When Health Takes Your Coping Mechanisms Away

“One of life’s best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem” – Robert Fulghum

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Dear readers,

Sorry, I’m back to some depressing posts. I guess this is very on-brand of me, so I think this is what you’ve signed up for.

Anyway, I think from my previous post; you can tell that my mental health has been taking a huge hit, and I hate how it affects my coping mechanisms. Ever since I was little, I have loved writing. My handwriting and spelling were horrible, and I didn’t understand anything about grammar. English wasn’t one of my strong suits despite it being my first language, but that’s not the point. The point is that I love to create stories and create a different world and escape from it. I hated reading because I struggled a lot, so I turned to writing to get lost in stories. I found my old stories, and boy were they bad, but I laughed, remembering how amazing I thought they were.

But that’s the one thing that stuck with me. Writing. I would change potential career options every two months, but I always fell back on writing. My one passion never left while I grew up, and my interest changed. During high school, I started taking it more seriously and writing. I originally started with a book called “Twisted,” which was like “Pretty Little Liars” but not. It was about a pair of twins whose parents were on a plane that got lost, and as they tried to find their parents, they discovered secrets about them and their past. That was the first idea that popped into my mind, and I think I wrote a good ten chapters of it. Next was “Missing Pieces,” which is a story that I finished and should be working on in the second book. Either way, those two were the first story I’ve ever taken seriously and given a “semi” good plot to work with.

Now that I’ve dipped my toes in fanfiction writing and the fanfic world, I keep coming up with ideas for the different ships I have. But when everything took a turn for the worse, I lost motivation. I didn’t have any ideas or inspiration to write any of my stories, I didn’t want to read, I didn’t want to do anything, and I was going crazy.

Writing is my escape route from the noise my brain makes, but now, the noise has got so loud I can’t even escape. I hate it when mental health does this to you.

I tried writing every day and getting a few sentences, but I would scrap it the next day and restart. Sometimes I would get so stuck I stared at the screen, willing it to write itself, but the blank screen stared back, and I got annoyed. I don’t want to be sucked into the world of darkness that is my depression, anxiety, and migraines, but my escape is being blocked, and I don’t know how to get out.

Being depressed sucks. It’s no piece of cake, and I hate it when people use mental health to “fit in” or be “quirky” or whatever. Like no, I don’t want this, I didn’t ask for it, you can take it back. Normalizing mental health is good, but saying you have a mental health illness when you don’t, is not, especially when you do it to gain attention. (This was off-topic, sorry.)

Please let me know if you have ideas or advice to get out of this hole I somehow fell into. I want to write again with as much passion as I did before.

Thank you for reading; I hope you have a fantastic day or night or whenever you’re reading this.

A. B💜

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The reason for the bow and arrow emojis is that I found this explanation of the bow and arrow and fell in love. One can take any symbol to mean whatever they want, so your meaning of a bow and arrow might differ from mine, and that’s okay. A bow and arrow help me keep my hope and determination in my future. An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backwards. So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it will launch you into something extraordinary. Just remember to focus and keep your aim.