I could not go on pretending forever .. when life finally caught up with me

I have existed on this earth for almost 50 years now. Goodness only knows how. There are times, like today, when it seems like a mistake that I am still here, and when I certainly don't want to be here. This is the reality of what people with depression, trauma and/or PTSD go through. 

I did quite the job in managing to keep things largely at bay for short and long periods, interspersed with a few mental health episodes. I called on my invisible friends, my visible friends and my spiritual practices to keep me sane. And they did, for some of the time. 

But I have never truly thrived in life. Relationships and career have always been difficult for me, and this year has seen my dreams for both of these things shattered, along with the loss of the group of friends I had due to moving back down south. 

But, when I talk about 'a few mental health episodes', I mean episodes that had already accumulated more than enough pain to last a lifetime and way beyond. They were bad; two of them saw me sectioned. On top of that, the latest episode has truly beaten the living daylights out of me and would be too much for any human being to handle without going under. What it has done, though, is made me come to terms with my reality and underlying issues, and that I couldn't spend the rest of my life relying on a higher power to keep my head above water.

Do I regret that it took this long for me to finally be honest with myself? Yes and no really. Obviously I would have preferred to have had the chance to properly deal with things sooner, but it would almost certainly have been too much for me to go through the experiences of 2024 beforehand. I think that spending time in religious and spiritual communities helped me to prepare for this year. Right now, God feels a thousand miles away from me, and I only just manage to do some sort of spiritual practice at the moment. 

Picture courtesy of Deviant Art

This is where the main focus of my life is now - facing trauma or whatever name one wishes to give to adverse childhood (and sometimes adult) experiences; but childhood trauma is undoubtedly more of a root cause to most of the issues in our world. 

I am very grateful to people who have researched trauma and PTSD and have been giving talks on YouTube. These have been very helpful and have made me aware of how so many of my issues are related to whatever I went through in childhood - and I don't know exactly what happened to make me the way I was, but something was definitely amiss. I did not function normally as a child, that is for sure. 

Right now, I am broken, having to come to terms with the fact that I have severe mental health issues which will take a lot of resolve to effectively face - autism, ADHD (whilst not having an official diagnosis for these, I'd say there was 99% certainty that I have both of these to some degree), religious trauma, childhood trauma - all brain injuries, or in the case of autism and ADHD, disabilities, no matter how much people seem to romanticise them. Back when I was growing up, autism was only really bothered about if it was someone that you could tell straight away was autistic and couldn't function normally in society at all. There's a lot more to it than that. My guess is that there probably is more people with autism and ADHD these days, because of the way society has gone in the last few decades; the destruction of community and the family unit has a lot to answer for. Vaccines more than likely have a bit to do with that too, but it's hard to say how much. 

But there has to be more of an awareness within society in general of how much childhood really does affect a person's life.