"But you're not sick enough" (more rambling)

Trigger warning : This post talks about mental health and could contain triggers. 

When you are feeling unwell, to the point of needing a doctor's appointment, nothing hurts more than having the person in front of you tell you "you're not sick enough, you don't need anything".

It's exactly the same when you go to a psychiatrist's office after sending him a long document listing all your problems, only for him to tell you : "you're alright, you don't need anything for now, try not to worry".

Yeah, right.

Try not to worry.

As if I didn't go to him BECAUSE I was crying every day for two weeks, while dealing with memory loss and struggling to get out of bed. As if I didn't go to him because I was feeling anxious all the time and wondering what went wrong.

I cannot pin-point when it all went downhills, for me to reach my lowest in May and in June.

Maybe in January, when I couldn't finish the first draft of my PhD dissertation as I had planned a few months before.

Maybe in February, when my body was feeling tired due to working too hard day and night including weekends, telling myself that "the sooner I finish, the sooner I'll start working and stop using family money".

Maybe in March, when I received some news that suddenly made me feel insecure.

Or maybe, I never really recovered from my first burnout (undiagnosed : it is very complicated to get a diagnosis here, unfortunately, unless you are doing extremely bad according to professionals) in 2021-2022, when I somehow convinced myself that doing two high-demanding degrees at the same time would be a good idea to "save time".

Sometimes I feel like a little girl with two big balloons in her hands. Except that in my case, it's written "time" on one of them and "money" on the other. "Time" and "money", big, fat letters following me wherever I go, because I refuse to let them go in the first place.

Just let them go, my family says. You have enough time and we are willing to support you until you finish your degree.

But for me, it is something that is easier said than done.

Time.

It is hard, for someone as sensitive as me, to not feel like a product about to expire, when I'm counting down the months till I have to reapply for a student visa again. Had I not been a foreigner in the country where I am living in, I would immediately write to my university to take a gap year just to rest, truly rest from one of the worst academic burnouts I've had in my entire life. But I am a foreigner whose only dream is to graduate, find a job, become a citizen and ... take a sabbatical (still better than no hope at all, I suppose).

Money.

I grew up in a household where "money talk" was never a thing. Growing up, I had no idea of the financial situation of my family, except for that we are "average". At the same time, my dad talks a lot about the importance of having money : at 27, it is not exactly easy for me when I know this by heart, while having none of my own. As a matter of fact, the night my stepbrother (who is three years younger than me) got a job, I congratulated him on the phone, before crying my eyes out in yoga class. Today, I still catch myself thinking : "I'm the only person in the family who doesn't have an income".

--

So I am stressed and anxious, dealing 24/7 with my own brain that doesn't know how to stop, even for a second, to take some rest. Sometimes I'm disgusted, even, by my own life choices : why literature, in a world that is already uglier than I imagined ?

The psychiatrist I saw, a nice gentleman despite his inability to see my sufferings, also told me that for him, the way I conveyed my thoughts was logical and my brain was pretty sharp still (something around those lines). I wish I had screamed more than just internally : nothing sucks more when you are such a natural fast thinker that even when you're at your lowest, you still appear to be someone who "thinks fast". Little did he know that it has been two months that I have been dealing with bad memory and constantly finding myself losing this, losing that.

It is hard, truly, when you are falling without anyone there to catch you.

Then again :

"When you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around

Do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?

Did I even make a sound?

Did I even make a sound?

It's like I never made a sound

Will I ever make a sound?"

("Waving through a window", from the musical "Dear Evan Hansen")