Many Things I Avoid Telling IRLs: The Months of These Feelings

~4609 Words | Last Edited: 10/17/2024

{I wrote this because I no longer want to carry this secret (or “secret” depending on who you are) with me in shame. If I had to delete every post from this blog that I’ve written so far except one, this would be the one I’d keep.}

I.

If you asked me, "What does it feel like to have life go so wildly astray in the way it did for you at age 18-19?" I would respond with these sentences from a poem:

Although to be literal, I would respond with, “she says it is possible not everything feels like something else”.

There is something that can be described as the capacity to feel. Some people tend to feel more intensely about some things than others do, some have more intense “versions” of feelings, some feel a wider range of feelings, and some are more prone to feeling certain feelings than others. Someone’s capacity to feel might be affected by medication and other drug use, by life experiences, by their brain anatomy, and so forth.

All in all, over lifetimes, people end up feeling different amounts of different feelings.

Likely, many people have felt slight disappointment, which might be caused by an experience as common as realizing there is less sunshine one day than they had hoped for.

When watching something, such as a movie, someone might be standing 2cm further away from the screen or the thing taking place.

Someone might be blown by a slightly stronger breeze when walking across a road.

There’s a lot of variation in what we experience.

It is possible that we have felt exactly the same.

And it is possible that we have never, not once, felt exactly the same.

II.

It’s not hard for me to think of the experiences in which I believe the way I felt differs vastly from what other people have felt, including before the onset of my hypomania (age 22) as well as before the onset of my first episode of psychosis when I was almost 23.

I’ve had an anxiety attack once at age 18 or 19. But neither that, nor are experiences of generalized anxiety, are the ones I identify as being extreme.

There are two other happenings, both when I was age 21 or 22, which are akin to an instinctively, ancient terror. During the second activity, the terror was far more extreme. It was stark. It felt inescapable. There were other times I would have, prior to those experiences, described myself as being exceedingly anxious, as well as times of feeling “horrifyingly afraid”, and “thoroughly terrified”, but what I am referring to felt far more extreme than that.

Rather than a feeling alone, it felt like a state of being, which included being mentally unable to plan, as well as involuntarily shaking while sitting on a chair on the spot in terror for at least 30 minutes. I had never experienced shaking like that before; never before, and never since. It wasn’t terrifying; it was a terrorizing situation.

Since then, I’ve found people who’ve opened up about their rare, similar situations. Although the details are more complicated than what I’ve decided to describe here (they include very psychologically extreme things), those two situations were both shorter durations of time in which I felt vastly different things from what I usually feel, and from what I believe most people usually feel, than something more chronic that haunts me above all my life experiences, ever.

III.

“I pretend nothing has happened because nothing has happened that I can easily explain.” — Slightly changed wording of Gina Keicher

What is this something that I speak of? Well, it’s more like a huge… happening, or event, or series of events in my life – not something traumatically horrible that happened a few days, or even 20 days, but >200 days.

And what I remember most to this day is the set of feelings that it encompassed. One of my feelings included feeling close to what I describe today as almost as panicked in those two acute experiences – which happened both at age 22; chronologically later than this experience that includes age 18 and 19.

This experience has been the worst part of life for me, the very worst thing that I have ever been through, and it leaves its imprint on me, still – invisible, and yet from an experience worse than my first episode of psychosis during which I created most of the scars on my legs.

IV.

I’m not sure: Can a story (a play, a book, a movie) make you feel things that you have never felt before? Or can they only rehash feelings from within the set that you have felt before? 

If reading about something elicits in someone second-hand guilt and/or second-hand shame, does the amount depend on the past amounts of guilt and/or shame you have already experienced? (E.g., slight shame if that’s all you’ve ever experienced prior to witnessing the story?)

How much do you limit my ability to invoke feeling, and how much do I limit your ability to feel?

V.

There is a story before the story.

