This is nothing like it was in my room.

Hello strangers.
How are you?
I hope you are excellent.
I kind of want to get all serious on you today, and I am sorry about this seriousness, but there's this misconception I really want to address right now.
And the issue is this: That mental illness is not a joke, and it's not an attention seeking measure, and it's not something to fuck around about, and it's not something you make assumptions about without having any knowledge of it.
I had a conversation with someone the other week, who told me that people who have panic attacks are "attention seekers", and that depression is basically easy to snap out of. This was following my having a panic attack.
I found this very problematic. Panic attacks occur as a product of the fight or flight response, which is when your body reacts by producing a ridiculous amount of adrenalin to save you from something - essentially, it goes back to being a cave man and trying to run away from dinosaurs. That kind of thing. So your body reacts to situations of high levels of stress and danger, and for an anxiety sufferer these are pretty broad... enclosed spaces, people, public transport, etc. etc. etc. So your body decides it needs to protect you. It takes the blood from your extremities, and moves it to your torso because that is where most of the vital organs lie. And when this happens you get finger tingling and numbness. This also makes your heart beat faster, which is why some people get palpitations. People often sweat - a mechanism to help you slip out of the grasp of potential dangers. Sometimes you get blurry vision, hot flushes, cold flushes, paranoia, inability to think straight...
And you know what? This is usually, not something that you can avoid.
Because there's a chemical imbalance in your brain.
So anxiety and depression sufferers can get so many different symptoms as a cause of this, just like drug users get different symptoms from drug use. So you can be paranoid, and you can be fearful of everyday things, you can be overly self-critical, self-centred, have mood fluctuations, feel like being sick, feel worthless, useless, guilty, feel like you can't leave the house...

And it can start from anything. You can have a genetic predisposition, you can have a traumatic experience, I mean, fuck, it can start because you don't get enough sunlight.

So the point is, you cannot make a judgement on someone who has this if you have no idea what it's like.
Depression and anxiety can seem like stupid, selfish illnesses. And they are, and that is what is so frustrating about them. Having the constant need to explain yourself, means you have the constant need to talk about yourself, because there is no way to explain.

I speak from experience, and this is not a cry for help or pity. I just want to explain. Because it can be really difficult to explain why you burst into tears at random intervals. Or why you can have perfectly logical thought patterns (a recent example: don't hook in with that awful sleazy male), and do the complete opposite of them. or why you deliberately do things that you know will be upsetting to you, or why you feel constantly guilty.

So anyway. This is me being serious. But I just thought that maybe it needed clarifying, because sometimes there's that idea that it's all just made up nothing, and actually, it's definitely something.
And I don't think it should be taken lightly.

RANT FINISHED.

Love you like fireworks.