The four walls around you form a box that is both safe and stifling in the same breath. Staying within them means you are protected from the world outside, with its too many people and too loud noise—neither of which are able to smother the loneliness and void you feel.
The noise comes in dribs and drabs via text messages, emails and knowledge of all the things you have to do. They surface like little bursts of static, startling your mind and prompting your pulse to quicken. You take the safe, easy course of action and silence your phone, retreating and escaping.
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At first, it feels so still and peaceful. Your little box is warm and comforting once more. You snuggle up on the couch, left undisturbed to nurse your wounds and exhaustion from existing for the day.
Here, it is safe. Here, it doesn't require any effort to interact with others. Here, you can settle and let yourself show, impeded only by the weight of your mind—not that it's a light weight, by any means. But it's easier to succumb to it than do sets of it joined by the other weights of people, expectations, facades and reality.
But as you hide, the weight grows heavier. It takes your surrender as an invitation—an affirmation of its right to be there.
You become more aware that your four walls are a cell, looking on them with disembodied eyes wondering if it is really you here right now.
It is, and you want out. But the way out is scarier and noisier than here. As much as you crave the presence of another human being just to be with, trying to find one brings about a host of anxiety.
What if they are busy? What if you are bothering them? What if they can't deal with you right now? What if it's awkward? What if they don't say the right thing? What if you don't?
You run through the options and scenarios in your mind. Maybe it's better to stay.
Still, you try to remind yourself of the truths you know, but can't feel right now.
These are all thought distortions. They are caused following the feelings and urges produced by neurons and chemicals in your brain not functioning like they are supposed to because of misbehaving physiology or past trauma.
They are intense. You feel emotions (or lack thereof) like a horse feels being branded. Thoughts come like waves of dead fish on a beach following an oil spill. But just because that is happening doesn't mean those thoughts and feelings own you.
It's an imperfect, fallen world. Sometimes our bodies get sick. Other times, it's our brains.
Little infections come, multiplying little lies that tell us that life isn't worth it—the situation is hopeless, we are helpless and we can't do this. These cells keep dividing until we are sputtering, coughing and aching—choking on the homicidal mantras of our disease and joints throbbing under depression, anxiety and pain.
It tells us the antidote is isolation. People are the problem.
So we hide under thick blankets, moving only to nurse our affliction until we realize that our pills are the poison and the prescription scrawls out the lies of a faulty doctor that is bent on destroying, rather than healing, us.
When we realize this, we are then faced with a choice: we can stand and shuffle until our steps become human again, choosing to walk with our aches and pains to the unique physicians we can find in friends. Perhaps they won't heal everything—it is almost a guarantee they won't. That isn't their place or purpose.
Yet, they may bring smiles to those coughing lips of ours and help lift a bit of the heaviness from our hearts. They may give us some salve that prompts us to find more. They may bring a bit of happiness with evidence that supersedes the falsehoods of mental illness.
Or we could stay inside and fall in the dark, lonely places to isolation and illness, afraid and weary of the world outside.
I don't recommend staying.