The problems had been piling up since I was 13, the age I first noticed I was having difficulty with executive functioning, and feeling intense negative feelings — such as guilt, shame, dread, fear — because of it. By problems, I mean assignments for school that I needed to do, and had yet done. In the beginning, the problems piled in hidden spaces – places that nobody entered but I, and one or two teachers.

These problems continued into high school, where they were more noticed by my peers, and got progressively worse over time.

I was during one of these nights, age 15 or 16, that I first looked up methods of suicide, such as drowning myself in waterways accessible to me by public transportation.

The final year of high school was my least stressful year, because I had only 6 classes (instead of 8), and also was taking easier classes.

Still, there were a few important assignments near the end of high school that I could ultimately not bring myself to do, and that I felt immense guilt over. One was the TOK essay, and another was my CAS hours, both which are supposed to be mandatory for students who wish to receive an IB Diploma. In Grade 12, I avoided the IB graduation ceremony while almost everyone else attended, because I thought there was a good chance I wouldn’t receive a diploma.

(It still haunts me that I didn’t get my CAS hours. I remember my peers talking about the process of getting their hours, how far along they were, and the dread accumulating in my insides that I still hadn’t been able to do anything toward them. I pretended it didn’t bother me; I merely refrained from joining into conversations about CAS hours.)

I knew the vast majority of my peers would go into first-year university after the end of high school with no more than summer vacation in-between, and I knew this was what my family and friends expected of me.

And I did not feel ready, but also did not believe I had any other options.

(There was one time, in Grade 12, when I brought up to my Mom that I believed I had mental health issues – I don’t recall exactly, but I may have referred to anxiety and depression in particular – and said that I wished to see a therapist. Secretly, I also hoped to seek treatment for my eating disorder. But my Mom’s response, in Mandarin, was devastating to me – she said “You seem fine to me”.)

VI.

I couldn’t envision how first-year university would go for me – the anxiety in my mind painted that time as an abyss.

My Mom helped me move into the flat I was renting in Toronto – a space shared by my roommate, my roommate’s Mom, and I. 

I went to each class (five total, the standard full-time student course load) of mine at least once. 

When I got home, never (…no more than three times I would guess, although I remember literally no times) did I feel like reviewing notes, or doing readings, or doing assignments. And never in my memory did I.

If I remember correctly, the first evaluation that came up was one for psychology. I had attended all the classes up until that point, and had done no studying. I realized I would most likely not do more than slightly better than chance on multiple-choice questions. And I thought that if I were to fail, it would be better to a) see what the exam questions were and fail, than b) to not see what the exam questions were and fail.

(These are the kind of horrible decisions you have to make if you’re ever in the position of being me.)

So I tried to find my exam class that day.

And I couldn’t for the life of me find that damn room. I walked around for about an hour after the exam’s start time, and after that, I thought it was pointless, I might not have enough time for the exam anyway, so that was when I pulled out my laptop to escape from my current plight.

That was the first and last exam that year I ever tried going to.

By that point, I had stopped attending most of my classes. IIRC, one class I attended one to three times total, another class two or four times, one four times – looking back based on the dated notes I’d taken, the other I had gone to up until the exam point, and one class was easy enough to follow along and absorb information by just sitting in the class – it was an introduction to philosophy course.

I attended that class either every day, or almost every day, up until the winter break in December 2016. It was the class that was most pleasant to be in, because the room was dark, without being as populated as the psychology course (which had >1k students), and it was easy to follow along even if you didn’t do anything outside attending class.

The rest of the time, I hid in a basement library part of the campus near the classroom of the one class I still attended. Every day I would wake up, eat breakfast made by my roommate’s Mom (she was paid to make me two meals a day by my mother), get dressed, shower regularly, brush my teeth regularly, brush my hair, do makeup occasionally, and take the streetcar to this basement part of campus by 10:00 AM. There, in the quiet ruins of what could have been, I played a mind-numbingly repetitive game on my laptop for hours on end, all the while having anxious and depressive thoughts, including obsessively idealizing suicide. It was just this one computer game – not ever even multiple games. 

