I logged on to twitter this morning.
With tears in my eyes from waking up with utter anxiety and feeling as if I was in an enclosed room that was shrinking faster than my self esteem and closing in on me like a tight pair of jeans…
I saw someone post that it was World Mental Health Day.
Not sure what that means, but I’ll assume it is to recognize that mental health exists and to bring awareness and acceptance.
Awareness
and acceptance.
Imagine that.
It is hard, however, to imagine the unimaginable.
It is hard to fathom what you do not understand.
It is hard to accept people who are different…
But you know what is harder?
Calling your dad from across the country because you started cutting yourself with some nail scissors.
Wearing tons of bracelets to cover up your fresh wounds…
An even harder phenomena is contemplating whether or not you even want to wear bracelets to cover up these wounds….
These open cuts that you’ve made to pry yourself open so people could look inside of you and maybe see your inner beauty…
Maybe see who you truly are.
Or loving to go out to eat minus the going out and the eating part.
Who I am is not the makeup I decide to wear that day or that letter on the inside of my shirt.
But people see that.
Who I am is not the girl in the Christmas card wearing the dress I feel awful in.
And although pictures haunt me like no horror film ever could, I smile.
People see that.
Mental Health Day is an every day thing for me.
Its a war that I got drafted into without any training or notice.
I wasn’t given a uniform, so not many people know I am even fighting in this battle.
But I was given protection.
Protection that took me a while to utilize, or even identify for that matter.
So imagine me in this war, with no protection, no uniform, and no allies.
And the only weapons I had, I was using against myself…
Plot twist.
I found that I had more people on my side than I had originally thought.
I found that not everyone fighting a war wears a uniform.
I found that it is a true waste to use all of my energy going under attack against myself.
This war follows me from crying on the bathroom floor to going downstairs and saying, “I’m good, how are you?”
You can’t be your biggest ally and your biggest enemy, for it is far too exhausting and rather contradicting.
It’s confusing and harmful and hurtful and quite frankly, you don’t need all of that combustion in your life.
You’re fighting a war, here!
The last thing you need is another war within the war you’re already fighting.
So… choose.
Close your eyes, and look at yourself…
and choose.
