I think one of the hardest things about mental health issues is that you can be travelling along quite nicely, and then POW! Out of nowhere, you feel that you are back to square one.
That is the nature of the beast. The problem is that all too often, we see it as a personal failing, and we shouldn't.
I have bipolar. I also have OCD. Occasionally, I dance the merry dance with anxiety as well. These are just labels, of course, and one person's bipolar is not another person's bipolar, etc. As @Former-Member said, it's all about being individual, and truth be told, nobody is 100% healthy or "right in the head". Everybody has issues. Some have more disruptive issues than others, though.
@Former-Member- you wrote "It's cruel when your own mind sabotages your own self!"
Darn tootin' it is! I can relate to that very strongly. I think that this is a major piece of the puzzle regarding mental health issues. It is also a major misunderstanding that "normal" people (whatever that means) have. I don't think that anyone can appreciate how difficult it is when you are your own worst enemy, unless of course they have experienced that state of affairs themselves.
To be fighting yourself every step of the way is not only exhausting, it's downright impossible. You will never win that fight... hahaha...
When I first started to tackle my issues with depression and, later on, too-high hypomania, I thought that I could win through sheer force of will. I saw it as a battle, and set to work fighting those parts of myself that I had identified as "the problem". I set about excising the parts of my personality I didn't like. To a certain extent, I think that this sort of approach needs to happen, but it definitely has its limitations.
The problem with fighting yourself is this - you fragment your personality. That inner voice that you identify as "you" sets itself up as the main authority within yourself. It then goes about, poking and prodding at all of the other bits of your self, making judgements about which bits are right and which bits are wrong. Then it goes about trying to make changes, supposedly for the better.
And what happens then? All of the other parts of yourself start to fight back. All of a sudden, you've got a heck of a lot more internal conflict than you had before, and there's not even any guarantee that anything gets resolved for the better. Instead, there's just an inner war that rages, and more often than not, it makes things worse.
I started to accept that I get depression from time to time. I stopped seeing it as a disease, a disorder, an illness, call it what you will. Instead, it's just a part of me, an important part of me that falls into a heap to protect itself when I have used up too much of the natural go-go juice in my brain. It's as simple as that. Hahaha...
I stopped seeing it as something that I had to fight every step of the way. That gave me the energy to be able to be gentle with myself, to treat myself with patience and compassion and kindness instead of berating myself and kicking myself when I was down.
Since then, my depressions have been more bearable. They still suck, but I accept them and have learned to live with them as best I can.
... just a few random thoughts...
I haven't noticed you about much today, I hope everything is going well for you. Sending you cuddly bear hugs and big sloppy kisses XxX