Why I Write

Between this blog and posting Facebook statuses, I've been warned many times about the dangers of sharing too much on the internet. These warnings are often increased beyond those that most hear as in my chosen career as a teacher, I'm under increased scrutiny by the public. This is the reason that with many social media sites I limit what people can see as much as I can. On Facebook I even have a narrowed "Trust" list that I've selected over the years, had to narrow at times when people have lost my trust, and have recently opened up as I learn to trust more people again. I recognize that blogging is more open. Anyone can randomly run across my blog even when the link I post on Facebook can only be seen initially by some of my friends.
But in recent months, as I learn to open up to people again, I feel particularly haunted by comments made in the mental health programs I've been in. A therapist in my first treatment program who said that we shouldn't post about our struggles for the whole world to see - those things should be saved for only our inner most circle of support. A chaplain in my current treatment program warned me against posting personal things on social media as I should figure out if a person is mature enough to handle it first, and I'm only opening myself to ridicule if I share my struggles with people who can't handle it. Other discussions in my current treatment program have warned against oversharing as this is a sign of having poor boundaries. While I can see where these warnings are coming from, in my case, I disagree, and I feel like it's about time that I share the reasons why.

1. I write because it's therapeutic. I process my thoughts and emotions by writing. When I find myself upset, whether it presents itself as anger, anxiety, or depression, the most effective way I've found to sort things out is by writing about them. I write about what situations have brought me to that point, and I try to sort out what has made me upset, why it is valid for me to be upset, and how I can move away from being upset. By the end of most blog posts, Facebooks statuses, or journal entries, I've calmed down and am able to move on, at least to some degree.
   
2. I write to find support. For me, having social anxiety means that I fear people seeing my imperfections to a point that they'll abandon me. I often fear that if I reach out to a particular person, that they'll see me as someone who is too negative to stay in their life or too much of a burden to stick around. The place that I feel the least fear reaching out to people is online. I've rationalized this as "if I write something online, people have the choice to read it, and they have the choice to respond." Once someone responds, I know who I can trust and reach out to (though, in the past, I've often still feared reaching out to them). While this is something I'm working to move past as my sole coping mechanism, it's been a fantastic tool for me in my journey. And sometimes, simply reading a comment, seeing a "Like," seeing the number of views climb, or even knowing that if particular people read my post they'll be praying for me is all I need as a reminder that I am loved.
   
3. I write because I CAN. Writing is one of my talents. This is hard for me to say so directly because I still fear that it my sound arrogant, but I can back it up with the fact that many people have complimented my ability to put my struggles into writing. I have been gifted with the ability to explain my struggles in writing in a way that most people can understand, and because God tells me to use the gifts He has given me to spread His love, I do.
   
4. I write so that people know that they're not alone. I recently discovered that anxiety is the most common mental illness faced by adults in the United States, and that social anxiety is the most common of the anxiety disorders. This came as a huge surprise to me as, at least during my formative years, no one talked about anxiety. Lots of people talked about depression, many people talked about OCD without understanding its full meaning, some people talked about Bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but no one talked about anxiety, and social anxiety, especially in its generalized form, was just becoming recognized even by those in the psychiatric profession. When no one is talking about their struggles with mental illness, it's easy to feel like you're this strange person experiencing something that no one else has experienced, and between feelings of isolation and the thought distortions that often cloud the minds of people battling mental illness, it's easy to feel like you're this weird person who's somehow separate from every other person who's ever lived. One of my favorite things about being in group therapy has been the number of times that someone shares about an aspect of their mental illness that they fear no one will understand and then looking at at least half the people in the room nod their heads and/or proceed to share their own experiences of the same thing. Not everyone reaches a point in their struggle with mental illness to wind up in a mental health treatment program, so I like to think that writing is a way to reach out to people to let them know they're not alone - maybe it'll even prevent them from reaching a point so low that they need the extra help.
   
