Lived Experience Forum

[Acanthiza]

Just making a place where I can put all my meandering thoughts and remembrances and feelings. For some reason it feels good to be writing things down in someplace where someone else might see it. But! I don't actually expect anyone to read what I am writing I am just happy for it to be here and it can be safely ignored, I will definitely be raving away here.

Well funnily enough I don't have the energy to write anything at the moment, my eyes are closing on their own but I had to at least make a thread for later or I might be too anxious to do it any other time.

I suppose I can explain the title a little. I read once an interpretation of the concept of the wyrd which is fate but fate that can also be influenced by past and future events. You can even feel the ripples of your past and future self making choices. Well it might have all been wrong / I misinterpreted it but I liked the concept, that we can change things and we are connected to our future and past selves.

OK I can hear a bat flying outside, I am going to sleep.

[SkySeeker22]

@Acanthiza

Thank you for being brave to share your thoughts and feelings in this space where others have the opportunity to read and respond to what you have written. 

It's great that you have started this thread for yourself and when the time comes and you do have the ability to write more here I'm sure your "raving away" will resonate with others too. 

Its great that you have started this thread for yourself to have a space for you to get what you need out of your head, and have the ability to later reflect on these.  The "wyrd" concept really resonates in the idea behind the thread.

Warm regards

SkySeeker22

[Acanthiza]

Been thinking quite a bit about my childhood. I have always had anxiety, I don't remember a time I didn't have it but I didn't realise I had it until my... early twenties? To me it was just life, that is just how it was. The unfortunate side effect was assuming that everyone else felt the same thing, and I was a failure for not dealing with it properly. Anxiety is still a dominant force in my life but I have learned so much I feel completely different. It always felt like an iron bar, and trying to go against it felt just like ramming into a solid iron bar would. It took a lot to change my thinking enough to function even slightly better. Communication or rather miscommunication is a massive anxiety trigger for me. Bad enough that I couldn't order food over the phone for the longest time and would absolutely dread when I needed to make a call to someone. I still need to psych myself up for it and I only used a drivethrough last year because they terrified me (anxiety makes absolutely no sense!)

Getting sidetracked, I wanted to tell some tales of being an anxious kid. I would get nightmares pretty regularly and believed some wild things. For example I somehow got myself into a catch 22 where for some reason if you thought monsters weren't real they would definitely exist and get you so I had to believe they existed logically to be safer. Another good one was thinking dead people walked around at night and would not hurt people that were sleeping because they thought they were dead, but would definitely harm an anxious child that couldn't sleep. At one stage I remember being afraid that a skinless man was stalking me, at another that I would hear footsteps behind me in the bush and thought if I turned to look I would be killed.

Alright that pretty much gives the idea of just general anxiety, socially was extremely difficult. I read somewhere that the smarter you are the more capable you are of hiding mental illness and the worse outcomes you get typically. It certainly seems true in my case. I learned fast to hide my "weakness" and desperately tried to have some appearance of normalcy. At the same time I was super not aware and completely in my own head. I remember basically learning how to function socially when I was out of school like an alien learning from observing other people.

Anyway anyway. So I was very anxious as a kid and my brother basically tortured me. As an aside I have a terrible habit of comparing my experience to others. Other people have had it so much worse than me I feel guilty complaining. I'm trying to be better about accepting that actually some things were bad and I deserved better. So anyway in retrospect some of what my brother was doing was pretty much psychological abuse, even if it had the veneer of "normal" older sibling bullying, whatever that is. Maybe for a less sensitive kid without overbearing anxiety it would be fine but for me it definitely wasn't and taught me early to shield my actual emotions to not trigger a response from others (in this case my brother getting worse and worse because it was clear he was getting to me)

hmmm, maybe later I will outline the kinds of things he would do, and also how my parents were but this post is long enough I think. Again just rambling away writing things out as a form of processing I guess. I hope I am not being annoying, even though I realise I am being annoying by constantly saying that. Circles and circles in the brain, I learned to deal with the worst of that at least.

[Acanthiza]

Been thinking about the past and the future, which is kind of the whole thing of this thread. Stuck in your head just thinking about things. I've been alone all my life, never had a girlfriend, caused me a lot of grief through my teens and early twenties especially. Still an issue I suppose but as I get older it just feels more hopeless. For quite a while I have been telling myself "It's OK you still have time" and that I am getting better and better with the anxiety. I suppose that is still true but it is so hard to meet people, and I have gone off in my own crazy direction it would need to be someone pretty unique, odds are low is what I am saying.

