Luckily, I forced myself out of that phase, because internet commenters started typing beneath my videos, “Felicia has old face now.” Thanks, trolls. You did something good for once!
I developed an irrational hatred toward anything around me that was familiar. My bedroom curtains, the collar my dog wore, my car seats. (I suddenly HATED tan. Or did I?) I felt nauseated and trapped by every single object and person around me. If I wake up one more day and see that Princess Bride poster on my wall, I’m gonna take a sledgehammer to it. It’s trapping me here. I’m going to die looking at it. STOP OPPRESSING ME, POSTER!
From people close to me, to the way my desk was organized, every detail represented being frozen in a situation I couldn’t escape: my life.
At the lowest point (among some champion lows, I might add), I started fantasizing about deleting my Twitter account and erasing myself from the internet. It escalated to constant daydreams about disappearing entirely. Meaning . . . dying. My musings revolved around scenarios of how I could end myself. I don’t think I ever got to the point where I was serious about going through with my plans, but I was obsessed with thinking about them. I learned later that there’s a term for this: “suicidal ideation.”
I wonder how people would react to me doing a backflip off a cliff during this photo shoot? Or walking out into Comic-Con traffic? Or electrocuting myself with a gaming console in a French claw-foot bathtub? That would make a cool crime scene photo.
Would anyone vlog about it?
And at that point, when things got THAT weird in my head . . .
. . . I still didn’t get help.
[?Heal It Up, Woman.?]
After a summer of mental problems in 2013, I got physically sick for two months straight. And my boyfriend finally muscled me into doing something about it.
“You have to see a doctor.”
“I’m fine.”
“You can’t sleep. You walk around in a haze, and you cough all the time. I think you might be turning into a zombie.”
“I’m FINE.”
“You look super tired in your videos lately. Eye bags and stuff.”
LONG MINUTE of silence. “Calling someone right now.”
It’s true, it had been a year since I felt energetic, healthy, or normal. Depression can do that, but . . . could there be something else?
Guess what I discovered when I finally made a doctor’s appointment after procrastination for another few months? There were actual REASONS I was sick. And some of them affected my brain area. Experts can know stuff sometimes!
I discovered that I had an extremely severe thyroid problem that was causing a lot of my depression and lack of energy and was probably the reason my hair had fallen out in chunks over the summer. (Led to a snappy-ass haircut, though!) I also discovered huge awful fibroids in my lady parts that were gunking up the works and had to be removed, and BEST PART, at the end of 2013, as a Christmas present of sorts, I discovered that my acid reflux had gotten so bad because of stress that I’d developed a thing called Barrett’s esophagus. (It’s usually a condition only old dudes in their fifties get.) The lining of my stomach was creeping up my throat and converting all the good tissue to bad tissue, and because of this problem, I was a thousand times more likely to get esophageal cancer than the rest of the population at large, which . . .
WAIT.
WHAT THE FUCK?!
And THAT is when I decided to get control of my life back. Because for some reason, I didn’t merit it worthy enough to take extreme action when my mind got sick. But my body? Emergency timez!
Imagine saying to someone, “I have a kidney problem, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.” Nothing but sympathy, right?
“What’s wrong?”
“My mom had that!”
“Text me a pic of the ultrasound!”
Then pretend to say, “I have severe depression and anxiety, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.”
They just look at you like you’re broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much?
Yeah, society sucks.
My mental problems made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to hide them until I could “work through it” on my own. Which I never did, because I didn’t know how. And I didn’t feel brave enough to make fixing my mind a priority because I didn’t think anyone would understand. Having an increased chance for cancer, though? I’m too neurotic NOT to be a hypochondriac. So damn, did I get ruthless!
I said “NO!” to everything. A very good friend of mine told me once, “Of everyone I know, you need to build a bubble around yourself.” Well, I took steps to inflate that bubble. Anything that gave me the remotest iota of stress, I dumped. I set extreme parameters around my company. “I’ll be working from home now. I’m only coming into the Geek & Sundry office once a week, and if I don’t feel like doing that, I won’t.”
“How long?”
“However long I need.”