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Today is world mental health day... how are you really? Genuine question
(piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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[Big personal rant about the mess that is my mental health incoming. I'll be talking about heavy anxiety and heavy depression. So please be careful if you are sensitive to these subjects. Don't expose yourself to things that hurt you that you can't handle. It's okay. 𖹭]
How am I really? Well, I'm gonna be honest with my dishonesty. I would usually say meh. Because I'm too anxious to actually be opened about how I'm really feeling. Because I'm just terrified of dragging people down or having them hate me for not being well.
When I'm depressed, when I'm deeply self-hating, I don't call for help. I hide away until it goes away. Because I am too afraid that this will give people a reason to hate me. That people will tell me that I am too negative and that I drag everyone down. I'm too afraid of losing relationships, because I'm too much to handle. And these mechanisms apply themselves on the internet too. For every post, comment, or message I send, there are three others that just either never make it out or are deleted instantly by me.
I'm a transfeminine bunny-thing in her late 20's. I've been diagnosed with chronic depression and chronic anxiety only last year. Although, it is very much obvious and evident that I have been living like that since way before I was even 10. Same thing with the fact that autistic has only been diagnosed last year. For all of these, every step of the way, I've met either gatekeepers who didn't believe me, or people who looked at me and wondered how the fuck is it even possible that I have never been diagnosed.
I will never forget the look on my psychiatrist's face when I told him about the shit I was thinking about doing to myself when I was around 7 years old. Telling me that I should have been hospitalized back then. And that wasn't spite. That was complete empathy on his part. I will never forget that because finally somebody gave a shit about the kid I was for the first time ever. And yet all I'm left with is just bitterness and anger because no one gave a shit until then.
I oscillate between falling down depression pits or rising up anxiety spikes. Medications that are supposed to help that have only fucked me up more than anything else so far. My self-esteem is so fucked that my former psychiatrist described it as a form of anti-narcissism. I constantly switch between being depressed to the point of just wanting to sleep, all day, every day. Absolutely fucking hating myself to the point where I feel intense urges to just burn every relationship I have around me. Because I feel like it would be best to hurt the people who I love now, than to let relationships fester, because I'm that convinced that they're going to start hating me.
Feeling joy makes me anxious. I burst into tears when I laugh too long. I'm completely incapable of handling people loving me. I isolate from social groups out of fear of being outed. I'm reaching a point where I find myself going to sleep after sunrise every day because I am either afraid of insomnia preventing me from sleeping again or facing nightmares that I can't wake up from.
I live on income that I get for disability because I am completely unable to work because I'm just that fucking mentally ill. And that income is less than minimum wage in my country. I have to live with that and still endure people fucking seething at the fact that I'm getting that income because apparently I don't deserve it. I have problems and people and society and politicians and everyone's just telling me that no, I'm the problem.
I'm a fucking mess. That's how I'm doing, really. I'm not well at all. I try my best, I keep going. I don't have any other choice. The alternatives that my brain come up with are not worth listening to. Even at the worst, I want to keep living out of spite for all the people and institutions that would rather have me dead.
There you go. Funny thing is, I actually didn't intend to go on this tirade. It just kinda happened. Originally, I just wanted to say that most of the time I don't want to talk about it. I just say "meh" to hide that I'm cripplingly unwell. But I guess this rant is appropriate considering the post.
I am doing not so bad, not so good, so excuse me if I'm blunt/direct at some point.
First of all, I'm sorry you're feeling all this and I hope things (at least some things) start getting better with time.
Reading your text, I felt seen with some feelings of depression as I'm currently mildly to moderately depressed and already looking to get myself stable again.
But other parts reminded me of a person I love whose story also starts with undiagnosed autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. Like many ND children, they got missed, yet the consequences were pilling.
They were bullied and rejected even by adults who thought the autism or the difficulties at school were 'an attitude', so that left an unstable self-esteem that was often depleted and very dependant of external inputs (this is a core feature of clinical narcissism, not grandiosity as we coloquially understand it, so their adult expression became a mix of cluster B personality disorders symptoms). In adolescence, their family's religion started to sound less and less credible, and so started the classic path to atheism/agnosticism and anxiety about death, meaning, etc. grew (present since childhood but partially calmed by religion before). Finally, through all these stages, binge eating was a way to calm the feelings (many times without noticing all of them completely), and that led to obesity and other problems. So the list of diagnoses is big: autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disorder (dyslexia), persistent depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobia (thanatophobia), narcissistic personality disorder with some borderline and hystrionic traits, binge eating disorder, and I'm probably forgetting some. But the story is typical, very typical. ND child is neglected, gets sad with a lot of mental noise (neuroticism or however we want to call it, negative internal monologues, cluster B traits, etc.), and gets terrible coping mechanisms (and this looks different in all of us: substances, overeating, overspending, endless surgeries, sex addiction, frequent lying, etc.). A lot of trauma as a thread guiding this all. It's a spiral that starts early on.
Hurt brains sometimes are the more obsessive, perfectionist or hard on themselves. This person needed to work a lot on their self-compassion, well, still is working on it. Healing might take a lifetime, but I see they're doing better with time.
So... you reminded me of them. Many people do, actually, many ND folks. I know the book has its non-scientific moments, but it has a lot of useful information thoughtout the chapters. I really recommend 'The Body Keeps the Score' if you haven't read it. As I said, trauma is not uncommon in our stories.
I don't know if my radar is correct, but in case it is, be patient. Remember that healing our minds, our brains, takes time. Effort gets easier, but at first do as little as you can. Yes, it's enough and it's helpful.
I hope I'm not being... nosy. I hope my comment helps somehow. Hang in there.
I don't have a lot to answer to this, except thank you for sharing this. It means a lot and it's strange reading someone talking about someone else and it's feeling like they're talking about me in a lot of places. Yeah, I did relate a lot to this person. I'm glad they're still around and doing better, slowly but surely.
Thank you for this.