Anxiety and Depression are absolute motherfuckers.
I said what I said, and don’t plan to take any prisoners or take it back. These two diagnoses are complete assholes that never go away, not in any permanent sense at any rate. I was formally diagnosed in 2008, but I knew something was going on in my cranium for most of my life.
Growing up Gen X was different, and well documented by others elsewhere. In my case, most of my mental health issues were kept at bay because my family and my friends always kept me busy. Maintaining the mask of being normal, of being sane around them forced me to hide what I was going through. I didn’t want to afflict myself on them, so I carried the pain, kept a lid on it until I couldn’t hold it anymore.
2008 was when I received my formal diagnoses; Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Depression. Not long after my son was born, things fell apart and kept crumbling around me. Anxiety made sure I couldn’t do anything about it while depression berated me for failing to do anything about it along with every shortcoming that brought this situation into existence. I was ashamed and embarrassed for being weak, for being unable to move forward with my life, for being a waste of time. I fell into the trap of comparing my worst days to everyone else’s best days, which fed into the cycle.
Everyone else around me had their lives together, and I was a fraud. I couldn’t find a job much less be a successful human, so I withdrew from everything, everyone I knew. I was so afraid of being seen as a failure; in character, in mind, that it never occurred to me the real failure was not trusting the people around me understand what I was going through.
My withdrawal from life didn’t end with family and friends. I also fell away from my hobbies; playing Dungeons & Dragons, painting miniatures, going to movies, playing video games, fishing hunting, playing tennis. They all fell by the wayside and I cut myself off from everything I loved, which compounded my illness.
I’m closing in on six years since my last hospitalization. I’ve made a lot of changes over the past six years, chief among them moving to Canada. This past summer, I launched a third YouTube channel, and started camping again, something I haven’t done since I was 12 or 13 years old. I’ve committed to producing more content for all three of my YouTube channels (Uncommon Karma, TwoCowsGaming, and John_From_WI), writing for both of my blogs (uncommonkarma.com and twocowsgaming.com), and finding time to live my life on my own terms.
Anxiety is still a motherfucker trying to keep me from being who I am. Depression is the asshole that tries to take me out of being present and reminds me at every turn how insignificant I am. Me? I’m the asshole that doesn’t listen to either of them anymore.
A couple weeks ago I went on another camping trip out to the Highlands. Like previous trips, I brought my fly rod and spinning rod along with me however, this trip was different. On my way home I decided to stop at one of the many streams along the way and try a couple casts, to see if I was even interested in fishing anymore.
All it took was one cast.
The bait barely hit the bottom of the stream and I had a fish on. A nice brook trout. 25 minutes later six more brookies had been landed, and another half dozen or so had shaken the hook before I could land them. My body remembered what anxiety and depression tried to obliterate from my identity. The rest of the ride home was spent trying to justify “just one more stream”, or “one more lake”, the way it should always have been.
Don’t let Anxiety take away who you are or who you want to be. Don’t let Depression convince you that you are insignificant, that you don’t matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. You deserve to be who you want to be, you do matter, you deserve to be happy.
What you do, who you are, are the most important things in life.
Don’t let them go.
Regards, John
Uncommon Karma 