Living with my mental health issues
By: Joni Webber
Tags: Mental Illness, Anxiety, Depression, Mental Health, Borderline Personality

Most days it’s hard for me to just pick out, well I’m depressed or if it’s another issue causing the depression. For me my depression, borderline personality disorder, anxiety and fibromyalgia are usually intertwined all the time. Most of the time I have a difficult day then I’m usually experiencing all of these things at once it’s not like I can say okay well today I’m just depressed, or today I’m very anxious, or even today I’m personalizing things way too much which is one of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder. With that being said and living with the symptoms intertwined everyday all the time I can better tell you what life is like for me. How I learned to cope with and deal with the daily stressors that happened, whether they be good or bad.

I have learned ways to allow the feelings to happen but not let them ruin or control my mood for the rest of the day. Not that I’m very good at it and some days they do ruin my whole day and put me in a sour mood or just throw my whole day off. I usually know within the first few minutes how my day’s going to go. I usually have about a half an hour to an hour that I would be able to work myself into a better mood by doing some of the things that would put me in a better mood. There have been times where I just wake up grouchy and some days it’s hard to get out of that grouchy feeling. I often warn my family when I’m in one of these grouchy moods so they know to just leave me alone, because I have the tendency to explode or at least feel like I’m going to explode. The worst thing I could do is explode on my family so that’s how I’ve learned to give them a warning so they know to just let me be until I am ready. Oftentimes I can put on some headphones and listen to music or affirmations or even just my playlist to help improve my mood.

Even though I have had the past few weeks or months of nothing but fantastic days. Where I feel fantastic and I’m in a great mood and just doing things that make me happy, being productive, staying busy and keeping on top of tasks that need to be done. There are still times where it just takes one small thing to send me into a frustrated, irritated, depressed mood. The thing I have learned is the longer I allow myself to feel those feelings and be in that mood the harder it is for me to come out of it. I have been working on something that my counselor has talked to me about, which is allowing myself to feel those feelings and then to let them go push them aside and move on with my day. When she first told me this I told her it was easier said than done and I was right. However she was also right because I can’t let the little things that don’t go my way ruin the life that I want to live. So now onto the good stuff that I do in a day to keep me from being a moody, grouchy, irritated, depressed person. The first thing I do when I get dressed. I apply makeup to make myself look as good as I can so that I can feel better about my appearance. I often check my emails, send happy texts to my sister telling her to have a happy day, I’m put on YouTube and I either put on something right now it’s Christmas music because it’s happy that plug in the Christmas lights. I put on the morning affirmation which puts me in a good mood and gets my positive energy flowing. By the time I get done with all of that it’s time for breakfast. After breakfast I start working on my various projects and my to do list which I’m constantly tweaking throughout the day. All of which require lots of my time but also allow me to be creative. I am just learning to do editing on my videos most of my videos that I have posted so far have been just raw videos and I haven’t really edited them at all. I then work with Creative Cloud on some kind of creative something-or-other seems like lately I’m running out of ideas on what to do to be creative about. I often get up about every hour and a half and move around the house picking up trash or tidying things up just to stretch my legs and get the blood flowing again to sitting for too long really bothers my back. I listen to music everyday on my playlist. I do watch YouTube videos everyday. My favorite ones to watch are clothing haul videos for clothing by watching a few gals who are around the similar size.I don’t really watch a lot of TV because I find that I get bored and more depressed. Sometimes it is difficult to stay out of bed and function like a normal person should. This is my struggle with depression and other health issues.