5. I write to help people understand their own struggles better. The thing about mental illness is that, like many diseases, there are symptoms that are common, but some people's symptoms present differently. One of the reasons that it took so long for my anxiety issues to be diagnosed was that, along with the fact that social anxiety is a relatively newly recognized anxiety disorder, it was a long time before I had any symptoms that people recognized as relating to an anxiety disorder. In fact, I'm fairly sure that the symptoms that led me to be diagnosed with depression were actually symptoms of anxiety (though I definitely have had my struggles with depression). It wasn't until talking with the psychiatrist at my first mental health treatment program that I made the connection between what mental health professionals call "crying spells" and my anxiety - for a number of years now, I just recognized that when I felt anxious about a situation, I cried. My crying spells date back to high school, but when most people see someone that can't stop crying, they generally label said crying person as "depressed," not anxious. For a long time I thought I was just overly sensitive and would somehow grow out of it. I eventually realized that the tears were triggered by situations that were anxiety triggers. But it wasn't until recently that I had a name for them - "crying spells" that were a symptom of my anxiety. Two other of my anxiety symptoms frequently associated with depression are a complete lack of appetite, an inability to fall and stay asleep, and feeling tired all the time. Each time I have a therapist appointment, I fill out both depression and anxiety questionnaires - for a long time my therapist would simply calculate the score for each and comment on how my anxiety was getting better, but we still needed to work on my depression; at the same time I would sit there thinking "What do you mean my anxiety is better and my depression is still bad? I feel hopeful and generally positive, but seemingly everyday social situations still terrify me and throw my life out of whack!" It was just at my last appointment that she looked more closely and talked about how the questions where I had rated high levels of occurrence were more related to my anxiety than my depression. Not everyone who is struggling with mental illness is working with mental health professionals who can recognize their symptoms - and with the less common ones, it's easy to convince yourself that mental illness isn't your problem, but it's nice when you can finally find someone who can give you a name to the weird experiences that you keep having. And they can help you understand when you have a problem. For instance, we so often think of "suicidal thoughts" as meaning that a person wants to and/or is making plans to kill themselves, but those are only active suicidal thoughts. If your having thoughts of being better off dead - that you wish you'd fall asleep and not wake up or that some accident will leave you dead - those are suicidal thoughts too; they're called passive suicidal thoughts, and they can be just as dangerous. I didn't know that such a thing existed until I read a blog post about depression last fall, and it was right around that time that I realized that I needed to take time off of work to take care of my own health, and though I haven't managed to track that blog post down since then, I am forever thankful to the author.
   
6. I write to spread knowledge. Way too many people who haven't experienced mental illness don't understand it. While it's something that you can never fully understand unless you have experienced it, the ignorance goes far beyond the nuances that can only be understood when you've experienced it. Depression is more than sadness - it's a feeling of utter hopelessness that can make you feel like the most horrible person in existence, that a difficult situation can only continue to get worse until it's hopeless, and/or that leaves you feeling like there's no point in even trying to do anything anymore (even if anything means getting out of your bed to use the bathroom). Anxiety goes from mere nervousness to being so nervous or frightened that it completely takes over your mind to a point that how you live your life is continuously affected. Social anxiety is more than being shy or introverted or socially awkward - it means that, either in specific situations or across all areas of your life you feel like everyone is watching you and judging, and you start living your life in such a way that you can avoid any situation that might trigger this fear. OCD is more than wanting things super neat/clean or wanting things to be a particular way - it means that wanting things that particular way controls your entire life to a point that doing them differently leads to things like panic and/or an inability to move on until things are done that particular way. People with mental illnesses are not "crazy" or "weird" or "abnormal" - their struggles in life just happen to be with mental illness; everyone has their own struggles, for some of us, one of those struggles is battling mental illness.
   
7. I write to help people who don't struggle with mental illness understand and support the people in their lives who do. I wrote before that living with mental illness is something that you can never fully understand unless you've experienced it. I don't mean that as a judgement - it's just like I'll never fully understand what it's like to live my dog's life. If you aren't battling mental illness I cannot and do not blame you for this; count yourself blessed that this is not another struggle to add to your own pile. It is simply my hope that if I write, you might be of better support to those of us who do struggle. I can try to help you to get a better glimpse of the world through the eyes of someone battling social anxiety and/or depression, and I can tell you how people have supported me so that you can at least have a toolbox of ideas of how to support the people around you that are facing similar struggles. We're not all the same, but it is my hope that if I can help you understand me, I can help you to begin to understand others like me.
   
8. I write to promote awareness. While we increasingly talk about suicide prevention, the rest of mental illness struggles get left by the wayside. It is my goal to help show that mental illness is more prominent than people realize and to help people recognize mental illness in themselves or the people around them. If the information isn't out there, how can people be expected to know about it.
   
9. I write because I believe that silence only perpetuates stigma. Mental illness is such a deeply personal struggle that it can be hard to talk about. Added on top of that is the judgement of people who believe that people bring mental illness upon themselves and/or refuse to do what they need to in order to make it go away. When you're struggling with something that's too taboo a topic to talk about, it's easy to feel a deep sense of shame for it, which, in the case of mental illness, makes worse the things that you were already feeling. I know that not everyone will feel comfortable being as open as I am, and I'm not asking people to share more about themselves than what they are comfortable sharing. However, when people's first thought about discussing their own mental illness or the mental illness of another is "How do I keep this quiet?" it only perpetuates the idea that there is something wrong with talking about mental illness, and if you can't talk about it, how can you get help?
   
