Today’s another Single Man day.

I’m stuck in this funk, waiting for this:

(^this, of course, being that moment where the world becomes vibrant and colorful again)

But instead I’m feeling more like a combination of these:

I went to a counseling session today. The first I’ve been to all quarter, and it was an “emergency session.” None of the counselors at my university had any time in their schedules to see me this quarter (I guess there are more unhappy people here than I thought), so I’d stopped going. But then I found out that they all hold open slots for “emergencies” and stuff (meaning, if an RA has a resident that desperately needs mental health counseling). And since I’d told my RA friends about what happened to me last week and how I’d begun cutting again, they helped me get in to an appointment this morning.

My therapist this time was someone I’d never seen before, which was interesting (as always). It’s always weird for me to talk about my problems. Usually what happens is I try to flat out tell them stuff like how I’m feeling or why or whatever, and I think they always find it a bit strange how I’m just (mostly) open about it at first. Like, yes, I know exactly what’s wrong with me and why I’m here. I dunno. Maybe there’s something wrong with being like that. I guess I’ve made more progress than I thought. Anyway, he seemed impressed or surprised or something by my behavior. I get the feeling there was some kind of level of annoyance or disappointment in there somewhere, too, but that could easily just be me imagining it. At some point, I started to feel like maybe I shouldn’t have been there. I wasn’t exactly at risk to kill myself. I wasn’t going to. I just wanted to. There’s always a part of me somewhere inside my mind that wants to.

Either way, I figured since I was cutting again, I should probably get help, and now I’ve gotten it I guess, but I always end sessions feeling like nothing was accomplished, so I start to wonder if there was even any point in going to begin with.

Going in for therapy always makes me feel like I’m losing spoons (I mentioned spoons and my therapist got confused, so I had to explain the spoon theory to him. It was both amusing and slightly frustrating at the same time. I only said it because I was sure a mental health professional would know about that one. Guess not). I always get a bit depressed just by walking in and filling out their forms where you check the boxes and tell them how often you felt such and such within the past week. It’s like I’m telling myself, “yes, you really ARE crazy.” I suppose that’s part of the stigma that my therapist was talking about during our session. People think of mental health and therapy as bad things that you should be ashamed of going to, when in reality they are positive things and a means of growth on a personal level. So instead of buying into all that societal bullshit, I shouldn’t be ashamed of being born mentally ill (or as society would tell me, and as I realize I tell myself: being born a broken freak), but I can’t help but subconsciously buy into it. Not when telling people that kind of truth has so many consequences in the real world. Not when facing the truth means also facing the stigmas that come with it and are oftentimes worse than the truth itself.

And like I said, I feel as though I don’t get anything accomplished by going in, since there’s only 30 to 60 minutes to work through everything. A friend of mine said to me today that it makes sense I’d feel that way, since it took longer than an hour for me to develop those problems, so why would it take less than an hour to solve them? I understood, but it didn’t really serve to make me feel better (although to be honest, I don’t think anything will right now).

I’m in this state right now, at the point right now, where I don’t know why I bother with things like counseling or telling people about my problems. Life is constantly throwing shit at me that implies my life, problems, existence, etc. are meaningless and don’t matter, so to say it’s difficult not to buy into that kind of thinking is an understatement. I’m constantly cracking under pressure from things like schoolwork, thoughts of the future, and my social/love life (or, in the case of the latter, lack thereof). I’m beginning to have multiple instances of experiences where I finally feel like I’m starting to become content with myself and who I am and where I’m at in life and then something will happen to just rip all of those feelings away from me, like someone pulling a rug out from under my feet so that I fall backwards and hit my head on the floor below me. As I was telling the therapist this morning, I’ll be in this state of contentment with life, and then all of a sudden, I’ll become triggered out of the blue by something and I’ll become insanely depressed, and it’ll just hit me like a truck (or maybe I just immediately start to feel like I want to be hit by a truck) and I won’t be able to function properly anymore. It happened last week, and then again last night. I’m almost always able to figure out exactly what happened and why, but putting it into spoken words is so hard to do. I think I may have said this before, but I get the impression therapists and psychs find it weird when their patients are able to say things like, “Oh, I’m depressed because I’m lonely because I hate myself so much that I feel like I need another person to validate my existence in order to live and I can’t find anyone capable of doing that.”

I imagine if I went and straight up said that, they’d think I was lying. That, and for me, speaking words like that is what makes them, the situations I’m in and the things I feel, real; and by making them real, you ensure that they never go away. It’s essentially like having a child; by forming the words and sounds with your body and making them heard, you give birth to an idea that grows like a child. It’s always there and never dies until after you yourself physically die. For me, truly giving birth to these ideas is to not only acknowledge that I have a serious set of problems, but also to ensure that I never get better and that those problems never go away. 

The result of that birthing process, for me, is always something that look like this:

A complete emotional breakdown.

And I don’t like that. It’s embarrassing and physically uncomfortable for me. When I cry, even if it’s just a few tears at a time, my nose plugs up and I can’t breathe through it or smell anything. And when I’m done, my eyes will be completely dried out and I will have trouble keeping them open, which not only makes me look exhausted, but serves to make me feel exhausted as well. So for me to be essentially crying like people do in the movies when they have those “I can’t go on” moments, I’m essentially causing my skull to purge itself of all bodily fluids present (save for blood). There’s snot and saliva and saline everywhere and it takes a long time and a lot of tissues to clean up. It’s an altogether messy and regrettable process. I try really hard to be very calm and collected as a person, so to have these moments all the time, where I’m all of a sudden this emotional train wreck, is nothing short of irritating.

Therefore, I avoid the problem entirely by not talking about it. Of course, in therapy, you aren’t really considered “making progress” until you start crying uncontrollably in the middle of your session or have some kind of epiphany and immediately become slightly more happy by the end (depending on how you started out).

And even if I tell them about my problems, what are they going to do about them? How will they help me? I honestly don’t feel like I can be “cured” or that things will ever change. This war going on inside my head won’t stop, and the battlefield that is my mind won’t change back into a grassy meadow. Perhaps that’s just thinking as a result of the state I’m in. I don’t know.

What I do know is that sooner or later, I think I’ll have to do something about it.

I don’t really know what exactly it is that I should do, though.