I grapple with the concept of being mentally ‘sick’. But when my mentality begins to influence my physicality, I can feel my mental illness inside of me. It manifests itself in the bags under my eyes, my muscle-loss, my headaches, my messy hair. I embody a sort of sickness that has no real cure, and the irony of it all is that I am scared that my mental ‘sickness’ will kill me. I have episodes of hypochondria concerning my own hypochondria.
I didn’t go Christmas shopping today and I didn’t get my letters sent out. I stayed in bed and slept and watched T.V and all I ate was a packet of instant oatmeal.
Around 9:00pm, I made dinner with whatever I could find in the kitchen cupboards and I sat at the kitchen table and felt alone (my roommates have all gone home).
Is this what it feels like to be ‘sick’ in the brain? Or is this what it feels like to be a twenty-year-old who just finished final exams and is learning how to cope with the reality of the ‘future’, the reality of ‘life’?
I don’t really care that I didn’t get anything done today; I can just move my plans to tomorrow. But what will I do when my body gets tired from all of the constant mood-swings and delusion? It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that I am sick. My body, my bones and my heart feel tired. If I could live in this state, I would. But I think that it’s slowly killing me. My mind has taken over my body. Sometimes I’m scared that I have already lost control.
365 Days of Hypochondria 
December 19, 2013 at 6:20 am
Good days and awful days? You will one day find what works for you, and for right now you are on that mission. My brother is bipolar, currently he’s 22, there are good days and awful days. Fortunately, it is recently that he found a wonderful psychiatrist and began to take medication that makes him feel good. In the past he was resistant to both counseling and medication. Now he’s a new person.
That doesn’t speak for everyone, but mental health is of the utmost importance. Make it your priority to figure out what works best for you. You are still young and have a lot of life left to live. By the time you need to figure your future out, hopefully you will have a better grasp on what you need.
also, I’m sick of the stigma associated with mental health. I have lupus, an auto immune disease, and I take medicine every day. No one would judge me for it, it’s what I have to do, I just have it. I need to take care of myself. I have a sickness of the body, why affects me mentally and physically, and believe me, it has caused depression. This year I was determined to not allow it to define me. Don’t allow hypochondria to define you. There is much more than just that title.
December 19, 2013 at 10:26 am
Thank you for your comment. It is definitely hard to not let something define you when you’ve been living with it for as long as you can remember. Somedays I completely resist that label but on days that are hard, I sink back into it, because it doesn’t feel like I have another choice. I’m sure it’s this way for nearly everyone. I am definitely working on things, some days aren’t so productive though. I like to publish my good days and my bad days because I feel like that’s reality.