How Not to Fall Apart: Lessons Learned on the Road from Self-Harm to Self-Care

by Maggy van Eijk

no matter how shitty your situation is, there is an escape route, and every time you climb out you’ll be more equipped to deal with the next falling down.

It's so important to remember this.

Ultimately, your mental illness lies to you. It’ll tell you that everything is wrong and that you have no future. It’ll tell you that you should be ashamed and you’re a nuisance and you don’t deserve to get help. The world in which depression and anxiety reign supreme is extremely lonely,

The most important aspect of lists for me is the fact that they are a direct link to the future, even if it’s as immediate as what I’m going to be doing in the next half hour. Lists tell me I need to hang on.

Anxiety can shapeshift and manifest in lots of different ways.

I’ve always found depression incredibly hard to describe because it’s such a mystery. It exists on its own terms and there’s nothing quite like it.

Make a playlist of songs that make you feel something within your whole body; it might be classical, it might be deep house, it might be jazz. I like Bikini Kill and Radiohead and old-school Mariah Carey. I like songs that absorb me, songs I can lose myself in, songs that take me away somewhere else—even if it’s just for a moment.

I’ve often felt like I have had no control over my mind. It goes down corridors I don’t want it to go. It punishes me, challenges me, and quite frankly, freaks me the fuck out. It’s frustrating because my mind lives in my own head, so how can something inside me be working against me in that way?

When I’m depressed, every single thing around me becomes a tool to hurt myself with. An impulse tells me to stand closer to the platform, to smash my face into a mirror, to down a whole bottle of bleach or run in front of a car. It’s exhausting and it colonizes so much of the good in my life.

This state I’m in isn’t forever.

Whatever turmoil you’re going through, it’s going to be over at some point—nothing is permanent

“Everything in life is only for now”