I would come back at about 5:00 PM most days for dinner – generally not earlier, or else they might suspect that I’d missed some classes, and put on this act in front of others, lying by omission about my truancy from school, and how I had been since the start of school mentally unable to bring myself to do any studying.

I would pop above ground at noon to purchase lunch in this café above the basement library, and then retreat back into that quiet place where it was just me, and the rows and rows of bookshelves and tables almost always empty of people.

I spent many, many hours per day having obsessions about suicide. I could foresee no liveable future for myself.

VII.

What could I say to my parents?

Think back to when I was in Grade 12, before high school ended, that one spring or early summer day I was brave enough to come up to my Mom, and tell her I believed I was experiencing anxiety and depression. Her reply was in Mandarin — “You seem fine to me”.

In the whole of my life, I’ve had very little interaction with my Dad. I’m introverted, he’s very introverted, there’s a language barrier, and we barely have any common interests.

So I simply thought, “My parents won’t believe I have been experiencing major issues keeping up with my courses. I have no option other than pretending I’m able”.

((One year after that conversation, I would be failing every single one of the five classes I chose for first-year university. One year and a few months after that conversation, my family would find out about this.))

((Just shy of two years after that conversation, I would be diagnosed concurrently with generalized anxiety disorder with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, major depressive disorder, and anorexia binge-purge subtype.))

((Nine years after that conversation, I would be diagnosed with schizophrenia.))

VIII.

Let me describe more in depth into the ways that pretending I was able to do school was traumatically horrible – what I write is not about the external consequences that resulted, but about my feelings in the midst of this horrible experience in which I pretended I wasn’t failing all my classes.

Not only was I omitting information to my Mom in the rare video chats we did during the first semester, and misleading my roommate and her Mom, who knew my Mom, at some point I began to realize that I needed to overtly lie. In the December break from school, my Mom had casually asked me as we walked in the parking lot of a shopping center what my grades were, and I said “A’s”, pretending to have taken all, not zero of my exams.

I don’t have to tell you that it stings a little to get a paper cut. But do either of us know how much it hurts to get an arm sawed off? Or the difference between having someone else saw off your arm, and sawing your own arm off?

I mention this because failing your classes is one thing, and intentionally deceiving 99% the people around you – including your 2 parents, your 1 sibling, your 2 flatmates, your other 10 friends from high school in a group chat on Facebook, your handful of other friends from Facebook, as well as being unable to even speak about this thing that was happening in which you were pretending you weren’t failing your classes, and are Perfectly Able, to strangers online (the safest place to confess of all!) is another thing.

The ways to suicide appealed more in this time of my life than other times. I frequently thought about jumping in front of trains as I was waiting in line for them to appear through the tunnel, and I used the subway system at least a handful of times a week. I Googled material on the efficacy of suicide via jumping in front of trains.

It was during the time frame of this happening that I looked up for the first time eligibility requirements for MAID in my country. And found out I wasn’t eligible for MAID, because a stranger out there thought they knew what I was going through, and there was no way I was suffering as much and I was – that anyone could suffer so much that death would seem the preferred option.

It was during this time frame that I, with a seemingly insurmountable amount of self-hatred in my heart, composed my first suicide letter, written age 18 or 19. I remember the location I had written it: my bedroom in the flat in Toronto. It had been handwritten, on standard lined paper, with a blue or black pen.

I had felt so painfully, horrifically, traumatically alone.

I found a little comfort in music. I listened repetitively to Sea Oleena and Nicole Dollanganger, many of their lyrics speaking out my inner feelings. I wrote some depressing, anxiety-related poetry on my laptop.

That year did damage to my need for emotional connection. I had been so suddenly deprived of emotional connection starting from September 2015 that as painful as it felt in the beginning, the need gradually dulled within me, until I felt no need to connect with others at all. 

During that school year, I had been far more socially isolated than any year of the Covid-19 pandemic. There were several times I tutored English to a child in China, and Skyped them for an hour, but outside of that, I would at maximum say one or two sentences per day lacking in personal connection to someone, e.g., “Thank you!” to the bus driver, or “Have a nice day too!” to a cashier, or “I’m going to take a shower” to my flatmate’s Mom.

