mental illness – Turbulent Mind

February 5, 2021February 7, 2021

Productivity Shame

2020 was a rough year for a lot of people. A lot of us experienced disruptions in our professional and personal lives. This disruption has forced so many people to work in their homes. It’s also forced people out of their jobs. While I was lucky to not experience much of either of these things, I have recently caught myself in a negative feedback loop. In this loop, I constantly berate myself for a lack of “productivity.” This lack of productivity I’ve been experiencing has been through an active choice to embrace stillness by taking a school term off before jumping into a new job at a new school here in Daegu, South Korea.

I started out 2021 thinking of all of the changes that I have experienced in the last year. I thought about how many things I have completely turned around and I was able to give myself a few pats on the back. But why did I still end up feeling so shitty on most days? Why was I constantly feeling shame for not “doing enough” during my days?

I feel that the reason I am able to clearly see the mechanism in which productivity shaming truly brings a person down is due to the fact that I simply don’t have many obligations at this moment in time. Therefore, any “productiveness” that I perceive is necessary is actually not necessary at all. I literally have nothing that I have to do besides eat, walk the dogs, feed the dogs and cat, and clean the cat’s litter box. Technically, if I wanted to lay in bed all day and sleep, I had no obligations to stop me. Yet, I found myself feeling tired, hopeless, and full of self hatred.

I began to go into productivity overdrive a few weeks back. I scheduled every hour of my day to include some kind of activity. I started working out, studying Korean, walking the dogs 5 times a day, and reading. I even planned out exactly when I was going to prepare my meals and how long my meals must take. The first day was great. I finished everything. I felt this little high off of my accomplishments. I proceeded to try to pack the next day in the same way. While I succeeded, I found myself absolutely drained and exhausted from all of the hours I was devoting to studying and working out.

Ten or so days passed and I woke up this past Wednesday and felt absolutely hopeless. I was doing so many things, but I didn’t want to do any of them that day. I let my alerts on my watch and phone ring. Every time I swiped them away, I felt like a piece of crap. Feeling exhausted was getting to me. My insomnia was and still has been out of control. I was running on 4 hours of sleep every day and not allowing myself to rest was catching up to me. Yet, that Wednesday was not restful. I laid in bed, awake, frustrated and full of self-hate. Why couldn’t I just get my lazy ass up and do the stuff I’ve been doing every day?

I had completely depleted myself and instead of allowing myself to take a break on reaching these expectations, I mentally berated myself for being a “failure.” The guilt and the belief that you are not enough can be extremely taxing. That Wednesday stretched onto Thursday. Somewhere between Thursday and today, I finally figured out why I was “stuck” in this loop. I was setting expectations and goals that were so specific and grueling that I was setting myself up for failure.

You see, productivity shaming is an internal battle you fight with your perfectionist self. The self that sets these goals doesn’t have “happy, healthy, balanced” you in mind. It has the “cracked out, stressed, gotta survive” you in mind. It pushes you to the limit because perfectionist you was created under extreme scrutiny and stress. Your perfectionist self has served you well, and has likely helped you in many of your successes. However, the reality is that we can’t always be in “perfectionist” or “go, go, go” mode.

On Wednesday, when I woke up with the “fuck this and everything on the list” feeling, my mind and body was telling me, “Girl, it’s time to go easy on yourself today.” The checklists and reminders from perfectionist me were there to remind me of how I continue to set unrealistic goals for myself despite how badly I feel when I don’t meet them.

So, between Thursday and this moment, I’ve been working out how I can reconcile these parts of me. I reminded myself that it’s ok to not do everything on my checklist down to the amount of time I have allotted. I began to adjust my tasks from having allotted time slots to simply being a loose list of things that I’ll attempt during the day. I also broke down my list into “obligations” and “desires.” The obligations were simply to get out of the house twice a day for at least 30 minutes each time to walk the dogs. I tried to keep each of the lists manageable.

On Friday, I woke up in a pain flare-up from a condition I was diagnosed with a few years back. It’s called interstitial cystitis, which causes bladder pain/UTI-like symptoms in the absence of any actual infection. There’s limited knowledge on the condition and after many tests and scans, I was diagnosed with it based off of the fact that I was not diagnosed with other conditions that exhibit similar symptoms. I often have pain flare-ups during especially depressive/anxious times, and it’s just icing on the cake. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, is my body trying to tell me something?”

