I think one of the worst parts about having a chronic mental illness and experiencing a range of physical symptoms and/or physical side effects from medicine is that there is never any clarity or answers. Unfortunately, most people in society have a naive belief that things are knowable. That the right doctors and right testing and right medicine provides relief. As I mentioned in my dissecting a diagnosis and medication posts, mental health professionals do not agree as to whether I have “soft” bipolar disorder, borderline personality/ emotional dysregulation disorder, plain old major depressive disorder ++ and/or seasonal affective disorder. We don’t know if lithium or lamictal or wellbutrin help and suspect prozac, zoloft, abilify and effexor made me worse and cymbalta and lexapro didn’t do anything.
I’ve dutifully subjected myself to numerous rounds of testing.
My doctors said i’ve showed signs of munir’s disease and sjogren’s disease but neither were the full set of symptoms and there are not really any effective treatment for these chronic illnesses.
Most of the painful medical sicknesses I’ve had, I’ve also had to withstand without any medicine, the kind you just take Tylenol and sleep and suffer for a couple of weeks and then full recovery takes several more months, .
People offer encouragement when i tell them the things I’m investigating, speculate as to possible causes, assure me getting answers will give me relief even though i know they’ll be no answers. There never are.
When I’m healthy i can’t even remember what it feels like to feel like shit. So it’s no wonder, my mainly healthy friends, they’ve shamed me about my daily morning nausea (side effect with meds),shushed me for trying to relate to a pregnant friend (who has legitimate grievances ), rarely offered any support i crave for my psychosomatic illnesses, when I’m so depleted i can’t will myself into action, even to buy groceries or delivery to eat, no matter how much want to and try and it feels as bad as dengue hemorrhagic fever.
When I’m sick, I feel so utterly alone.
I know my sisters care.
No matter what people say, they rarely believe me when I say I am incapacitated. They’ll suggest I’m procrastinating or unmotivated or have writers block like any ordinary person. When i say my brain is mush and i can’t focus or concentrate and i feel so tired i want to collapse, it still feels like no one believes me. The ambiguous affliction undermines my credibility.
People want answers. Closure. Definitiveness.
Ambiguity makes everyone uncomfortable.
Mystery, uncertainty.
But that’s my existence. Searching and craving concrete answers is like chasing a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But still, I feel judged, for not trying hard enough. Because mental illness makes no sense to healthy people. A medical problem should be solved by a medical solution.
Without an answer, it’s all in your head, it’s all make-believe, it’s all histrionics. Get a grip.
