She’s different
She’s changed
She’s the person you once knew.
You feel sad and kind of pity her and you may even say things like ...”she had it all, what a waste!”
You stopped inviting her to your events, parties, and gatherings. You haven’t picked up the phone or bothered to text her to see how she may be doing and how life may be treating her.
She’s out of sight and out of mind, until a moment in passing with a mutual friend or family member and they ask you ... “hey how’s she doing now, have you seen or talked to her lately?”
You don’t know. That moment may or may not have sparked your curiosity about her well being and how she’s handling life or thought ...
“how’s she doing now?”
So you call, text, and you even reach out to her via social media. If you call her to see how she's doing then you've done your duty and you can continue on with your “very busy life.”
But, did you really help her to get the help that she so desperately needed to address the mental health issues that she didn’t even realize that she had?
When you finally do reach her, she eagerly accepts your invitation to talk because she is ready and has been waiting for this conversation. She’s played this talk out over and over in her mind for years and she is more than ready to confide and talk with you.
She explains to you that she is tired and she explains to you that she realizes that her life is not what she had expected or how she thought it would be. She goes on explaining to you that she is “awake” and fully aware and that she truly understands now. She tells you that through years of intense therapy, she has realized that she had dissociated for ten years from the traumatic events that she experienced from early childhood and that even more trauma continued on into her adult life causing her to decline even deeper into dissociation.
She tells you that she understands that the traumatic events in her life had caused her to become extremely sick. She tells you that she is mentally ill and has been for her entire life, unbeknownst to her, until now.
She explains to you that this is a scary new realization for her and that she is sad to come to terms with what her sickness has taken from her. She bears her soul to you even though it terrifies every fiber of her being.
She shares with you the daily pain that she carries around with her over the relationships that were damaged, lost and the ones that are beyond repair.
It took her ten years to realize that she was “sick” and that has been something that she has been diligently working on with the help and guidance of trained professionals. She tells you that she has finally found “her army.”
It took her ten years to finally become “awake” and finally “come to” and she has found her “true self” after years of being lost. She missed out on so much and she wanted you to know that.
she wondered and asked you ...
“why did no one try and help me?”
You see, she had learned that those that were closest to her, they knew just how very sick she was and that she was living with a severe mental illness, even though she had not realized that herself.
She was left to deal with her own suffering and lived in isolation. She was cast aside and put out of their sight because “she was out of her mind.”
No, not “out of her mind” she was just living and suffering from a mental illness that stole ten years of her life.
So she asked you why?
“Why didn’t you tell me that I was sick if you knew?”
You didn't have an answer for her
She broke down and cried and wanted to ask you more but she stopped. She did not want to hear your answer for fear of being cast away again and feeling rejected by you. She wasn’t ready to be cast away again or anymore.
You see, she had already been stung and was hurting and trying to heal from the pain of a conversation that transpired with a family member, a family member whom she confided in and bore her soul to, only to be told ...
“I’m glad that you’re finally trying to make things right!”
- A harsh and rather insensitive comment to make, seeing how she had done nothing wrong to “make right” and was unaware of her mental state.
She has an invisible illness, mental illness in fact and she finally knows that.
The stigma surrounding mental illness is undoubtedly real. It makes it damn near impossible for those that suffer from their illnesses to want to talk about it, share their struggles with it, and even harder to ask for help with it, especially if they are unaware they are suffering from it.
If you’re wondering “How’s she doing now?”
Thank you for asking, I’m doing ok and managing as best I can.
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