How I Overcame My Mental Illness in 2023
Let’s be honest, are we really ever over our mental illness? It’s a journey, not a destination, however, 2023 was a complete switch for how I handle my journey with my anxiety, phobias, panic disorder, and even depression. This piece focuses on my struggles with anxiety and panic disorder.
I’m a really strong person. Like, really strong. I have seen the depths of darkness, where I could’ve turned to self-medicating to numb pain, or sat and felt sorry for myself, or even worse… but I didn’t. I never have. Have there been moments? Sure. We all have those moments, we’re human. Once those moments are over, you realize you have to gather yourself up off the floor and continue on with life. Every time this happened to me, as exhausting as this was, it fueled me to do even more research, more reading, soul searching, and exploring how I could keep myself from reaching the depths of despair.
This is no small feat and you will be tired, overwhelmed, and want to give up-- don’t. Nothing ever came from easing through life like a breeze. It takes grit and determination to get what you want, and when you’re fighting against yourself and the voices telling you the worst of every situation, you need to be ready to push back and fight for the freedom you deserve in your life.
Life started to change in 2023 when I was scrolling through TikTok (not a healthy habit, I know) and I came across one of my favorite influencers for all thing’s mental health, Lily Sais. She is a recovering mental illness sufferer herself, plus a certified school psychologist and shares multiple videos on how she has overcome her panic disorder, health anxiety, driving anxiety, and anything else that she’s had to learn to live with and recover from. One topic in particular that drew me to her was depersonalization/derealization (DP/DR). This is a side effect of dissociation from panic and anxiety disorders, where your brain checks out and tries to escape the fear it’s inevitably creating, leaving you to feel like you’re living in a dream state and completely out of control of your own mind and body. It’s absolutely petrifying if you’ve ever gone through it.
I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to learn how to overcome this side effect because it has affected me since I was ten years old. Inevitably, I developed a mild case of agoraphobia, not being able to travel anywhere for fear of my panic disorder coming into play and leaving me in a complete state of fear whilst also being outside of my comfort zone. It’s debilitating and beyond scary and had controlled my life for decades. I didn’t want to change just for me but it was everyone else I wanted to change for. My poor husband couldn’t go on a vacation because I was so fearful, even to the point of planning an entire trip, just to cancel it in the end. Plus, I was done with the judgement from others about the way I handled these moments and the way I felt I had to live my life.
It wasn’t until Lily made a TikTok one day and she put DP/DR into perspective for me; “this happens out of love”, she said. It stopped me in my tracks. The trauma my panic disorder had caused throughout my life had been debilitating. It taught me how to despise myself. Living in a cloud of hatred you can’t escape from is something I truly can’t describe. Day in and day out, just hating yourself, it’s exhausting, there really isn’t any other way to put it.
However, when Lily mentioned love, I physically felt something change the pathways in my brain. I spent my life hating myself for something I thought was out of my control but it was the simple shift of mindset that changed everything. My brain wasn’t trying to ruin my own life, it was trying to protect me because it loved me. I had a faulty nervous system and it saw danger where there wasn’t any so it actually did its job by trying to protect me.
From the moment this shift happened, it was like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Instead of always trying to escape myself, I felt myself turn inward and embrace myself for the first time in my life. Instead of resisting life with hatred and always trying to fight an invisible force and inevitably exhausting myself, I felt myself relax for the first-time in my life. I can do this, I thought, I don’t hate myself, I have more love than the average person. Which was the truth. A lot of the discomfort we feel is our own minds and bodies trying to protect us; our ego immediately putting us on the defense to protect us from hurt feelings or danger in our environment.
My mind and body were willing to go the distance for me; to suspect danger where I didn’t even see any and protect me. Again, a faulty nervous system at its finest but nonetheless protecting me from danger--what a beautiful thing.
It wasn’t until I realized this and shifted my mindset to a more loving one that I was able to live outside my comfort zone, and we all know what happens when we live outside our comfort zone: we see a part of the world we never thought we would and we learn that it’s exactly where we needed to be the whole time. I was able to get on a plane in 2023 and see my husband achieve things I’ll never stop being proud of, meet some of the most beautiful individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and I was able to do things I never thought I’d be able to do, like hike over six miles in the freezing cold rain through the Canadian Rockies and see water that was a color of turquoise I never thought existed. How lucky am I?
In addition to shifting mindsets, this shift led to other thought processes that helped me realize just how lucky I am. I was again scrolling on TikTok (I know, I know…) and I follow an account that belongs to this guy Taylor who had been documenting his wife’s battle with ovarian cancer. I had been following them for some time and had unfortunately watched her decline as the cancer metastasized through her body. This past summer she took a turn for the worse and the day had come that he posted a photo announcing her death. She was thirty years old. They had millions of followers who all felt the same thing: devastated. This sounds really morbid and depressing, and it is, but that account did exactly what it was intended to, it brought awareness not only to the disease but the advocacy of an individual as a patient, and to learn to live life to its fullest. I’m only five years older than her and I was being given opportunities this woman would never get to see, and I was worried about a little discomfort of DP/DR?! I don’t think so. I would take the uncomfortable feelings of my own mind and body trying to protect me than the pain and anguish that entire family had felt for a number of years. I am beyond fortunate. My mental illness
Whether your mental illness has been caused from trauma, some kind of internal or external stimuli, it tends to teach us that we are the ‘bad guy’, that there is something wrong with us, when in reality, there is nothing wrong with us at all. We are simply reacting to the way our nervous system is internalizing a situation. Bad things happen to good people every single day, but that doesn’t mean we have to hate ourselves for it or define our lives by what happened to us.
In 2024, I’ll be trying to live more in discomfort. It has taken me years of researching and learning about all these different feelings and why I tick the way I do to realize that I was reacting to my reality with anger, hatred, and resistance. It wasn’t until I accepted what happened to me and accepted who I was that I saw it from a point of love, and for the first time a positive in my life. I was able to learn from this and move on with my life; no longer a prisoner in my own mind. If there is anything I hope for, I hope that if you are suffering, you start to see your reality from the perspective of love and as a positive in your life.
All my love,
Jen xx