Mental Health

Exhaustion, Depression, Anxiety, You Can All Go Fuck Yourselves if You Please.

Because I’m honestly tired of having you guys around.

So here we are again. She is back! How dares she? She hadn’t visited me for a few years, and now comes to dare to knock out on my door? Rude!

And I thought that after I finished my thesis everything would go back to normal.

I spent a year and a half wishing and saying that:

“when I finish my thesis everything will go back to normal. I will get this weight off me and I will be able to live peacefully”.

And then I finished the thesis, and I felt nothing the day I finished it. The relief didn’t come as expected. It was greater anxiety before than the supposed relief that I never felt.

To be honest with you, I had already finished the thesis and here I was now afflicted with the fact that I was in a vacuum. Of continuing in the same job that I wanted so badly to get out of, hence my entry into the master’s program.

I continued and continue in my online work, teaching classes and trying to hide the stress that all the students give me. I loved teaching, but suddenly everything became monotonous, and I seem to be living the same day over and over again, just like the “Groundhog Day.”

I look at the clock while the class is still going on. And then the terrible ten minutes to its end appear.

“There are only ten minutes left before this class is over” I think.

These ten minutes become longer than the entire class hour. Sometimes the anxiety is so great that I start sweating, fidgeting in my chair, in my hair, my voice is lacking. And then my heart speeds up, and all the muscles around it seem to crush my lungs, and no matter how hard I breathe, not all the oxygen in the world seems to be enough to calm me down.

The next thing I know, I cancel class after class. I can’t work at all. Not like that. I go to the river and I fall asleep there. Who cares anyway? I’m so lonely! And, after all, it only takes one click and I am no longer working.

One-click and I’m shopping at the supermarket.

What good is money if it doesn’t buy us the most valuable of the items, time? If it doesn’t buy us mental health?

Here it is again, depression, nervous exhaustion from working too much. And now, the money from working too much will not even be enough to pay for regular sessions with a psychologist or psychiatrist. Oh, the irony of it all!

Deep down we are all crazy. But when you are crazy because you work too much, I blame the world. I blame the system where bread is a fortune, where someone like me who lives in the countryside is forced to have a car; where the basic dream of a human being to have a house, a place to call his own is only attainable for a minority of the wealthy.

I blame my nervous breakdown on all the social networks, Facebook Instagram, and all that; I blame my friends’ holidays on expensive sites; on all the mothers, once my best friends, who seem to tell me that I too have to be a mother.

To all the St. Valentim days that tell me I have to love a certain way. I blame the system that tells me I have to work and work, and that not working and saying I’m exhausted is the same as saying I’m lazy.

I blame a system that still doesn’t see mental illness in the same ways that it sees a bleeding arm or cracked head. I would rather crack my head again when I had a bike accident. I would prefer that to feel that some days I am able to fly, and other days I feel like I am going to die from so much anxiety that it feels like I want to squeeze my heart and crush it.

I blame the world and myself, and my genes that made me naturally nervous. I blame the tranquilizers that no longer calm me down. I blame the medicine that told me they would do me good and made me almost a legal junkie.

Welcome again nervous exhaustion, depression, anxiety, but, you can go fuck yourselves if you please.

Thank you,

Joana

Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal navigating her thirties. If you have enjoyed this article, maybe you would like to buy me a coffee here https://ko-fi.com/joanaaraci

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