confessions of little turtle

this may sound strange but i am proud that i have a mental illness and have survived this long....i didn't kill myself and i did do some good things after breaking down....i want to continue talking with others about our mental illnesses....it is the most interesting thing in my life...why is there such illness...what is causing this....and how are we being mistreated....i yearn to talk with others....i yearn to be supportive of each other in our quest for some rest and peace and security....

It does not sound strange. I am 63, and sometimes I invoke this feeling to pump a little life into a tough day....still here, did do some good things, can access good moments/memories with a little effort, I worked, I had children, I still have things I want to do....whether I do them or not....we'll see...
Even some of the unpleasant (leave out the truly dark) memories have something to hold. I remember being in the hospital, in school years ago, not being able to feel my body from the waist down, completely panicked, moving on some sort of autopilot, and hearing the instructor describe me as "so calm"...I wanted to put a note in my pocket saying "Don't think I didn't suffer"---the only real thought/feeling I was aware of hours on end was that I was going to die/flip out, and if I died people would say "At least it was quick, and she didn't suffer"----when I had my first real breakdown, I was in college, with no money, had to work, rarely slept, even hallucinated, I had two rules 1] You will go to work 2] You will not go home.
My GPA was 4.0....which made no sense to me.
I became reliant on others not noticing (though I was threatened with being tossed from my dorm for being unsociable...they didn't know I was under the covers wide awake when not in class fighting to stay in the world)---and so the day I thought I was taking detailed notes in class (to avoid the tunnel vision effects, the odd way the room closed in and the voice of the teacher was so far away) and a student two seats away leaned over and said quietly "Go ahead an leave, I'll explain" (this was an older woman who came from the community to take classes) I was freaked out, I looked down and the page of "notes" was just a crazy mess of lines and squiggles. I was years away from figuring out what the hell was going on with me....
but hey, we ARE still here, and we can still talk, care, make a moment's difference.
((((((((((((((((((((((hug)))))))))))))))))))))))....i do rant on...ah well, the mind is a mired place

you a very brave person

the mind and its many facets are truly fascinating...

even through the misery i can appreciate the brilliance of it and the enormous amount of power the mind generates..

we can be blissfully happy, while on our death bed dieing in agony...
we can be totally oblivious to pain and misery surrounding us through out the day, seeing the good things and acknowledging the positive..
we can be in total agony and feel such pain while being the healthiest person on the planet (physically)
we can walk through the day seeing only pain and suffering even when walking through the most beautiful blissful environment

our experience seems to be subjective... but who is the subject?
what constitutes a normal healthy happy experience?
what IS happy?

contemplating this one would think we could mould our perception into a pleasant experience for ourselves..

but we can only do so much consciously..? so we have to wonder what is the subconscious..
these must be our programs that we are taught.. the world has implanted in us from a young age..
and if so much is controlled by the subconscious, and they have implanted these programs to manipulate our subjective experiences.. why?
instead of instilling within us pleasant things?

can the subconscious constantly be changed? or is it something that is formed and solidified at a certain point forming what we will experience in life to come..?
is the subconscious even part of us? or within the mind? how many levels of consciousness is there? are we on some levels connected through a form of consciousness and that why our subjective experience seems to be influenced so much by something outside?

people should become more interested in the mind.. and less interested in the physical aspects of what we seem to think we understand when it is all a perception of what we create within.. each persons experience is different, so how can we objectify things and say "this is what this is" when the next person may see it completely different but totally agree because he thinks the other see's the same thing as he?

we have no idea what LIFE is
but we are thrown into the violent stream of things every day to try to survive and convince ourselves that we do...

i for one dont understand.. and am not sure why i can't control my perception or the subjective experience that i create within...
but maybe others don't have such violent storms raging within either..

they say curiosity killed the cat, but did the cat discover something that they didnt want him to know and they killed him instead?
preserve the illusion, dont free the people, keep us all chained to our own mental prison and let us believe we are free... people have become happy with this..
and maybe even afraid to take the chains off... because they dont want to be curiosity, the dead cat...

i apologize, i hope that i dont offend anyone - i am just arguing with myself..
much love... explore the mind...

