That Burn

That Burn

By Sophia Bishop

A wise man told me once that the worst thing you can do is shell up, hide all your feelings inside you. Lock them away in a room, cork them into a bottle and leave them there.  Always seemed like a good idea to me, then again isn’t it easier to hide than to fight. He told me that, while yes it did seem like a good idea in the long run the best thing to do is to confront how you feel because that room can only hold so much before the hinges come off the door. That bottle can only store so much before it cracks and everything comes out all at once threatening to knock you over like a tidal wave of emotion.

But such is the life of someone living with manic depressive disorder. And honestly living with it. Many people say they are, claim to suffer from a form of depression but those of us who actually do are able to sit on the side lines and watch these people and be just, amazed at their sheer sense of self righteousness. Let me tell you. 8 times out of 10, you do not suffer with it.  You are sad, everyone gets sad once in a while that doesn’t mean you have some sort of psychological disorder. Let me show you a glimpse of a mind that is plagued with it.

Inside the mind of someone with Manic depressive disorder (MDD) everything that is real seems fake and that which actually isn’t real seems like the single most real thing in your life. You can jump from happy to sad in the space of a millisecond. You will get these waves of over whelming anger from no where that make you want to destroy everything around you.

Someone I loved very much, more than I, him or anyone around us might have realized, died when I was still quite young. That’s what kicked my MDD off, for my older brother (a ray of light in my dark life.) It was being in so much pain for so long with no one wanting to help him. For my mother, probably my best friend in the world, it was her horrific child hood, where as my Aunt hers didn’t kick off until the birth of one of her children. My Doctor told me once that MDD, it is always there beneath the surface but it wont usually show itself until something traumatic enough to make us retreat inside ourselves and be faced with the overwhelming blackness, happens.

That’s what it was for me. For a long time I felt completely lost, like no one around me actually saw me, even though looking back I can tell that they did. My family saw the pain I was in but were at odds how to help me. I cant say I blame them. I think I was at odds on how to help myself as well. But when you suffer with MDD, even with a whole world of people around you, somehow you can still feel so completely alone.

It wasn’t until I met a very special person that I started to feel so less, isolated. And so that person became my whole world. See that’s another aspect of MDD a form of jumping from one extreme to the next to prevent yourself  from looking at probably the only person who honestly needs your attention, yourself. I put everything I had into this one person who to me was on a pedestal so high they might as well have been god. But what I didn’t realize was that while they were up there so was I, and when everything seemed to go wrong, that person got sick, suddenly I wasn’t enough. I slipped.

I hung on the edge of that pedestal looking down at the plummet that would shatter me and stared up at the person I had worked for so long, so hard to save. Yet they didn’t reach out. Didn’t offer me a hand to help me to keep me from falling, they stood and they watched until my fingers bled, my wrists broke and I fell.

The fall seemed to go on forever, it was like one of those movies with the never ending wells, you know the floor is there somewhere something cannot go through the earth, there is a bottom somewhere. But I fell, and I fell and i continued to fall and I didn’t think I would ever hit the floor but eventually…I did. And I shattered.

But this time, those who had surrounded me were so far away and the person who could have picked me up, was no where to be seen. Looking back I realize they were there I just couldn’t see them at the time.  But in my mind, because I couldn’t see them a feeling started to well inside my shattered body that I had not been faced with in a long time, resentment, hate…distaste. I began to loath that person, but really…it was myself I loathed.

There I lay, broken wondering if I would ever be able to put myself back together again….then…there he was.

It was like a ripple effect, one piece, two, three and so on and so forth. But when you have been shattered, sometimes some pieces fall into such tiny fragments that no matter the love, no matter the wish they cant be put back together and you are left with empty parts of you that long to be filled.

That is what someone with MDD is forced to face every day. Overwhelmingly, suffocating feelings of missing parts of yourself. Feelings of being abandoned by people you fought so hard for. Watching them love other people fills you with a sense of disgust, hate unlike anything you have ever felt before. And you come to find yourself sitting alone, because being alone is easier than sitting with that person, being alone is easier than admitting you dont hate them for loving other people, that’s something you love about them but rather admitting that you feel neglected.

Because while you, yourself may love someone else with parts you never thought would be alive again, you always put your own feelings aside for that person and yet feel they cannot do that for you, how do you admit that when to you it seems so selfish.

So you sleep, because your tired but no amount of sleep wakes you up.

You cry because you hurt, but no amount of tears quells that pain.

And you scream, praying someone will hear you, but no one does because you are not screaming on the outside, you are screaming inside the bottomless well that is your mind.

And it is devastating. And confusing all at the same time.

I have to deal with that every day, no one knows because no one gets close enough to see what is behind the face. No one gets close enough because you can’t bring yourself to let someone let you fall again.

And the pain is overwhelming, but you have to live with it. Because giving up is never an option.

“As I was going up the stairs,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish I wish he’d go away.”