Author: Abhila Shamunjal
What most people think is, people who suffer from anxiety and depression can wake up one day and decide just ‘to get better.’ That one fine day we can wake up, sip up that hot coffee, smile, and try to deal with it like a professional.
Pardon me for giving a reality check, but it’s not true. None of us can just decide to get over it, and it just does not happen.
Anxiety or depression is not something that we can choose to have on a Monday morning and try not to have on a Friday evening. It’s not something that can turn right off from where we started. It never was, and can never be a voluntary thing.
Guess what? If it would have been that simple, we’d never dwell in our pool of mind just to keep people around us in comfort. We would never complain to have that chest ache or mind-boggling constant worrying thoughts.
IT IS NOT OUR CHOICE.
There are some days when we feel totally free and away from it. Like we have actually flee-ed away from the thing that causes us intense worry, and then boom! It creeps in and shows up at the most unexpected and unusual hour, without any prior notice. It jumps in, stays in for too long shocking us to the core over and over again. With all these things, I don’t mean we are sick or we are abnormal. It’s just that we are not normal like you all.
We can’t just choose to be ‘happy’. Cant just chill with a cigarette in hand thinking our minds is at rest. No. It’s not that easy. Anxiety- doesn’t come with a pause button in our life. Depression- doesn’t have a shut-down button on our brains. And unfortunately, none of these two have an eject button too.
I would like to report all those people out there who are constantly trying to help us, please stop saying ‘just relax’ or ‘control your mind’. You guys are just downplaying our illness by saying these three words.
Would you tell someone with a broken leg to stop overreacting and just keep running with their level of speed? Would you tell a person who’s suffering from a chronic disease to just sit back and smile? Are you saying our illnesses are something you can’t take seriously because it’s all in our heads?
That’s right, it’s not the real illness and YES ITS ALL IN OUR HEAD, that is the biggest problem. You can sense a hot dish and try not to touch it, but you cannot ask an anxious person to stop worrying about it, because that’s what they have already done in the first place ever since they encountered the situation.
Stop telling us to smile when we don’t know how to do it. Stop telling us to choose that booze-playing upbeat music and forget about it. Stop telling us what to do unless you haven’t stepped in our shoes and our mind, all at once. Because, you will never know how does it feel to be plagued and restricted with a dark cloud on our heads, and a heavy soul in our heart that follows us every time trying to find a way to escape, which seems it lost in a game of puzzle who doesn’t know it’s exit way.
So, before you try to make us feel better all by saying “take a chill pill” please remember all this is mental illness. Not an outlook or a stage of our life for which we are fighting or crying for attention.
Trust me, if we wanted to or would have the ability to, we would have sat back and chilled! We would prosecute the entry of our invalid and over-traumatized thoughts from entering into that dangerous territory built inside our head. We would opt for that ‘chill-pill in such cases, as fast as we could.
-sincerely,
A girl who’s waiting for a magic wand to rewind the time when she actually started to feel anxious about her anxiously occurring thoughts.
