Wake up. Lie in bed. Scroll on my phone. Get up. Feed the cats. Eat something. Go back to bed. Play on my phone for a while. Eventually fall back asleep. Repeat.
Well. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hello! My name is Max. I’m a 29-year-old college graduate who is currently fighting some major depression and C-PTSD. I have been privileged enough to spend a lot of time working on my mental health for the last few years, but I still have a long way to go. As it turns out, when all you do is sit at home and introspect, you struggle in new areas. Being alone all the time is not the solution for social anxiety.
I’m starting this blog in order to share my experiences. I’m hoping it will be therapeutic, and maybe someone will get some benefit out of reading it. So let’s talk about the title, shall we?
Shame is a very powerful depressant. It is the strongest force I have ever dealt with, and if you encountered my mom’s stubbornness, you would understand how impressive that is.
Shame can come from a myriad of sources. My ADHD is a huge source of shame for me – what do you mean that I, a grown man pushing 30, genuinely forgot to take out the recycling for two straight months? I was diagnosed with ADHD at 20 years old, so by the time I knew it was a genuine brain chemistry issue rather than a moral failing, I had already internalized that I was defective. If I really cared about my stuff, I would keep it picked up. If I was really smart, it wouldn’t take me twice as long to do my science homework as everybody else. If I really wanted to be helpful, I wouldn’t have to be reminded to do my chores multiple times. But I couldn’t do those things, so clearly I didn’t care about my stuff, I wasn’t smart, and I didn’t want to be helpful. What’s even crazier to me is that nobody directly told me I didn’t care, wasn’t smart, and hated helping. It was simply what I inferred from the feelings I experienced when I realized I had failed once again.
I amplified those feelings in my mind all the time. It’s not good, but everybody beats themselves up now and again. ‘Ah man, I can’t believe I forgot the one thing I went to the store for,’ or ‘oof, I really didn’t mean to be that insensitive, I’m so mean’ are unkind things to think about oneself, but not unheard of. I did this same thing, but dialed up to 11. I would constantly berate myself in my head, screaming at myself about how useless and stupid I was. By the fall of 2020 (a rough time to be alive in general), I was being so cruel to myself that I experienced passive suicidal ideation. I constantly wished that I would go to sleep and not wake up, or thought I would be better off dead. It was a dark time for me – I was trying to keep up with classes in a pandemic while stressing about my high risk family members, I was trying to get medication for my depression, and I was starting to come to terms with the fact that I was transgender after growing up in a pretty conservative church community. All told, it was a pretty rough patch. I ended up attending an intensive outpatient therapy program focused on dialectical behavioral therapy, which I fully believe saved my life. Those six weeks were some of the most exhausting weeks of my life – my therapy group met for two hours, four days a week, plus an additional hour of individual therapy once a week. I started to learn to rewire my brain, actively stopping my internal rants to remind myself that it was unkind and not helping. I started taking a breath before responding in anger. I started learning to ground myself physically, to be mindful of my body and emotions. Slowly, the shame started lessening, and I stopped wishing I would die. It’s a lot of work to retrain your brain, and it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done it.
I’m still not finished rewiring my brain. I still struggle with shame and feeling like shit, but now I believe there’s actually a future out there for me. I don’t know what it is yet, but I want to see it. And I know I will.
transcribing max 
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