It sounds strange, just hear me out. I’d really like to emphasize that my ex boyfriend is an absolutely lovely person, and we are still best friends to this day.
My mental health has been terrible as long as I can remember, literally since I was a young child. The constant and sustained turbulence of my home life combined with school woes had developed me into a being of pure anxiety and depression. If my anxiety could be harnessed to make electricity, this country would no longer have a reliance on natural gas. Every little thing sent me spiraling and panicking. This was only intensified when I moved away from my parents to live in a different city a hundred miles away. While Living on my own with friends has been great in many ways, but for some god damned reason my anxiety and depression got exponentially worse. I spiraled harder, I was in the void of depression even further. I nearly took my life on 3 occasions. It peaked by the end of 2022 to the start of ’23, I ended up getting 5150’d. I went to a therapy program for 3 months from January through March of ’23, the program emphasized on managing anxiety. The techniques the program taught seemed like they were working for those months. During that period the air felt fresher, the sun shined a little brighter. But once I left the program my mental health returned to being terrible over the course of the rest of the year. I was not able to truly hold on to the anxiety managing techniques that I was taught. In January of that year, I somehow managed to get a boyfriend. He was my emotional anchor for the majority of the year. However, we broke up in November of the same year.
When we broke up, I was absolutely heartbroken, absolutely devastated. But as I was reeling from the breakup, something happened. A switch was flipped in my brain. For some reason, a reason I cannot explain, I began to manage my anxiety on a level I didn’t think I was capable of in the following weeks. Those anxiety managing techniques I learned in the program magically made sense in my brain. How? I don’t have a damn clue. It’s march of 2024 now, and my mental health has held strong. I’m going to college and majoring in psychology. It’s stressful but it has not gotten close to breaking me. If this was a year ago, I would’ve absolutely snapped. I think the shock of the sudden breakup with my boyfriend impacted my brain so hard that I was rewired on a fundamental level. I still struggle with mental health, I think I will for the rest of my life. But with the level its held steady at for this extended period, the future seems a lot less bleak.
Who needs electroshock therapy or shrooms? Just breakup with someone you love.
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