Le sigh. Also worrying about my future, don't know how long I can keep doing a pretty brain dead job, even if I barely work. But I don't know how to get out of it. I have been accused of not applying myself a lot in my life and pretty much judged for not functioning but it isn't easy out there! I don't have it in me to try and apply for jobs, especially ones with a lot of competition, and mental illness means the resume is not exactly impressive. I've always wound up in the easiest jobs to get which is not the best for the old brain or the self confidence. Even then I don't think I have even managed a year working anywhere. Except the farm I suppose but that was only during uni breaks.

My family thinks I should make money through writing but I think they have a pretty skewed perspective of 1. My ability and 2. Exactly how easy that is. Weird to say I did... write a little book of short stories. Putting it up on the internet was one of the hardest things I have done in my life, it didn't do much but it takes a lot of work to promote things. The thought of going out and marketing it, and then doing the same thing again in the future is way too much for me.

Anyway. Just a lot of pointless worrying which I usually try and avoid but it has been more intense lately. Sometimes I feel like I don't have "real" problems, after all it is all in my head! What's stopping me from doing all these things? Well I don't think that way so much anymore through a lot of work basically. When I had bad hypomania I would think I had all the solutions and that I had overcome those obstacles and, predictably, when the manic period was over I would feel a hundred times worse.

OK, rambling and complaining. Where better to do it than here I guess. Now to worry about going to work without enough sleep, and where I am going to live now the house has been sold, and how out of shape I am and... so on and so forth. Exhausting.

[Tilz]

@Acanthiza  Hey you have a great view on topics. I love it. 

[Acanthiza]

Thanks @Tilz , just spilling stuff out here. It is nice to have a place to write things.

[Acanthiza]

Since @Xibon asked I will post an old poem here. Trying hard not to manage expectations, lol:

A run

I run

the patter of my feet

match the beating of my heart.

It’s dark

but that’s never bothered me

I pick my path above the breaking waves.

Putting feet between

fallen shells and tumbled rocks

barely engaging my brain.

I run

along a strip of twilight

sand rushing at me

gaining definition and disappearing

slipping out of frame

To the right is the ocean

a dark abyss

peopled by creatures

that do harm to man

but I do not fear it

the tumbling waves bring comfort

and the solace of indifference

I run,

and my mind’s subsumed

into the cycle of my legs

into every burst of breath

mixing with sea air

To the left is the city

silhouettes and streetlights

pale orange, or strident white

peopled by people

and I do fear them

for the potential

of mockery or scorn

I run

away from how I was

fresh thoughts pumped with fresh blood

the old to slowly drain

and be refreshed by my lungs

I run

and breathe the salty air

and feel my muscles heat

its dark

there’s no-one else around

alone I find my path

between the buildings and the sea

as I run I think

and I truly feel alive

-----------------------------

I have a few old poems kicking around, mostly about mental illness. Sometimes it helped me to think about them and write them down even if they might not be amazing. I lost a lot on old hard-drives and things, found some I don't remember writing at all. Anyway try writing poetry if you feel like it! One of my poems was almost completely just one word over and over haha, it still counts.

[Xibon]

@Acanthiza thank you so much for posting this.

It's beautifully written and I'm incredibly impressed with your artistic use of language. I am simply in awe. 

Your expressive content feels almost painterly, and you describe the setting, your emotions, and the bittersweet melancholy and exhilaration of running as a form of emotional regulation.

It reminds me somewhat of the old movie 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' (which was also made into a song by Iron Maiden).

Thank you for sharing ❤️

[Acanthiza]

I am tired but don't feel like sleeping yet. I guess I will continue with my random writing about my life.

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Content warning! Suicidal thoughts/intentions and self harm.

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I can't really remember exactly what I wrote before and I am not reading all that now, lol. I think I pretty much outlined the anxiety I felt as a kid and in general. One thing I forgot to mention is that I self harmed as a kid. It is probably a fair insight into how my psychology isn't the best through my reactions to that. Because it was something that happened in my life and not someone elses I think these kinds of things: that it wasn't "real" self harm, well I won't go into detail but that is something I have thought. That I wasn't really a kid so it wasn't a big deal, since I would've been 11/12, possibly later I honestly do not remember exactly. Largely that I am faking how bad it is / how mental illness has affected me in general.