Socialization had been so rare at that time for me, that even interactions as brief and minor as those stuck out to me.

In the last months of the second semester I was to be in Toronto, I realized, “Heck, since I’m only here for so long, I might as well make the most of the remainder of this school year, and visit some locations around the city”. After all, it wasn’t like my parents, sister, roommate, or her Mom could perceive me out-and-about in the city, and not in classes. So I started taking the streetcar to museums, to distant places in the city to buy secondhand clothing from shops on Facebook, to malls to go shopping in, and buy binge food in, as I struggled with restricting calories and binging occasionally back then. 

There was a slight improvement in my mental state in the last few months – maybe it had to do with the beginning of Spring as well as behavioural changes I made, such as spending less time playing that computer game in a library basement, and more time wandering around the city – although I don’t remember if I continued going to even that one philosophy class post-December or not.

The time had been very emotionally repetitive, and tedious, composed mostly of these emotions:

I had felt like I was perpetually treading in a muck of bad feelings, and like I had been outcast by the rest of the world.

Such heavy feelings to have felt so frequently not in my forties or fifties or sixties, but ages 18 and 19. 

(No, I don’t remember feeling much outside of those emotions – not joy, anger, love, or hatred for another.)

IX.

& Usually, if you’re failing all of your classes, it’s not just you and the professor who knows this – won’t your friends, your family, be updated in a dose-response relationship as well?

But not in this story of my life. For >200 days, it was just me experiencing this crumbling of my hopes and dreams, this personal hell of living a lie, this deep shame of being not nearly as able-bodied as others easily perceived me as.

I was terrified others would shun me for the rest of my life if they found out that I was not as able-bodied as them, and that I was lying about being just as able-bodied. I tried to keep the audience of those around me as limited as I could to strangers. I released some of my whirlwind of inner thoughts and feelings of guilt and anxiety in a password-protected diary on tumblr, with whom I shared the password to no one, and eventually deleted because it was full of bad memories.

I remember seeing a sunrise over the bustling, lively city of Toronto, and feeling shrouded by my gut-wrenching guilt, doubt, fear that loomed with me always. It was horrible, feeling like I was betraying the people I loved by lying, and yet believing that was my best option into my future (it’s possible to have one option be very terrible, and the other unbearable). It was not the feeling of mere depression, but feeling like my actions were figurative casualties into other people’s hearts – I was the one killing the truths I valued so much.

It was like being smothered with heavy, dark clouds, 24/7.

I felt so different from others. I could not relate. And the feeling was probably mutual – I doubt anyone I knew could have related to me, and my catastrophes. 

I resented other people’s happiness, with a bitterness that I’m not sure is a product of the cruelty of the world, or a moral flaw of my own.

Some nuanced feelings struck out to me during this time.

These included (all three definitions are from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows):

anthrodynia n. a state of exhaustion with how shitty people can be to each other, typically causing a countervailing sense of affection for things that are sincere but not judgmental, are unabashedly joyful, or just are.

…through realizing how easy misleading loved ones could be, how far away was their perception from my reality, how difficult it must be for them to contemplate my reality of being far less able-bodied than them, and how impossible I felt it was to explain what was going on – and realizing how rare it is to share understanding with someone, even people you’ve known your entire life.

As well as:

apomakrysmenophobia n. fear that your connections with people are ultimately shallow, that although your relationships feel congenial at the time, an audit of your life would produce an emotional safety deposit box of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice or loss.

Sometimes, I projected the way I behaved onto other people. I passively wondered, was anyone else putting up a complex facade, living a double-life? Were my parents really going to work each morning when they drove to their office’s, does their joint bank account truly have the account they claim it does, is the salary they tell me really their salary? I didn’t believe they were lying about any of this, but the possibility cropped up in my head – and it never had before.

sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

I tried to ignore what my high school friends were up to; there was now probably very little mutual ground. Comparisons hurt.