sorry.. it double posted again..
i guess my internet is messing up...

no. not brave, ...

can you say more

sorry, sometimes i say weird stuff..
i guess i get into different moods sometimes, im going through a rough patch or something...

stay strong..
dont listen to everything i say..

you are important to me...you and I have a mental illness...
together we will fight

the fact that I have a chronic mental illness really drives me crazy..
I want so badly to cure myself and others..
I think that my depression has something to do with my eating...
I also think that taking anti-depressants has made my depression chronic..
I was taught that my depression was best treated as a lifetime disorder...
I now think that may be wrong for me....
I had such a hard time getting off anti-depressants...
I suspect now that it has to do with the drug not my mood disorder..
I have a moody personality but I am now questioning the chronic use of drug therapy..

I've been afraid of taking drugs. When I was really bad and went to pdoc he offered me drugs, I said no. I found a T who doesn't like drugs, or I think it would be better to say He believes we can do it without drugs. There was one point where I was particularly bad and he was considering to send me to a Psychiatrist to get drugs, but we worked through it. He said he was afraid of getting me addicted to something. It has been hard, and still is, but there is part of me that is glad I never went the pharmacy route. Some days my mind changes on that, but those are usually the bad days where I'm having a hard time.

thanks...I think drugs would have been good for me taken just for a short time..i would have liked to have had some sedation for a week or two in a secluded setting and then go back to real life....that would be during my breakdown...but people didn't know and I didn't want to tell...I made lots of mistakes...and now I cant get off my celexa...I want off

I know what you mean. I think antidepressants are rather dangerous and should be used sparingly and much less than they do. I blame the antidepressant for unleashing the BP. And I think the benzos exacerbated my PTSD.

nammu how did the benzos do that to you

Hmm how to explain without using my hands.

________-------

The first line is normal everyday baseline that everyone has. The second represents high anxiety. The benzo lowers the anxiety..at first. Then it goes up to where it was or higher.....so you take another pill to lower it. Eventually your baseline is higher than what you started with and the constant up and down of anxiety exacerbates the PTSD. If I did it all over again I would insist on trauma based therapy that taught specific copping skill for triggers and anxiety reduction. Then later regular therapy that explores the specific past trauma

Stopping by to hug my favorite Turtle ((((little turtle))))

oh what a wonderful hug.....thank you ...thank you...a big hug back...and a hug for everyone else on here

I think my mental illness has some genetic cause...not just that... but all my male cousins[7] had serious mental/behavior problems including 2 early deaths...

so did I have anything to do with my parents having me....I had no choice...
I have to live with what genes I got...
and yet my family looked down on those that had a mental illness..
it was something you either didn't talk about or you made fun...

made fun....wow..what a screwed up family...it looked good from the outside...
so here I am now an old screwed up psychiatrist...still struggling with having a mental illness...I have really caused a lot of stress on my wife...she doesn't understand...I don't think she can...this mental illness thing is not pretty...especially if you have no money

It's hard on our spouses. They just want to help but their hands are tied as much as ours are. We suffer from mental illness but they also suffer too. I often focus on myself and don't realize how it impacts my spouse. We don't like to see loved ones in pain and we want to fix it. Managing mental illness takes a lot of effort.

big confession.....I feel inferior because I have a mental illness....I cant help it...

Me too. I hate feeling "less than" or a "thing", a label.

I have been killing myself with sugar most of my life...

my first panic attack really changed my life big time....

I am a person with many health problems....I am doctor sicko...
please don't follow in my footsteps...
I always had the idea that I was special..
that **** didn't happen to me...
but it did....big time...I cant believe my thinking..
when I hit the real world I wasn't ready at all..
and I am a pretty lazy person...
always have been...and I expected to be really at the top
but I didn't work at it...you have to work at it to get somewhere
I wasn't willing to work at it but expected wonderful results
part of my depression is tied up with my own unrealistic expectations

I am so stubborn....it leads me to a lot of tension...it also helps me
I am not a winner.... and I am not a loser...I am just me....with all my problems
most people I know hide their problems....but I think they have them...
even my psychiatrist...and my wife