So my current situation is that i have a baby, his dad, and our two best friends living with us. Not the typical american dream. Many people tell me we should get our own family a place but i am NOT paying for that shit, especially when splitting rent with friends is much easier.
We dont bother each other. When we would normally text we just pop into each others rooms instead. Its very cool for them to occaisionally interact with my baby as well, it makes us feel like family. Im pretty sure if we all had our own places we would be extremely lonely
Normalize living with friends! Normalize found family! My son’s birth relatives suck. My birth relatives suck. These people are family
before i had gotten close with ex-catholics i was under the assumption that “catholic guilt” was mostly about sex, or serious topics.
but i was naïve. it’s apparently about every positive experience. enjoying a meal? you’re so lucky, children are starving. spending your day off cosy in bed? wow, so selfish, homeless people are freezing to death.
every former or present catholic i’ve met has a very obvious anxiety disorder and it’s so painfully not a coincidence.
My talented friend Mercy wrote this poem detailing her experiences as a Samoan American. She can be found on IG and Twitter, and here’s a bonus link to one of her many spoken word pieces.
I think an extremely important part of mental health awareness and intervention is acknowledging that no, help isn’t actually always available. Or the “help” that is, isn’t actually helpful.
When I was 22 I hit a wall. I called the suicide hotline from my car so my roommates wouldn’t hear me crying. I explained that I could barely shower, feed, or dress myself. I needed immediate intervention.
They asked me if they could send an ambulance for me. They wanted to hospitalize me. I explained that I was a week away from finals. And graduation. If I were hospitalized, I couldn’t graduate. The inpatient program also didn’t allow phones or visitors, and I knew how disastrous it would be for me to lose contact with my family support system.
I didn’t need to be hospitalized. I needed daily solutions. Simple ones, even. I needed a few precooked meals in my fridge so I could use my menial energy to keep my body going. I needed a doctor to contact my school and ask if I could have some extensions on my class assignments. I needed a few excused absences so I could catch up on my lost sleep.
They told me there was an intensive program that allowed residents to live in an inpatient care facility and get daily help with tasks like eating, therapy, medication, and showering, while still leaving for work and school, but it cost $30,000. I told them half the reason I was calling them was because of my financial pressures and fear.
In about 10 minutes of back-and-forth, it became clear that they had no true solution for me. I could go into the hospital and an inpatient program which would interrupt my entire life, and which I knew did not create very good results and had traumatized some of my own friends, or, well, I couldn’t even go into debt for the other program. They didn’t accept any new patients without half of the cost upfront. So it wasn’t even an option.
No therapist or psychiatrists or social workers could fit me in for 3-8 weeks.
So I said thank you and hung up, emotionally spent. I felt utterly empty.
Sitting in my car I realized I had a choice, to live or to stop. Nobody was going to save me. Nobody was going to help.
So I went inside, and I cried myself to sleep, and when I woke up I still hadn’t made a choice. So then I did. I chose to live no matter how terrible, just in case things turned around down the road.
It was unspeakably difficult. I didn’t shower. I barely ate. I either slept too much or not enough.
But I did survive, and a year later I got with a therapist who started to make things a little lighter for me.
I still struggle now, but things are usually much better, and I’m glad I’m still here.
I just think it’s important to acknowledge that for many people, especially in rural areas, and for people without money, which is most people, that the “help is always available” line feels hollow. Because often times it isn’t, actually.
But that doesn’t mean there will never be.
Overall, we need to build an entirely new system for mental health support in this world.
But for now, ask yourself or your friend in crisis what might make things a little more bearable until help actually is available.
A meal? Emailing a professor? Clean laundry? What might make things a little lighter?
I know that on the very brink, things like this may seem totally pointless or trivial. But if you can’t stop yourself or someone else from falling, sometimes the only way to save someone is with a softer landing.
Hey, I just want everyone to know that what the world is going through is a legitimate trauma. Full on. It fits the “official” definition and everything. This is a traumatic event.
That means that it’s normal and expected to find yourself using coping mechanisms that you thought you were done with, to find yourself numbed out, to be on the verge of constant panic attacks, to be acting impulsively and compulsively, to engage in very old patterns, to have wide swings of every behaviour especially regarding sleep, food, and sex.
The research shows that people in a traumatic situation who most often develop PTSD (which I would say we are all at risk of) or have their existing PTSD/C-PTSD intensified are folks who cannot or believe they cannot do anything about it the trauma event.
So, if you are able, look for a place in all of this where you can feel that you can do something. Harass a company not doing enough for its employees, sign a petition, check in on a neighbour, set alarms to remind yourself to eat (it’s on my own to do list for today), intentionally spend time every day doing straw breathing to shift your sympathetic nervous system response. You don’t have to become some social media hero, or spend all your time improving yourself. But if you can find something that makes you feel like you can do something for yourself that decreases the trauma load on you, it will greatly benefit you going forward.
If anyone has any questions about this, my asks are open, or you can message me. (I cannot do any online therapy, I am happy to share information about trauma itself and any tools that I know)
It is okay to reblog this.
- Registered Clinical Counsellor, with 10+ years specifically working with trauma
As we are coming up soon to the one year anniversary of all of this (today is the first day of Wuhan’s lockdown), I just want to encourage you all to remember that anything you’re struggling with may become heightened in the next few weeks/two months. I know the exact day my household went into isolation/lockdown, and essentially still is, and I am preparing myself for the potential of a very bad week or so then. Your experiences may vary but be aware of the possibility of:
- increased irritability - poorer sleep - heightened startle response - increased vigilance - inability to concentrate - nightmares - muscle tension/overall pain - dissociation - increase of any mental health symptoms you may struggle with
The best advice I have for when the time comes is to: remind yourself that it’s a normal response around anniversaries of difficult things; give yourself as much slack as you can around things that aren’t necessities; give yourself as much soothing as possible (blankets, heat, gentle movies/music, whatever helps); keep yourself grounded in the present; remind yourself that it will pass because no feeling lasts forever.
I wanted to make this post so that if some of these responses do happen to you, you’ll know why and thus decrease any panic/worry/spiral you may have about what is happening.
and if you need another excuse to accept this, we’ve had lots more trauma than “just” a deadly pandemic, too, like what’s happening with the Texas power grid, what the USA has been going through since the January 6 insurrection, and what those living in Russia and Myanmar are contending with
