#at least that's what I'm telling my therapist

[the-acid-pear]

Mental illness is insane I'm just having dinner w my father eating this a little too spicy pasta enjoying the Yeowch on my throat and the silence and suddenly I'm like yeah I'd kill myself.

[vulpinesaint]

throws a book at the wall i'm SO fucking tired of putting emotional effort into relationships only for it not to be reciprocated

[mikimotopearl]

I don't think people realize how limited AI is, at least for now. It's a bit cringy. They keep tagging that explanation bot on twitter as if it's actually going to help😭. Unless you have actual reading comprehension issues and need a fucking 280 characters long tweet rephrased, it won't

[lexicals]

.

[slippery-minghus]

the bad news is i spent about an hour (after already getting home late) wandering around my apartment crying because i couldn't find my computer mouse anywhere. checking every place it could be twice, three times, knowing i don't lose things because of how badly it messes me up, only finally finding it at the cusp of a very bad meltdown in a place that i had already checked once before (and only once bc i knew i hadn't seen it in there the other day). had to take meds and cbd and lay on the floor for a long time and i still don't really feel ok.

but the good news? i won $100 in a raffle through work. so that's neat.

[scarletcomet]

does anyone else ever feel like maybe they need to be hospitalized or weren’t ready to be discharged from the hospital?

[daz4i]

man it's a bit frustrating to see your brain doing something that's like. not good, in a sense. and you know where it's coming from, you understand what your disorder is perfectly, you know you are emotionally reacting this way bc of whatever's going on up there but you also know there isn't anything you can do to change it

[terriblebicho]

They should invent a psychologist that doesn't make fun of you when you mention you suspect you may have a disorder they haven't yet considered.

[yardsards]

my hobbies include watching the sheer horror on new therapists' faces when i tell them about my childhood

[ask-80s-rinandlen]

[anaalnathrakhs]

i don’t really have a personality i just have a bunch of consumed media and half assed interests or hobbies stuck together with duct tape and every time i try to talk to someone it dissolves and i’m an empty shell again

[omarfor-orchestra]

So now I need to figure out what caused this mess uh

[healerelowen]

augh my back

but i have a vent thing so here ig/lh

(if the wording doesn't make sense, it's basically a hopeful plea that said friend is there, with the provided context that I’ve already lost a family member and a multitude of furry and feathery friends, it would only stand as a somewhat reasonable hope that he is with them too.)

[khezuonhead]

yeah big fuckin shock that the bitch that's constantly been made to feel so incredibly unimportant, that's always been lowest in the pecking order, that's closeted to the people that they live with, has absolutely piss poor mental health and spends most of their time shut up in a room either playing games to escape or just being sad and angry all the time

[cetoddle-archive]

going to sound edgy for a second okay

[inkskinned]

so while i was writing the book, i became violently suicidal.

this was mostly due to the fact that i had a very bad reaction to some meds and my brain stopped producing any serotonin. also i was in the last semester of grad school where it's actually illegal to feel anything but dread. so it wasn't going well.

somewhere in the fog of it i became aware i needed help. nobody was taking clients or my insurance. i didn't want to do inpatient care - it wasn't right for my needs. there's not really an "in between" stage between "inpatient" and "no care," but i was trying to do the right thing. i was trying to activate the chain of command that was my emergency plan. i knew i needed help now.

i used betterhelp.

i know, i know. i'm a straight-A student and so smart and so clever, how could i ever use something so blatantly bad. to be honest with you, i didn't feel particularly keen on it from the getgo - things that seem too good to be true usually are. also, if something online is free, the price is usually your privacy.

the thing is that there was kind of a global pandemic happening at the time and i worked 5 jobs alongside of being a fulltime student and also like writing a book on the side. it is a miracle that i even thought about getting help. i would love to tell you i had the mental wherewithal to like, process whether this was the right choice for me. mostly i was desperate. i was so suicidal that i was trying to find a reason to stay inside of fortune cookies. i was the kind of suicidal that looks like splatterpaint. i hadn't been that bad in an entire decade.

they took my data. i gave them it freely. somewhere out there, they have a dossier on me. on everything i survived. my story in little datapoints, scattergraphed beautifully.

the first woman told me that really i should be grateful, because (and this is a direct quote): "at least you're not anne frank." i said that i felt that statement was antisemitic, as anne frank's life and experience shouldn't be compared to like, a nonbinary lesbian in western massachusetts. the therapist said that i should try to use lucid dreaming to try to picture myself in an actually scary situation, like running from nazis.

i applied for another therapist. i was willing to accept the possibility that there was a bad apple in the bunch. the next therapist and i even laughed about how inappropriate that statement was. and then, in our next session: the new therapist said if i was struggling with body image issues, i should just work harder on my appearance. she spent 3 sessions in a row talking about how she was grieving, and made me memorize facts about her grandmother so "she can live on through my clients."

i am a three's-a-charm kind of person. okay, so what if the last person made me uncomfortable. i figured it was just a misunderstanding of priorities - she had felt she was sharing with me, i had felt like i had to take care of her. i applied for another therapist.

the last woman asked me to help her pray. she bowed her head. i stared at her, frozen, while she said: lord, i beg you: cure her. take the pain of being gay away from her.

i spent somewhere between 2.5 and 3 months on betterhelp. in that whole time, i was not getting the professional help i so desperately needed, even though i was fucking trying.

in the end, i survived this because i finally could get off the meds that were literally killing me. a request for a real therapist finally went through. i survived because my friends saved my life. because nick let me sob myself dry in his arms. because maddie took the razors out of my room when i asked them to. because grace slept over in my bed for like 3 weeks in a row since nobody trusted me not to hurt myself when i was alone. i survived because i got fucking lucky. because even when i was desperately suicidal, i was too old and too self-aware to take "you need to be prettier" as good advice.

the thing is that there's a 19 year old me who isn't like that. who would have heard "just think about how grateful you should be" and said - oh, i see. i would have assumed that is what it means to be in therapy: the same thing my abusers used to tell me. that i am just pretending and lazy. that i am ugly and unworthy.

betterhelp positioned itself to take advantage of an incredibly vulnerable community. it preys on desperation. it knows it is serving people who are not doing well mentally. it saw that there is a huge need for real, immediate, compassionate mental health care: and then it fucking takes your money and privacy.

i still get their ads on instagram. last night i watched as a woman in a pool pretends to talk to a different woman. they discuss her anxiety.

there's a 19 year old version of me, and she didn't survive this. she was too tired, and drowning. i almost fucking died. this thing almost fucking killed me.

in the ad, the woman playing the therapist takes a note on a clipboard and then nods once, sagely.

i have to admit it's a pretty scene. the steam and light coming off the pool water lands on the actresses. like this, it almost looks baptismal, holy.