay-in!"

It's not great. You're dehydrated, your mouth feels as rough as sandpaper, your eyes feel heavy, your brain throbs as if you've experienced a hundred headaches all at once, you might feel bed sores on your side from where you've been laying down too long, your legs are stiff (maybe even cramped), your stomach feels twisted, you feel sick. 

What some of you might not understand is, like insomnia, over-sleeping has a horrendous effect on your body. You aren't better off because you got more sleep than average: if anything, it produces the same feeling as not sleeping at all. But don't go falling down the WebMD rabbit hole because you'll end up being told that this will give you heart disease and kill you.

So, what's the solution? 

Well, it's complicated. Sleeping varies from person to person. They say eight hours of sleep is the average needed for adults to function, which isn't necessarily true. I know people that function on five hours of sleep per night and function fine, others that require a minimum of ten hours before they can do anything. I personally have found that I need at least ten/eleven hours a day, otherwise I cannot do anything once I'm up or it takes me longer to get things done.

My recommendation, as vanilla as it sounds, is make a routine. Set a time (or a rough estimate) to get into bed, listen to something that's not strenuous on the mind (I listen to rain sounds or a podcast), set multiple alarms to gradually pull you out of your sleep, having a morning ritual (mine isn't healthy but I get up to pee, have a cigarette and make myself a cup of tea).

It doesn't matter if people call you "lazy". You're accommodating for your body and what it needs. When I was a teenager, my family constantly mocked me for sleeping so much, claiming it was something every teen went through: it is, but at the time I was also diagnosed with "dysthymia", which prevented me from being able to get out of bed every day.

Some of us function in the daytime. Some of us are night-owls. Either way, we need sleep in order to reboot ourselves and rest, to gather our energy to be used for the following day: that differs from person to person, especially for those of us that are neurodiverse. There's no shame in going to bed at 6pm or 3am, as long as you're doing it in a way that benefits you. You know your body better than anyone else.

- K

It's A Hardknock Life

I love October. As both a die-hard fan of horror and an openly queer person, October is the month I often refer to as 'Gay Christmas': it's a time for weirdness and expression, something I celebrate in my everyday life but even more so around Halloween.

It will come as a surprise to nobody that I was excited for October this year, yet it didn't turn out the way I hoped it would. In fact, October was possibly the worst month of 2019 for me.

Let's rewind. In September, I managed to grab a job as a retail assistant. Up until that point, I'd been unemployed for three years (following a very embarrassing incident at my last job combined with an enormous mental breakdown and relapse into alcoholism). So, knowing I had finally managed to become employed and be self-sufficient gave me the boost I needed to keep on truckin'...yeah, that lasted all of two weeks.

Unfortunately, I spent 2019 so focused on completing my degree, so focused on worming my way out of the debt university/bills had put me into, that I had neglected to take care of my mental health. I suffer from "severe depression", which means that I cannot function in the same way that a neurotypical person can: I often refuse to eat, get out of bed, shower, speak to people and generally live like a 'normal' human being because of my mental illness. So suddenly plunging myself into a job, even a part-time one, was probably not my brightest idea.

Nevertheless, I put on that godforsaken uniform, put on my determined goggles and set forth into the ludicrous world of capitalism and minimum wage. For a while, I was fine. In fact, I was surprisingly good at my job, something I hadn't expected going into it. My colleagues were wonderful and understanding people and, for the most part, the customers weren't that bad (I'd heard many horror stories of retail prior to getting the job). 

After a fortnight, however, I realised something was wrong. Getting up became more difficult, holding back tears whilst stacking shampoo on the shelves became impossible, and I would regularly have meltdowns wherein I'd shut myself in a cubicle upstairs to have panic attacks. It became so bad that, on my penultimate shift, I found myself looking down at the box-cutter I was using to unpack laundry detergent and thought I'm perfectly content to drive this thing through my face. 

On my last shift, I had such a psychotic break that I spent two hours in the staff room, bawling my eyes out, struggling to breathe, panicking over my situation. I needed the money but I knew in my heart that I wasn't able to do it anymore. And with that, I resigned. 

Quitting my first job in three years was one of the toughest decisions I've ever had to make. There was a gigantic risk in doing so, because I needed money to self-sustain and pay my rent, but I knew Universal Credit was an option and, despite it completely crushing my pride, I knew that I had to do it that way.

Fast forward to the week I've just had. The council are messing myself and my housemate around, sending me in circles for documents and evidence that I either can't access or is incorrect. My university kicked me off the surgery registry to make way for new students and I'm having a difficult time re-registering elsewhere because of documents and my medication (I take sertraline, an antidepressant) has run out. Plans have been cancelled, hopes have been crushed, and I'm left sitting here in the evenings wondering why I'm even trying anymore.

Here's the thing. I am naturally hard-wired to be despondent; pessimism is the drug I've been taking since birth. So, to an outsider, my situation probably looks like an utter shit-show and you'd be amiss if you thought I was handling it well (even with the aid of medication). But it's times like these that I think it's important to take a step back.

Severe depression clouds your judgement. It's incredibly hard, sometimes impossible, to remain objective in the face of dire situations. It's a tool that you have to practise and utilise when and where you can, though most people I know tend not to because it's "too difficult". I understand that but look at it this way: there's no harm in trying, and if things still go wrong, at least you can say you did everything you could.

That's how I'm looking at October. Things aren't resolved right now, and they probably won't be for a while, but I take any energy I have and I push it into problem solving. That might mean some days I don't leave the flat. It might mean I forget to eat lunch, then dinner. It might mean I smoke entirely too much and scratch my throat. However, I'd rather take those punches than the feeling of failure, the feeling of defeat or acknowledging that my mental illness has bested me. 

I wound myself up so much this week that I became physically ill. I felt vulnerable, angry, confused by the state of this country's system and its lack of empathy towards people like myself. Yet I know sitting and complaining will not change my circumstance: it will only add fuel to the melancholic fire that's spreading across my brain. 

My tip for the day is simply look at the little things. I finished a jumper today: it's ugly, it's ill-fitting, it's terrible crochet but I did it. I phoned various people to sort out my situation, and despite not getting the answers I needed, I can say I tried because I phoned them in the first place. I got up today: that in itself is the biggest accomplishment you can ever achieve in your day-to-day life.

Find something. Anything. The smallest thing, whether that be making a cup of tea, texting your friend, watching one YouTube video and spacing out for the rest of the day. Nobody is making you run a marathon all at once and don't let anybody push you into doing more than you're able to.

- K

Introduction

Hello, dear readers.

My name is Kirsten, I'm a 23-year old writer and I have a mental illness. The purpose of this blog is not necessarily to give advice: I am in no way a licensed therapist, nor am I an expert in the field of mental health. I have a story, one that I regularly share with my Instagram followers (@vulgarqueen) and now, I'd like to share with you.

If you're not aware of me, I'm a freelance writer that mainly dabbles in the world of the horror genre and poetry, and mental illness has played a large part in both of those respective subjects. My pain is my art, and I try to make the best of being mentally ill by producing content that entertains rather than depresses.

However, I know a lot of my audience is not neurotypical. I have heard so many personal stories, so many struggles, and I've equally received so much feedback from people thanking me for being so openly honest about my own life. That is what prompted me to start this blog: not for myself but for those of you that feel alienated, confused or just downright mad. 

I probably won't post on here too often, only when I feel it's necessary to share something I've gone through: for weekly updates, I encourage you to follow me on Instagram.

With that being said, welcome to Cottonhead.

- K