Just is an awful word

This post is a little bit experience sharing, but a lot of me just really needing to vent.

I am very lucky to have parents that are understanding with mental illnesses, especially when many parents of their generation have the mentality of mental illnesses are not real illnesses. However, my mother sometimes really frustrates me and gets me down.

The thing is, my mother is a very strong woman who has never taken life's bullshit. She has had to deal with depression herself throughout a hard life(undiagnosed), but she has always soldiered on with a "you just have to do it anyway" mentality. An attitude that I have always tried to have. The problem, though, is I feel that that attitude has really contributed a lot to my issues. Conceal Don't Feel, I've always pushed everything down and tried to "just do it anyway," but all it's done is make me feel emotionally constipated.

I feel like I'm not allowed feel anything besides happiness, I feel guilty for feeling run down, anxious, or scared. I ruthlessly ignored my oncoming anxiety and depression because I always felt that everyone's problems must be a thousand times worse than mine if they can't just ignore them like I can. Sometimes I feel like I'm observing the people around me through a mile thick wall that I've built up around myself to keep everyone else's negative emotions and the general world around me from ruining my impeccable good mood. I have no idea what a "good cry" feel like because I have drilled into myself that crying is badwrong, it doesn't get me anywhere in life and it's admitting defeat.

I've pushed and ignored and "just done it anyway" and believed I was never letting life get me down until at 20 years old my depression and anxiety said alright! We've had enough! and started affecting me in ways I couldn't ignore. The final weeks of my most recent semester of college were absolute hell. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I was tired, shaking, headache, tight chest, chills, shaking, I couldn't breath! For almost 3 weeks I was practically in a constant panic attack and the thoughts of "dying would be so much easier than dealing with this, I wish I could just pass out and die already, it wouldn't be so bad if I was having a heart attack and could just die" were getting so very hard to ignore.

When I finally went to the doctor for all my symptoms I still wasn't acknowledging what I knew deep down. When my doctor said it's depression and anxiety I wasn't surprised at all, I was hearing what I knew deep down all along, but my mother was surprised. "I always thought you were so laid back" and I just laughed because my mother and I had always boasted about how close we were, how could she not know how high strung I really was?

My older brother has already been on medication for over a year, so she was really great with helping me come to terms with needing medication to functioning, and to not keep fighting the medicine, but she still uses that fucking word "just." That I still "just" need to keep pushing forward, and "just" need to have a "do it anyway" attitude and the medicine will help with the symptoms I can ignore, but that's not a solution. I don't WANT that to be my solution. I'm so very very tired of feeling like I need to have a breakdown, that I need some fucking release but I can't because I can't let go and just fucking cry a little. I feel like I desperately need to have a good sob but I can't, physically cannot and I'm being suffocated by feeling ashamed about it.

Every once in a while I want to acknowledge my depression and anxiety. I can't do it because I'm scared, I don't feel ready because it makes me want to throw up and panic and hide away from the world. Sometimes I need to be alone and quiet and lay around and not do anything because it physically hurts to be out of bed today. Once in a while I want to cry and say I can't do it and I'm sad and scared and feel so very very alone. That as much as the medication helps I'm not going to "just get better" over night if I will it hard enough.

I can't "just get better" enough to get off the medication, I may be on it for the rest of my life! That word "just" makes everything seem so trivial, easy, and simple when there's nothing simple about it. The only thing I "just" want to do is be able to break down without feeling like I'm losing.

I love my mother so very dearly, and I'm so very lucky to have her, but she so lives by this "just do it" attitude that she doesn't understand when my brother and I both feel like we can't, she doesn't understand that feeling when every fiber of your being is telling you not to do it and no matter how hard you kick and scream you can't make yourself "just do it anyway."

Maybe she's a stronger woman than I am, but I don't want to push is all down and ignore it anymore, I don't want to "just do it" I want to work through it, I want to fucking feel something, and then I want to ACCOMPLISH IT. Not fucking "just do it."

"Just" is such an empty word.