OK I really need to say that obviously this thinking is completely wrong and that any self harm is not good and especially for someone so young even if they aren't a little kid. But when it comes to thinking about myself I can't make "excuses", I have to be as hard as possible. Well I have slowly challenged that thinking but am still not all the way there by any means. Still carry a lot of unwarranted guilt and make unfair comparisons way too much. Even now it feels like I am lying somehow to mislead people even though what I am writing is 100% the truth.

Alright so that was no good, I don't feel comfortable saying exactly why I was self harming as a kid but it wasn't something external... largely. Mostly my own thinking, maybe some things I had internalised in retrospect. OK enough being vague, I will move on. I already stated how my anxiety could be isolating and it definitely gave me a different perspective to most people, along with just being weird in general, who knows where mental illness ends and I begin anyway. Well I didn't understand a lot of basic social things going through primary school and highschool. I wouldn't learn a lot of those things until well into uni when I made a concerted effort to overcome my ignorance. I am talking basic things like taking an interest in people, finding common ground and all the normal social interactions that most people take for granted.

I was bullied quite a bit in highschool, in retrospect some of it was probably people just wanting to interact / get to know me but I didn't have the tools to see it and respond correctly. Some people were definitely just arseholes though. I still made friends that I have kept to this day, I was just talking to them not long ago since I started a sunday games thing over the internet during covid to keep in touch and we have continued doing it.

So what was I getting at? Oh yeah high school. I'll spare you a lot of what was going on with me, the main point is that I had my first suicidal ideation at about 15/16. It took the form of a real existential crisis. Is there a content warning for existential dread? Anyway I became obsessed about what happens after you die to the point where I thought there was no reason to live. I tried all kinds of thinking to get out of it, some of it certainly manic since I tried to invent a new god to believe in at one stage 😅

Finally I "solved" my crisis by acknowledging that no-one really knows what will happen and I will find out after I am gone, no need to rush the process. I do distinctly remember no longer being afraid of death though, which is a strange thing to feel for someone with anxiety. Insanely afraid of talking on the phone, but if there is something life threatening and there is no chance of me being judged because of it I won't be afraid.

So so, I get through highschool, it turns out my dad wanted to leave months ago but my mum convinced him to keep it a secret until I was out of school so they both were lying to me through the HSC (actually he first tried to leave about the time I had my existential crisis, probably not a coincidence that I felt emotionally unstable)

I'm the youngest so both my siblings were out of the house and I was the one that mainly saw my mum being completely emotionally devastated. I didn't want to make things worse for her ever so it was a long period of hiding my emotions and how bad things were for me. Terrible time in my life, my dog that I had since I was 5 had to be put down, she was old anyway but my mum couldn't look after her alone, my other dog got put up for adoption. I was off on a shitty trip with a school friend before uni and I remember getting lockjaw from the stress (also from an injury from starting a fight and having my jaw popped out when I was 17, still clicks to this day and is a good reminder not to be violent) I couldn't brush my teeth, not a nice time.

So off to uni after that! Well that is probably enough, even this sketchy recount is way too much writing. I'll skim over uni later I am sure, pretty important since it was definitely the absolute worst time of my life... so far! Ehhh I am joking I know I won't get that bad again. My twenties definitely weren't great, and there is so much expectation during them, pretty messed up in some ways which I will get to.

Usual disclaimer I don't expect anyone to read these blah blah blah. But what if... someone did? 👀

Hopefully I wouldn't be judged harshly. OK time to shut up now until the next time I write a whole lot of nonsense.

[Acanthiza]

To break up my depressing reminiscing and as a reminder to myself... my life is so much better now. But I am greedy and want it to improve even more. Anyway I went to a bipolar support group yesterday and I think I did not realise how much I needed to talk to people in person and have them understand me. I didn't even share that much but I was on the verge of tears a lot. Also... I look to other people to validate things for me. I won't believe my problems are real and not just me being a failure until someone else says they are. Which means I have to share them first!

Alright maybe doesn't make any sense, but it makes sense to me and now this post is here as a reminder to myself. I am feeling a bit rough currently which is often the way, bouncing around, but on the whole I am very positive about things improving.