Life Update: (Un)lucky Year
Happy, New Year, friends. I hope you enjoyed the holiday season, and that the upcoming year treats you kindly. For me, the past few weeks of holiday after holiday was not as enjoyable as it once was; I was straight up just Not Having a Good Time. But the new year is finally here, and we all know what that means:
New Year, new shenanigans, as we Finns like to say.
Wondering
Being admitted to a psychiatric facility once is enough of a troubling and traumatic experience. Especially if your stay gets prolonged, ranging from several months to over a year, the ward will most likely become a place you never want to find yourself in ever again. And for those who get the proper help they need on their first and longer ward period, there might not ever be a reason to go back – and that is always the end goal.
Waking
I have never been a morning person. I don't like waking up early for no apparent reason: to me, there needs to be at least a somewhat relevant motivation for me to get out of bed before the clock strikes 9 am. For the longest time, I had that motivator in the form of school schedules and uni lectures. But as years have gone by, as I have gotten even sicker and sicker, those reasons quietly exited my life and left me without much of a trace. This, in turn, made it possible for me to stay up ridiculously late and wake up to eat my "breakfast" at 2 pm. That used to be my very normal lifestyle, with a sleeping pattern so horrifying that people around me almost started to worry for me, no matter how much I tried to justify it with "my creative juices flowing the best at the wee hours". To everyone else, it looked like a very unhealthy way of life, while I was none the wiser. And as much as I love working when everyone else is fast asleep, I do have to admit one thing.
Longing
If there is one place in this world that pretty much everyone can agree on that they never want to go to, it's probably a psychiatric facility. The stigma and shame of being admitted to the psych ward is very strong even to this day, no matter how much progress the Western society has made in terms of accepting and normalizing mental illnesses. You can have depression and anxiety, maybe even some traumagenic illnesses or eating disorders, but you can NEVER be so sick that you would absolutely have to go to the PSYCH WARD. Anything but that! You would rather even immerse yourself in your suffering, because the thought of hospitalization is so terrifying and shameful.
"But School Doesn't Count"
When we are talking about child abuse and childhood trauma, a term that gets brought up very frequently is "growing environment". Time and time again, it has been stated that the kind of growing environment a child has during their formative years has a huge effect on the kind of person they will become when they step into their adulthood. A safe growing environment provides a sense of security, instills trust in your parents and other seniors, feelings of being cared of and loved. Those experiences are important in the development of self-esteem and healthy self-image, as well as feeling like you can trust the people around you, and if something were to happen with them, you'd be equipped to defend yourself and get that sense of security back.
Life Update: Fall-ing In Love
The older I'm getting, the more I find myself liking autumn. This makes it sound like I'm actually old, when I'm literally in my early twenties, but you get the point. When I was a teenager, I used to despise this season. I guess it reminded me of the school year starting too much, so the entire period of autumn got a bad name. But as I am growing and finding what it's like to have your own life as an adult, fall is becoming a time I'm more excited to experience year after year.