I recently saw a quote on Instagram that said something along the lies of, “If you’re guilting and shaming yourself while you are resting, then it isn’t really rest. If you feel exhausted after resting, then that’s a sign that you weren’t truly resting at all.” It’s definitely not the exact quote, but the gist of it is there. My body was telling me, “Girl, you aren’t resting enough. You aren’t giving your body what it needs while you can and your mind is making yourself feel like shit while you’re telling yourself to rest.”

If anyone else can relate to a chronic feeling of not “doing enough” please reach out. I’d love your insight on how you deal with this never-ending feeling that you should be busy with something at all times. How do I embrace stillness and rest? How do I get the most out of it when my mind/body seems to reject simple acts of rest such as sleep?

July 22, 2020

High-Functioning Anxiety/Depression

I recently had a talk with my therapist about what it means to be a high-functioning person with anxiety and depression. It made me realize that a lot of people are likely suffering from mental illness despite “keeping it all together.” This happens because I was taught that falling apart was not ok. I also continue to function because the culture in which I work in cannot really deal with “mental health issues.”

I have been in situations where I’ve been sobbing in my classroom before class begins. Desperately trying to suck the tears back in before any students see me. I’ve been still in bed 30 minutes before the time when I have to be at work, and still somehow managed to get myself “together” enough to pass for “functioning” at work. The moment the students come in through those doors, I put it all away and I put in all of my energy and efforts into making class fun for the students. I know that the students can feel me struggling some days, because they are patient with me. But I constantly berate myself. I tell myself how I’m not doing enough. I reprimand myself for not being more “together.”

The High-Functioning part of my mental illness stems from a childhood of constant activity. If I wasn’t at school, I was doing some type of sport, or some kind of project at home. I was raised thinking that idleness is a sign of weakness. That if I let my mind or body stay idle, I will, in turn, allow myself to become a worthless sack of shit. Being useless is my worst fear. It’s one of the biggest reasons why I rarely sleep a weekend away.

So what happens when my mental health takes a turn for the worse? Well, I simply overcompensate. I run myself until I’m on empty. I forget about really simple things such as meals, medication, cleaning, and doing laundry. In my worst state, I do everything I can to make it through those doors at work before collapsing in a heap on my bed at the end of the day. On the weekends, I have no work to occupy my time, so I keep myself so busy that I don’t even have time to think about what is making me so distraught. This works for some time because it keeps me from dwelling on negativity, but eventually my emotions cup overflows. When it overflows, then the anxiety begins to manifest itself into real physical symptoms.

The past two weeks, I’ve been terrified to fall asleep. I wake up every two hours during my sleep, gasping for air. Panic attacks plague me and coming down from each attack takes time and energy. Sleeping is almost as detrimental as not sleeping, and I wake up every morning absolutely defeated. In my dreams, I replay all of the things in my day, my week, my month, my year that have accumulated to break me down so that I can be gripped in fear when I wake up… on the dot… every two hours.

I am exhausted. I feel like I’m constantly on the verge of tears. I feel hopeless. But that’s life, right?

February 13, 2020

A Year Ago

As I’m reaching the one-year mark of my working contract here in South Korea, I realize that the person I was a year ago was drastically different than the person sitting here typing this out right now. I’ve written and re-written this entry many times now, wondering how can I actually be honest with myself if I’m not acknowledging my starting point. As painful as it is to remember and to reflect on, I need to acknowledge what I was to recognize how far I’ve come. Before reflecting on my past year here in South Korea, I’d like to paint a picture of what February 2019 was like for me.

Everything around me was hectic. I rushed to say my good-byes to people I was afraid I would not see. I tried to pack as much in as I could and, of course, I tried to spend as much time as possible with my family and my significant other. It was bittersweet. I was excited to go back to the job that brought me so much joy and made me feel so accomplished, but I was also terrified that things would turn out in a way that was completely unexpected. Despite the fear that was starting to build up inside of me in the shape of “what if” statements, I kept soldiering on and preparing for my departure.

