I am Here. I am Now.

Yes I know this is also a song by Dave Matthews Band. As soon as those words came into my head I also thought of the song. I have it linked below.

I have so much to say about my mental health, but I am too afraid to share it. This morning I wrote a blog post and I thought I was ready to post it, but then I just couldn’t. It is 1,200 words long. It started out talking about the DSM and then moved into a therapy modality that I’ve experienced.

I am too afraid to write in detail about my mental health experiences. Interestingly one reason is that I don’t want my experiences to be reduced to yet another person talking about their mental health struggles. Been there, done that. Haven’t there been confessional memoirs? Aren’t there blogs or websites or Facebook posts about this already? Why do we need more writing about this? As long as I hold my experiences inside of me and keep them close to me I can make myself feel special for having survived them, for still being here. But if I share my experiences and discover that lots of other people have also survived similar and much worse things, I’ll somehow feel less special. Less strong.

I know so many people gain strength from feeling like they’re not the only ones going through something. That’s supposedly the benefit of support groups, that people feel less alone in their struggles. But for me that doesn’t help at all. Why would I want to find out that someone else is struggling just as much as me? It’s bad enough that I’m suffering. Why would I want to hear about somebody else suffering as well? Then I have to cope with the emotional weight of my own suffering and their suffering on top of mine. I don’t want anyone else to experience what I have, and it doesn’t bring me comfort to know or hear that others have!

Apparently that’s a fun feature of being a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), that you tend to be very attuned to and strongly affected by the emotional states of others. In the past I have tended to take on or absorb the emotions of others. It’s not healthy for me to be around people who are sharing their challenges. I’ve heard the phrase trauma dumps. And it was not described as a positive therapeutic situation.

The other barrier is that I feel like I only have one chance to put some of these things out there. Once I have revealed something about my history, it’s out. I can’t fine tune it or curate it better or pull it back and hold it close and nurture and comfort that hurt. That hurt is out there for the whole world to witness and examine and inspect… and maybe even judge.

So much to say, so much to say, so much to say, so much to say.