My family found out I was lying after the entirety of first-year ended. It was when the school sent a letter in the mail to our address with my transcript in it. Before they found out, I had been planning with my Mom to rent a flat near the school at a different location, in the flat of a different peer I’d known prior to university, to continue into my “second-year” of university. I knew the apartment was a high-rise, and I was hoping of moving into the apartment in the fall, and jumping to my death from what I knew would be a flat on the >20th floor into the streets of downtown Toronto before the next two semesters ended.

During the time of this happening, I had been unable to enjoy anything to such an extreme extent that I had never been outside of it – although I’d had major depressive disorder since age 14.

Here is a Tumblr with reblogs I made that represents how I felt in that time frame.

Here are lyrics that resonate with me when I think about that time:

Everywhere we go it's all a lie
Livin ain't so easy when you're not alive
How it hurts to change
How it hurts to change when everything is not enough
If it's the thought that counts well count me out
And when I close my eyes it hurts the same
How it hurts to change
– Woke Up Feeling Sad, RL Kelly

I hate my mind and I'm stuck here in it
And I don't know what I'll do but I'll probably quit
Cuz everything that I love I turn into shit
And that makes me sad and I'm not really mad
I just don't understand why I am who I am
And why I don't do everything that I can
To make myself better and be a good friend

Stuck here in nothing that's my own fault and preference
Being alone is nice and depressing
But really I'm sad cuz I know I'm the best of the worst
Knowing what I am makes me sad and just really hurts
– Familiar Haunt, RL Kelly

No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes
No one knows what it's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies
But my dreams, they aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance that's never free
No one knows what it's like
To feel these feelings
Like I do
- Slightly changed wording of Behind Blue Eyes, The Who

Things get hard when your heart's not there
And if you die you never know why
And maybe you don't care

I'm givin up hopin' I will get the things I need
Life is a bummer
Wish I could give a fuck but I'm too broken
Life is a bummer

I had a dream and you were there
I woke up feeling sad
Fell asleep to try and find you
Got lost inside my head

Sit around and wait to die
While nothing happens, no one tries
Pull this trigger on my mind
Cuz life's a bummer

Life is a bummer
–Life’s A Bummer, RL Kelly

X.

To this day, I rarely hear of people talking about something similar to my experience. I hope that just maybe, just maybe, if I share this with enough people, I will find one who is able to relate.

Wouldn’t it profoundly change the way we converse with people / the depth to which we understand people upon meeting them, if our first words were “What were the strongest feelings you’ve felt?” I speculate that those who are less able bodied may more often have felt pervasive feelings of guilt, and/or self-loathing. Possibly anger directed at the world for their predicament. No, it is not love, or hate for another, often the so-called strongest feelings, that I feel compelled to share with others about. It is a battle of Man vs. Society, and of Man vs. Man.

XI.

There are tests for personality – I can tell someone what bin I’m in the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, or my results are for a test on Big Five personality traits – but can I have a, “This is the whole of the feelings I have felt” quiz, or scale? Or even just, “These are the feelings I have felt that stick out to me most now”? So I can tell people, “I’m a “GuFeAn-DoSe” (Guilt, Fear, Anxiety, Doubt, Self-hatred) or something like that .

Because often, I suspect that what acquaintances think I have felt in my life, is very different from what I have actually felt. I know others may be strangers even more so to me than I am to them, but it’s my mind that feels dismayed when being met with this perceived mismatch over and over again…

In retrospect, what I was experiencing included amotivation and anhedonia, two common symptoms of schizophrenia with an onset earlier than the first episode of psychosis.

I almost never think of that school year when I was 18-19 these days, because life then felt so strikingly different from all my other years of life, and there are few reminders of it. It is easier for me to accept the results of that year as having gone unexpectedly astray now – at age 27 – that I’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Perhaps I am, or at some time was, a a “GuAnFe-DoSe” (Guilt, Anxiety, Fear, Doubt, Self-loathing! If there was a Myers-Briggs for the lifetime history of an individual’s emotions, or emotions during a certain time period.)