Hard To Love

Hard to Love

This post is not meant to diagnose, treat, or save you from mental illness, if you or someone you love is in danger, please get help. You can text HOME to 741741 to be connected with a crisis counselor. I personally have.

http://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts

I can imagine that in my condition I can be hard to love. What with the constant trips to the hospital, fierce mood changes, swaying faith, codependent behaviors, and never ending need to talk to humans for support and validation. I can be difficult to communicate at times, the Bipolar makes me erratic and the medication makes me confused. For a girl who at her baseline loves to talk and communicate, being seen sitting with a loss of words can make me appear to those who know me as completely lost and hopeless.

It has taken me several years to find that baseline, and let me tell you, it is a never-ending journey. That sounds generic at best. But maybe it doesn’t for you reader: maybe this is the first time you have ever heard that. “Baseline” is your “normal” who you are aside from the meds, therapy, outside influences, and uncontrolled substances that you chose to put into your body; maybe it’s even who you are with or without diet changes.

I’d like to believe that I have always known who I am. However, the truth is, I haven’t. My diagnoses have led me to completely fall apart and invert into the shell of a human that I never wanted to be. At my baseline, I am a very confident person; but the depression side of Bipolar tries to pull me down into a deep dark place. I fear the dark places, they send my brain into overdrive. I struggle and fight inside to never see the side that is suicide: a side effect of depression.

I can just imagine that with the roller coaster of emotions that I go through, it is probably hard to love and keep up with me. I have to remind myself that I am deserving of love. Maybe it’s like that for you too reader; do you ever feel like you don’t deserve the people around you? Like they could leave at any moment? In that case, you may be afraid of abandonment like me. It’s a condition called “fear of abandonment”. The condition leads you to believe that, because someone in your life previously was in and out, or gave you some serious uncertainty, that everyone in your life may leave you. (Or perhaps just a close friend, significant other, or partner).

Walking around with this fear is extremely unhealthy; it is one of the reasons we as humans develop/have anxiety. This may not be the case for you, maybe you are super confident that the people you have surrounded yourself with will always be there for you. That’s amazing! Hold fast to that feeling, that confidence is the stuff you are using to get through life. But if you ever feel like this persons gonna die, that persons gunna hate you, or everyone is going to see through your shields and decide that they are better off without you or vice versa; you probably have “fear of abandonment”. Remember that you are not hard to love.

-A Manic Monday