By Kay

One of the ideas that scares me the most (and, unfortunately, gets stuck in my head most often), is that there’s nothing wrong with me at all.

The basic premise of this idea is that while I was still lost in the heartbreak and despair of breaking up with my first love, someone suggested to me that I was depressed, and I latched onto the idea. At some level I know that I’m using it both as a convenient excuse to stay in bed as long as I want and as a ploy to get attention, but consciously I have become so wrapped up in this lie that I believe it to be true, and identify and exaggerate possible “symptoms” of depression in order to make the story more convincing. In short, I am a lazy, attention-seeking, manipulative bastard who is using a mental illness as an excuse, and has become so caught up in this out-of-control lie that I don’t even realize it any longer.

Whenever I consider this notion, a voice in my head breaks through and sarcastically congratulates me on taking my unhealthy practices of self-loathing and negative self-talk to a whole new level. But that seed of doubt is planted. And it’s the closest I’ve come to a rational explanation of the irrationality of my emotions.

It makes me feel so crazy to think like this. It makes me feel like I don’t know myself, and that I can’t trust myself. It also undermines what I believe most of the time to be very real trials I’ve been through, and the effort I’ve put into making things better, because how can I be getting better when nothing’s wrong with me? I wish I could shut it out once and for all, end the vicious cycle, but as long as that niggling idea is still somewhere in my mind, the silent arguments over it can’t be closed.

Originally posted here.