***Fair warning, this is absolutely train of thought blogging with hardly any censorship about the topics of anxiety, depression and suicide. Cause honestly when it gets to this topic and this absolutely triggering time of year, the only way I can manage to speak about the chaos that has lived in my mind around this season is through train of thought rambling. Nothing against my loved ones, I just need to write about it so I can try to regain control over my mind without people leaving or distractions popping up. This might make you uncomfortable but that’s okay. This topic isn’t easy. This post isn’t short. But I need to get this sorted.***

I don’t know.

That’s honestly how many times my anxiety got the best of me and sent me down a dark path that I almost could never turn back from.

I couldn’t honestly tell you how many times my mind just turned on me. How many nights I spent crying into my pillow or shouting in so much pain that no sound comes out. How many times my mind utterly had no concern and was absolutely ruthless to me and I stayed as silent as possible. Everything so robotic. Going through the motions of every day life. For years this was what I accepted as the norm. I was barely living but from what I believed, it was working.

A fair amount of the anxiety I fight with is probably due to the fact I was raised with the idea that mental illness is a myth or just wanting attention. It wasn’t a real sickness, just people who couldn’t handle themselves. I guess it makes sense then why I tried so hard to keep in control of everything and why I became such a douchebag friend to people. I guess I hoped that the more control I seemed to exude, the less real the monsters in my head were. Oh but they were. They were so very real. They just sat there. Slowly building like a horrific symphony that would eventually crash upon me after 6 years of repressing the hell out of them.

You know what made things so much worse? The silence. The fact that I took solace in silence. The Internet became my vice then, it was so important to me to keep my MySpace updated but for what? Just to show people how miserable I was that I put every effort into making it seem like being okay was obviously the only thing I was capable of? If I got caught up in the nonsense, maybe that would silence the monsters. I just believed that if I pushed enough distractions into my mind, there would be no way for those voices and thoughts to hurt me anymore. I immersed myself so deeply into a culture that showed so many people fake secrets and honesty. Don’t even get me started on how much the self harm culture seemed to be glorified back then. I was such a fool for falling into that trap.

Sure at first I may have considered it because for some reason it just seemed to be the acceptable way to deal with your emotions but then my painful desire for control took over and perverted my mind. Self harm was one of the dumbest things I could have done but it gave me control. I may not have been able to handle the emotional pain I was suddenly being tackled by, but at least I could do something and feel like my mind was an absolute mess. I figured if I could put my mind to condition it to accept the physical pain, I could handle the emotional pains. In hindsight, this was incredibly stupid but it made sense back then.

At first I was incredibly dumb and wasn’t even subtle about hiding the scars. I didn’t care. I was obsessed with the control. But after threats of having adults brought in if I didn’t stop, I got more clever. My left shoulder was my spot. To be completely honest, I can’t even tell you when I stopped physically harming myself. But my mind never stopped. There is no amount of words that could describe the fear I get when I see fresh scars on other people. I actually shut down and then start getting nightmares that I never stopped self harming.

I got better eventually for all the wrong reasons. Cause by better I mean I was able to distract myself more successfully by throwing myself into everything possible – clubs, friends, classes, etc. The physical self harm stopped but I fiercely believed that if I used all of my efforts being involved in everyone and everything other than myself, my anxiety would suddenly no longer be a thing. I’m pretty sure it was like trying to use duck tape to try to mount a flat screen TV to the wall. It could work for a while but after enough time and heat, it just crashes down and everything is a mess because you took a simpler way out instead of the right way. High school was a mess. So many tears, puberty, drama and just an unhealed heart trying to pretend it was all better.

A heart that needed to love itself and it still doesn’t know how to do that. A heart that was ripped apart by its owner trying to spread enough love to hide replace the empty places. I can’t tell you how many times I considered death and that’s a problem. I’m 95% sure it’s because my mind tends to repress any negative experience because it knows how much it’ll screw me up. But what I do know is that since coming to college, I seriously considered it three times and attempted just as many times.

It’s one of the cruelest ironies in the world. I was absolute crap at living happily, but I was apparently even worse at dying. After the third attempt, I realized I needed help. My friends were incredible but there’s only so much you can do when you’re still young yourself and your friend is imploding while you have no idea what to do. It took me feeling like what was left of my heart was destroyed to really take getting better seriously.

I realized that thinking I needed people in my corner helping me up wasn’t working. I needed to square up and help myself up this time. It was the most terrifying thing in the world to open myself up to that. To a new counselor, to a new life outlook, to everything I was trying to ignore but most of all, to myself. It was a slow and tedious process. But the negative thoughts eventually got more manageable, the nightmares and sleepless nights passed and a wall went up as I reconstructed myself.

Sometimes I do regret that wall because I’m still struggling to this day to let people in. In a world where I’m expected to be strong to handle all the problems I encounter while maintaining a certain air of togetherness. To be completely honest, to say I have my shit together is an absolute lie. But I’m okay. I’m not gonna be a fool to tell you that I’m cured of all my anxiety. That isn’t how this works. At all.

Those years were so dark for a reason. It’s because I didn’t know that it was valid to have those monsters in my head. Some days are worst than the others. Especially during this time of year, I struggle so much with that kind of mentality. But I am so much stronger than I used to be. All sarcasm and self depreciating jokes aside, I know I’m stronger than I used to be. The lack of pounding in my head and the sudden freedom easing me to sleep easier than before I started writing this confirms this. But I am able to get through it. Most days I can handle it when I’m allowed to comprehend and decompress at the end of the day. Some days I just don’t want to be near people and I’m absolutely rude and standoffish not because I dislike peope, but mostly because I know I’d break in an instant if I stay too close to people who genuinely care and ask me what’s wrong. Other days are the best where I go to my friends or someone to just vent and acknowledge the demons in my head. Knowing your enemy is half the battle and speaking about it has made the battles so much easier. Doing a news story on anxiety last year was a huge milestone for me. When I got the tattoo of Keep Going on my left shoulder with the accompanying blue water color phoenix, it was the beginning of an upswing in dealing with those monsters in my head. The anxiety was so much more bearable. The nightmares of scars past no longer haunted me every night. The days in between emotional break downs grew. I truly lived again. I was no longer just surviving by a few fingers, I had a solid grasp and I pulled myself up properly.

I still think it’s cruel irony that for someone who used to hate the idea of living and was crap at dying, I’m doing one hell of a job surviving. There’s a lot of details I’ve left out but all you need to know is that yes, I’m Kristina.

I have anxiety that can turn into depression when left untreated or repressed for too long. I have gotten strong enough that self harm and suicide are no longer seriously plaguing me. I’m not perfect and I have bad days. I am surviving because I’m taking care of myself trying to live the best possible life while learning to love myself. The journey of living with anxiety is never ending. But I’d like to think I’m doing a pretty solid job.