An Irrational Need to Explain Myself. Part One.

What most people don't understand about my experience with mental health is that all the work I've done, literal decades of work, was done just to get to a point where I have a workable diagnosis. From the age of 14 on I have been treated for depression and substance abuse. Those are two *symptoms* of what was ultimately discovered to be complex post traumatic stress disorder that I've been suffering from this entire time. We haven't even been addressing the proper things this whole time. Judging from my family's response, my mom alone believes me that this is what my life experience has been. The rest think my life is a product of my choices and parents apparently have no effect on a child's adult life.

In reality my struggles make the fact that I graduated high school and college and held down any job for any extended period of time absolute miracles. They have no idea what invisible battles I was fighting while I did those things. I had no idea how handicapped I was. We talk a lot about able bodies. We don't talk nearly enough about able minds because anyone who has ever been sad truly believes they know what its like to be clinically depressed for decades. They have no fucking idea. The best thing you can hope for are people who are capable of acknowledging that fact.

And yet everyone who's never actually suffered in this way looks at me like I'm a complete failure. Their cumulative lifetime of advice and judgement is very much like I've been sitting in wheelchair with broken legs staring at a set of stairs that I need to climb and they have been standing next to me saying just get up and walk. Getting increasingly more angry at me as time has gone by and I haven't been able to get up the stairs. What worked for their children didn't work for me and instead of asking why and looking at the obvious differences between my life and theirs they have been content to fall back on the easy, wrong answers and blame me and my attempts to navigate life without reliable parents.