“It’s hard to figure out what’s being caused by my medication, versus a human reaction to someone just being kinda shitty”

I absentmindedly drove around my neighborhood and calmly talked out loud to my car speakers while my mom listened on the other end. I had just come back to the area after a disappointing telephone appointment with the nurse practitioner that evaluates my mental health medication.

“I think the hardest part about this whole process is that mentally I can see everything clearly, but then side effects and the challenges of my emotions cloud everything. It’s exhausting triple-overthinking whether they’re justifiable or not.”

It’s never just getting help. Or getting medication and then just “trying out prescriptions.” The complicated swirl of mental overthinking and self observation becomes so exhausting that I tend to forget to leave energy to forgive myself for having human reactions to the environment around me.

There’s another part of mental health that most people leave out completely: your friends care a lot about your mental health…until the ups and downs of it all carry on too long.

Life is complicated. People are constantly busy with their own thoughts or their own complications of self. But you’ve probably even seen versions of this on social media. The statuses about debilitating self-doubt and memes about loneliness fade into the technological ether because everyone scrolling gets used to it.

When you have a mental health issue, it becomes a ticking clock. The moment you speak about it to a friend, the timer counts down from about 12 months out. You have about a year to talk about it before people expect you to get over yourself.

It’s like when your friend had a bad breakup and they keep talking about it and rehashing every single moment, trying to piece together where things went wrong. Eventually the other friends at the table desperately toss wide-eyed glances at one another once that person gets up to use the restroom.

At some point, your friends want you to stop being so emotional. It happens pretty slowly because emotional support is endurance, not a sprint. They are there immediately after crisis, and then that support slowly drops away. People stop asking how you’re feeling. Then they skate over or ignore any references you make about your emotions in general. Then they only respond to happy or exciting moments/news in your life.

People have an amazing capacity to care about each other, but realistically it takes a lot of work to maintain. Then if you throw in the fact that everyone who walks the Earth has his/her/their own issues too? Any capacity of care is truly a gift.

It’s important to hone your own ability to carry your own emotions. But there are always EXTREMES to that. Carrying emotions completely on your own defeats the purpose of having people around you or putting in work in your relationships.

I know I’ve personally caught on to this quicker than ever before. I think seeing the world a little more clearly and developing healthy boundaries has ironically made it more disappointing and easier to expect.

The other negative to having these healthy behaviors is that it’s easier for me to understand these behaviors from other people. And eventually I pull away on my own. I call it “mirroring.” Maybe when I was less healthy I would continue to try with people, hoping that my efforts would eventually prove a worth and convince people to pay attention to my thoughts and feelings.

But now? If they don’t make an effort, I just move them into a different box. I mirror the behavior back and that lack of emotional transaction changes the nature of the relationships themselves. I allow people to make whatever decisions they feel are best for them, and I let it go. Eventually more and more people pull away and keep about 8 feet of emotional distance from someone who has a life-long mental health struggle.

It’s okay…but sometimes it’s lonely.