I remember the last Friday before my departure so clearly, like it happened yesterday. Yet, I have trouble remembering all of this past year in this level of clarity. My phone rang in the morning, the phone number was from Madison, Wisconsin. I knew it was likely the APHIS Office confirming the receipt of Misha’s paperwork. When I answered, I remember the girl on the other line was so helpful. She explained to me that the records she received for Misha were out of date.

The air was knocked out of me. “Out of date? What do you mean? Did the veterinary clinic forget to include the rabies titer test from October?” She gently replied that they did, but that they did not submit the titer test to an accredited lab. At this point, I knew exactly what that meant. Having traveled with Misha to Korea before, I knew exactly which lab the blood sample must be submitted through. I knew I had told the veterinarian that it must be that lab. I even included an informational guide from the South Korean Animal and Plant Quarantine office with all of the information that I had of Misha from the last trip.

My heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach. I felt my knees go weak and I was speechless. The girl on the other line kindly asked if I was still there. To which, I weakly replied, “Yes, yes… I’ll call the vet clinic to get it straightened out.” That day, was a logistical nightmare. Being a person with anxiety, I do not like confrontation, but I confronted my veterinarian who admitted that she did not look over the informational guides I gave her, and that she went through the lab because that’s the lab that she usually sends the tests for pets traveling domestically. The veterinarian offered to send another blood test to the correct lab for an additional fee and that, “Maybe it’ll get here in time for your flight.” For the first time in my life, I think I saw red. I was so angered that all of my planning and instructions were dismissed because someone else thought they “knew better.” At that time, another veterinarian stepped in and said, “No, there will be no fee. You clearly asked us to do something with specific instructions, and we neglected to do it. We will try our best to get the bloodwork done.” I thanked the veterinarian and went home. I knew it would not be done. The lab had a waiting period of at least three weeks.

That night, I had panic attack after panic attack about not having Misha with me. My relationship with her is very close, and I depended on her heavily for my mental well being. I cried and cried and could not possible imagine my world in Korea without her. Thankfully my family and boyfriend were willing to help me get her to me as soon as May. I would only need to survive three months without her.

I’m not saying that without Misha, my mental health worsened. But I definitely was forced to face the fact that I was not well. With or without her, it was something that needed to be addressed.

I arrived in Korea to an apartment with no hot water, heat, or a bed. Nothing was prepared and it was infuriating. My work had tried to get a bed ordered to my apartment, but the delivery was delayed due to the Lunar New Year holiday, and I was forced to sleep on a folding couch for two weeks.

I think at this point, it felt like everything had gone wrong. No dog, apartment is a mess, I’m 6,000 miles from my family, and work was not coming back to me as smoothly as I would have liked. I broke. I broke into a million pieces and I am still picking them back up. I realized that so many factors in my life have contributed to that breaking point that it was inevitable. Whether I stayed back in Minneapolis or I came here, it would have happened.

February 2019 me was someone who broke down almost daily. I panicked about big and small things. I panicked about whether the students liked me. I panicked about whether I was covering the materials well enough. I panicked about whether or not I could keep up my duties as an instructor and a supervisor. I panicked to the point where I physically could not hold food down and began to avoid eating altogether. I didn’t make it more than 2 months before I knew I was completely defeated by my own fears and insecurities. Every week was a new fight, a new issue, a new insecurity that I battled through with my boyfriend on the other line. I could hear the exasperation in his voice. “What can I do for you? What do you want?” He would ask. I had no answer. I had no idea.

Booking that first therapy appointment was the best decision of my life. I practice what I learned through the sessions every single day. I practice mindfulness and grounding. I practice forgiving myself and setting realistic standards. I continue to work through insecurities, trauma and maladaptive behavior. I will continue to fight for me.

Now, a year later, I want to pat myself on the back for getting through those first few months. I want to tell myself that I’ve improved a lot since then. I want to say that even though I haven’t been perfect, I am still doing the best I can do for me. I want to read back on this entry on a rough day and remember that I have come a very long way from what I was. A lot can happen in a year, and this last year in Korea has felt like an entire lifetime.