#because I read Ronan's loneliness on a day my own was overwhelming

[piningeddiediaz]

ok hold on gonna be emotional over the weird magic books for a sec bear with me. 

about to read the last one ever and i just. love these books so much. because the first time i read these, i was 16 and had just come out of a gcse exam i thought went terribly and had picked it up bcos my english teacher had told me maybe reading something will stop me fixating on all the things i did wrong in the exam. and it did. maggie stiefvater wrote this world and these characters, and for a certain period of time i was so lost in that little historic town of henrietta, virginia that i forgot all about why im so stressed. and then again, when i was 19 years old and had the worst fucking day of my life i came home to cdth and i opened it up and ronan’s clusterfuck of a life made me forget my clusterfuck of a life. in the last six years these books have been there for all those crappy moments where i didnt have it in me to face reality, and now it’s all ending but it’s still always going to be there. so just. these books mean so fucking much to me, and im so glad to have shared it with y’all 💗

#just. this series means so fucking much to me and im so sad to see it finish but im also so excited to see how it finishes #because I read Ronan's loneliness on a day my own was overwhelming #and its been so long since that nov 5 3 years ago #personal #will delete later probably

[brilliantshane]

I Apologise In Advance

If you follow me on twitter you might know that I have mental health issues. I have been diagnosed with Major Depression and Generalised Anxiety Disorder(the Romeo and Juliet of mental health problems). I often tweet at length about it, especially when I feel anxious, this usually results in losing 20 followers approx and who can blame them, these people log on to twitter to escape their own dreary existence and laugh at a few memes, not to read about Shane going through his monthly mild breakdown and crying in the wardrobe again. Even though I completely understand these people, I hate them. I’m only joking I don’t really(I do). So I decided that I would write this thing, in an effort not to annoy the general public and so that i have something to do with my anxiety stricken hands. Also I am very self conscious that writing in this way can seem masturbatory and self indulgent but I am no stranger to either of those things. I must warn you though that I am no writer and what follows may well read like the incoherent ravings from the final entries in a lone assassins diary.

I was born mentally ill. I know it’s a chemical and hereditary thing with me because my whole family has problems. My parents were married in the 80s, aged 19  and I was born 5 months later(I’ll never forget the moment when I, aged  9 or 10, realised that the maths didn’t work out). It’s crazy to look back and think how young my parents were and how hard it must have been, how much resentment they must have felt towards each other and me. Imagine being spending your 20s, stuck in a marriage you didn’t want with 2 young children in the days before divorce, resentment would be natural and unavoidable.  I know they felt resentment because they hated each other. The tension in the house was oppressive. I often came home to uneaten dinners and holes in punched walls. My father had a hair trigger temper and any interaction with him had the opportunity(can’t think of the word) to go wrong. I learned to be quiet, in fact I learned it so well that I even when I wanted to speak my mouth couldn’t say the words. I had become conditioned to fear any interaction with anyone. People would look at me with pity and say ‘You’re so quiet you poor thing’ and then become distracted by my sisters jubilant tales involving her love of Ronan Keating. I stayed in my bedroom until I was 28.

I suppose my childhood was not atypical for someone growing up in a council estate in the last days of Catholic Ireland. But I think that my hereditary propensity towards depression and anxiety mixed with the intense fear of my youth left me with zero chance of being a fully functional adult. My teen years were horrific,  my parents divorce was a Pandora's Box of pain, hatred and anger. My mother turned to drink and screamed at me for looking like my father and my father told me that any recollections of emotional abuse I had were false memories (FAKE NEWS!). I haven’t spoken to my father since I was 16 but his angry face sometimes wakes me up in a cold sweat.

‘Yeah so, you had a tough childhood, who didn’t?, you say.  The only reason I bring it up is because it has had such a bearing on who I am now.  In my early 20s I hated myself. Truly hated myself. I was stupid, ugly and useless. I hated my own face and couldn’t look in the mirror. I cut myself on the arms and the stomach, made worn out, pathetic attempts at suicide and when I was alone and drunk I literally howled in pain. Years of isolation had left me pathologically lonely, every time I was with someone I wondered how long before they would discover that I am a fraud.

I wished I was dead.

The brain has ways of coping with pressure and some of these ways of coping are ridiculous and illogical, often when you are mentally ill you don’t realise how stupid and disordered your thinking is. In my late teens I wouldn’t shower because I lived in terror that people might discuss how I had finally showered. In my early 20s I showered 3 times a day and spent an hour getting my hair just right. I began walking on the side of the road facing the traffic because that way I could see when they were going to crash into me. I kept my hands firmly in my pockets in case the urge to push people out on the road became too strong. I went to get an STI check because I fully believed I had AIDs even though it was literally impossible. I incessantly apologised for slights real and imagined. I developed a small tremor in my right hand and panic attacks were a daily occurrence. In other words I was a fucking basket case.

It all came to a head when I was 28. I decided I’d had enough and I became serious about ending myself. It was September 2014 and I walked to the canal in Tralee. I sat there for hours crying before finally walking to the edge, I went into a sort of trance , took a breath and………..my body tensed up. My anxiety kicked in. I can’t swim. What if I changed my mind. I had heard of a man who hung himself in Tralee and when they found him his fingers were broken from trying to break the rope off, what if that happened to me. I took a step back from the edge. My anxiety had saved my life.

I went and got help. I did counselling and went on medication. I felt like a new man. My anger and pain left me,. My thoughts became ordered. The pressure was off. I was weightless. My sister told me that she had seen me laugh for the first time in 20 years. Awkward conversations were a problem no more, I didn’t care if it was awkward, I got on with my day.  I started to do comedy first with video and and then on stage. Standing in front of people trying to make them laugh was something I would never have dreamed of in a million centuries.  My life changed and I no longer hated myself.

In the last year though, things have changed. I seem to have taken a step back I’m nowhere near as bad as I was previously, for instance I am not at the stage where I am afraid to leave the house incase I commit a murder, but I have noticed the ‘coping’ mechanisms returning. I’ve started to needlessly apologise again for imagined slights. I find myself wondering if people hate me or don’t like me anymore. I wonder if I am annoying people and then find myself compelled into asking them if I am annoying them which results in me actually annoying them.

The fears that I am a fraud and I will be found out at any moment. The almost overwhelming compulsion to tweet and the intense loneliness of it all. The loneliness.

The boy sitting alone in his bedroom.

I don’t know why I am writing this really, maybe because it can be helpful to try and articulate vague feelings or maybe because I am a self indulgent prick. I know though that I need to stop the slide before it reaches breaking point and I can because I have done it before.

If you related to any of this and are clueless as to what to do then I would advise you to go to the doctor as soon as possible and tell them how you feel. It might change your life.

If you read this far then I would like to say thank you and also that I am sorry.

Shane