I recently had an online friend open up about the very hard time she was having with anxiety and depression after the birth of her youngest, who is about the same age as my Mabel. I wrote to her telling her that she wasn't alone, and that I was always there any time she needed to talk, including that I could empathize due to my own issues with anxiety and depression.
"I never would have known that you had any anxiety. You always seem to have everything so together and under control."
At first I chuckled a little bit, but then it started nagging at me. Just like a faint buzzing in the back of my head at first, but before long it was like it was screaming at me, demanding that I address it now, right now, or else.
The me you see on Social Media is not all of me.
I am not trying to lie to people or put up a fake front, so the things I post about, the things I share, are a very real part of who I am, but I try not to over share the bad. I want to have a positive space, so I try, and sometimes fail, to only bring the positive along with me online. I obviously don't always do that, because I'm human, but I apparently do it enough that I've managed to convince others that I have things together and under control. I don't, and this simple, well meaning, comment now has me worried that I'm making myself unavailable to friends who might need me. Anxiety and depression is a lonely place to be, and I know that I would never personally approach someone who seemed to have it all "together" even if I was in a place where I most needed them.
Listen, friends. I. Am. A Wreck. I have battled anxiety for literally as long as I can remember, long before I knew what it was. When your a child, and then a teen, you don't understand what anxiety is, or I didn't anyways, and so you loose a lot of people. I am forever thankful for the friends I have from those years, because they stuck it out with me even though they didn't understand any better than I did why I would cry for no reason, and put myself down constantly, and need crazy reassurance that people actually did like me and were my friends. Because anxiety is a liar and a thief, and it controls your life in a way that I wasn't able to cope with at that age or for many years afterwords.
Then you bring depression into the mix, and there is nothing I can think of to describe it. Not only are you constantly scared, constantly anxious, constantly angry without knowing why, but you start to convince yourself that you are the problem, will always be the problem, and that everyone else would be better without you.
It doesn't matter how good things are going in your life, because that just makes you feel worse. Why can't I be happy? I am so blessed, I am so fortunate, why isn't that enough? There are well meaning, loving people in your life telling you that you can't possibly be sad. Look at your husband, look at your children, look at all the people who love you. They don't mean to, but they are making it so much worse, because you already know that you should be happy. You just don't know why you can't be happy.
The last 12 months have brought with them some of my darkest moments. There have been months at a time where we were getting knocked down every time we'd get our feet under us again. People who should have been a support turned out to be some of the people knocking us down the hardest. But here I am. I'm still here, and these past 12 months have also brought with them some of the best moments of my life, and some of the most amazing growth I've experienced as a person. I wouldn't have made it without my husband, my children, and the amazing friends I am fortunate enough to have. I have friends, people who are more like family, who I've been able to reach out to when I'm in my darkest places, because I know they have been there too. I know they won't judge. I know they care. I know they won't take what I tell them in a dark moment and use it against me, because they know what that's like too. The thought that I couldn't do that for someone else because all they see is Put Together Holly hurts my heart. The me you see online is the real me, but it isn't all of me.
I don't care who you are, or how together you think anyone has it. If you need someone, reach out for them. If you have no one to reach for, you have me. No one has it all together, and everyone needs someone at some point, and I'm here.
