When you are dealing with a mental illness it can be a very overwhelming problem and when it starts to take over your life and turn your good days into bad days it can make the process of learning to cope even harder. I personally struggle with depression and anxiety and when I was first diagnosed with it I always felt as if I was a burden on the people who love me. I felt that because I was having to go through this and cause so many other people pain it made me worthless and a burden. Those were the types of thoughts that would constantly enter my head, but nevertheless they weren’t true, just like all other negative thoughts I have.
When you build a support system and start to surround yourself with positive and loving people, it can be easy to gain some positivity from them, but if you are constantly spreading negativity towards yourself or others it can hinder your support system and create negativity more than positivity. You shouldn’t rely on your support system to fix you, it’s only their job to help and guide you. You have to fix you. It’s very hard when you suffer from depression because you feel demotivated all the time, you don’t have much interest in anything, you’re always tired, you never feel well enough to want to leave your bed and it’s hard to take the step of wanting to get better. But just because you are going through this, doesn’t mean you are a burden. It means that you are strong and you are growing. We don’t ever get the answer we ask when we are given a problematic situation in our lives that we didn’t think we would ever have to deal with. We think that life is just going to run smoothly and there’s no way that anything bad could happen to us, but then when it does it seems impossible to fix. We will never be prepared for anything ever, we just have to ride it out by living in the moment and learn as we go. You have knowledge of certain situations but you won’t ever be prepared unless you have already experienced it, and that’s why some people don’t understand how to help with mental illness because they have never felt that same feeling with that same experience. Most people don’t know what a near death experience feels like or what it’s like to be in a car accident or having a broken bone or having food allergies. If we don’t understand something we don’t understand, but if you make an effort to want to learn how to help and become more empathetic about the situation it makes all the difference in the world.
Always remember you’re not a burden, but a gift to life that serves a purpose in this world. Keep fighting and keep pushing toward the very thing that you want and that’s to be okay. It will happen, you need to keep fighting and I believe in you.