10. I write to help eliminate stigma. Because mental illness is something that happens within people's thoughts and emotions, there's often the belief that they should be able to control and stop it. The fact of the matter is that it is an illness that people can manage but cannot eliminate or control. But because it's mental illness rather than physical illness, people with mental illness get treated differently. When people are fighting serious physical illness and/or injury, the other people in their lives surround them with support - they bring meals, spend time with them, ask no questions about time off needed from work (and, where allowed, donate sick days); even when it's a chronic, lifelong issue that can be managed after initial time needed for intensive treatment, no question is given to their ability to gradually resume normal life activities, and no questions are raised if it takes longer than originally believed. Too often, people battling mental illness are deemed "incompetent," "weak," "lazy," etc. It's not the truth. It's not okay. And it's my goal to stop it.
    
11. I write to prevent people in the future from having to go through the same experiences that I have. Too many times in my life the systems that were supposed to support me failed. My high school, my college residence life, my colleagues as a young teacher. Two of them failed because they failed to understand my social anxiety and depression despite my attempts to advocate for myself. The reason for the third is still unknown beyond a knowledge that at least one person who was asked to help me never did. But, in this day and age, none of them should have happened to me, and it is my mission to do all that I can to prevent anyone from having to deal with them again. Because in our world today, there is no one who should present mental illness symptoms beginning in elementary school and not be diagnosed until college, and there is no reason that a person with mental illness should be denied needed accommodations (especially when simple) and/or being deemed as somehow "less" because of their mental illness.
    
12. I write to give you hope. It's been a long journey for me - between 5.5 and 6 years that I've actively sought mental health treatment, and nearly 15 years before that when I didn't understand what was going on. I never quite hit rock bottom, but I've come close more times than I've often admitted. And if you're in crisis mode right now, I know that these words may not mean much to you right now - I too have been in a place where I wondered if it would ever be possible to experience happiness for more than fleeting moments if it all; I wondered if the only thing my future held was misery equal to or worse than what I was already experiencing in the moment. Don't believe me? Take a look at my previous blog posts, especially from last fall. I could probably add some even worse Facebook statuses to the collection. When mental illness takes over your life, it's hard to see the possibility of anything better than where you're at right now, but it can get better. With the right treatment, it can get better. One of the greatest blessings of being in group therapy for most of the last 4 months has been seeing so many people go from completely hopeless to being smiley much of the time. I've seen people go from having constant active suicidal thoughts to having no suicidal thoughts at all. And to those who don't struggle with mental illness themselves but know someone who does, don't give up on them. It takes the right treatment and a lot of hard work, but it's possible. If it's someone you're close to, help them find resources, even if those resources make them nervous. On the first day of my first intensive group therapy program (which was a partial hospitalization program for those familiar with the terminology), I was terrified and convinced that group therapy wasn't for me, to the point that one of the nurses later told me that she thought they'd have to tie me to the chair to keep me there the first day; I now see it is the best choice I've ever made because it set me up to be on track for today. It took me 5 years to find a treatment program that worked for me; keep looking for resources - don't lose hope.
    
13. I write ONLINE because the internet is a powerful thing. It seems that at least weekly I run across a post on my Facebook News Feed where someone is trying to show teens how quickly things can spread on the internet in an attempt to deter them from oversharing. The truth is, there are some things that really don't need to be shared - naked selfies, nasty words directed at another person, etc. The internet is a powerful thing that shares things beyond where we intend them. As adults, we spend so much time focused on how the internet can be dangerous, perhaps in an attempt to offset adolescents inability to recognize the real dangers that we know are out there. But when we focus only on the dangers of how information can spread on the internet or how interconnected the internet is, we too often forget that we can use those same things as a tool for things beyond trying to prove how dangerous it is. If I only journaled, wrote notes to friends, wrote a print article, or even wrote a book on my anxiety struggles, the information may not spread to many people, and it would certainly take much longer. When I write online, the word spreads quickly, and to accomplish all that I want to, I need it to spread quickly. If I only wrote in print, I would also miss out on the connections that the internet provides. I can't even count the times that I've found an article or blog online that has helped accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish, and for all those things I am thankful. I feel connected to people I've never met. Other times I find new connections with people I never expected - I've grown closer to family members, I've found encouragement in people that I once considered acquaintances and now consider essential members of my support system, I've reconnected with friends I thought I'd long lost close touch with. The internet is a powerful thing, and I'm choosing to use that power for good.

So to all those who think I shouldn't write, I hope that I've at least given you something to think about. It's true that there might be negative consequences for me someday - there are some people/institutions/things that I haven't had the highest opinions of in my writing. My openness online may close doors of opportunity down the line (though, if what I have to say in full closes doors, I don't know that they're doors I want to walk through in the first place). But if sacrificing some things for myself can help accomplish what I want to for more people than I know, it's worth it.
My favorite devotion centers around the question "What is the meaning of life?" and answers the question by saying "The meaning of life is to, like a mirror, reflect the light of the Son into the dark places in the world." I write to be a mirror, to reflect God's light and God's love into those dark places.