My fight, My Struggles with Anxiety and Depression

The bad habits, My cry for help

Ever since I can remember I've always had some weird things I never understood about myself. Things I did, things I said sometimes, or the way I said them, my thoughts and at times my feelings. During therapy, I figured out that some of these things developed due to some bad childhood experience, they were some sort of defence and some were my way of coping. Take the imaginary world for an example, I created that world to help myself cope with the rejection I felt around people, it also helped me to stay away from people because they were mean, so my world kept me safe, and there I was in charge and in control.

One of the things I loved doing was pretending to be sick. Growing up I was never a sickly person, so that meant I was missing out on that TLC sick people usually get. I started pretending to be sick, sometimes I would have just a slight headache and I would make it sound worse than it is. Back then I never wondered why I was doing this, I just enjoyed the attention it brought me, but now therapy was forcing me to ask myself why. I realised how hungry I was for love and I wanted so deeply to feel cared for. This pretence was my cry for love, it's a pity that I had to resort to lies in order to feel loved and cared for.

I also had this tendency of acting like I've got everything figured out. I didn't want people to think I'm not intelligent, I hated feeling stupid so I pretended my way through life. When I finished high school I had no idea what I was going to do next, in fact, I would have been the happiest girl in the world if my parents had allowed me to just stay at home, but I had no choice but to go and study. Like always, I pretended to have things figured out, I went and registered for a course I didn't even like and tried to convince myself and everyone that I loved it. The worst part about this is that with all this pretending and lying you end up losing the sense of who you are, you end up believing the lies, you end up not knowing the things you hate or love. You end up forgetting the person you really are, you end up living a lie believing that its true.

I went through life telling people lies because I did not want to sound stupid or like I don't have things figured out. When someone asks me a question, my defences would go up immediately, I would think of the best possible answer to give them so they don't think I'm stupid. Eventually, I began to believe these best possible answers about myself instead of the right and true answers. I lost myself and I wasn't even aware. Therapy helped in bringing all these things to light, the hardest thing to deal with was realising that I had no idea who I was, everything I thought I knew about myself came crashing down. I had to start afresh, I had to find myself, I had to lay down my defences, I had to allow myself to be vulnerable so I can find my true self that got lost on the way.

It wasn't easy, I remember crying, telling my therapist that I don't know who I am anymore. She told me I was in a good space, I did not understand what she meant then, but eventually, I did. All those walls of defence I had built over the years were now down, I was now aware of everything that was happening, and I knew why it was happening, I had a chance to start over, I had a chance to rebuild in truth, not with lies or pretense. I now understood why I was always so exhausted and drained, pretending and lying your way through life is no child's play, but I did it anyway because I was afraid to be my true self, I didn't want people to reject me, I just wanted to belong, feel loved and accepted. It was time to let go of the habits, it was time to lay down the defences, at last someone was listening, at last, someone was hearing my cry.