Me: I feel completely out of control
Dr. X: What do you have control over?
Me: (Thinking hard, but finding nothing) I feel like I have no control. My mood is out of my control, my anxiety, everything.
...so went a portion of my therapy appointment yesterday.
Most of the time I feel completely out of control, yet control; over myself, my life, and my finances, my destiny is one of the things I desire most. It is also one of those qualities I believe to be so important to my happiness.
To me control over me and my life means I am driving my life, not the other way around. It means I have both personal freedom to choose the life I want, and a responsibility to make this life the best it can be; both for myself and others. It means existentially I am responsible for creating a life I want to live.
My seeming inability to do this; my being driven and directed and thwarted by my mood disorder and its symptoms, adds elements of anger and frustration, stress and anxiety, to all the depression and mood cycling I experience.
My symptoms create intense and never ending death anxiety in me; the anxiety, sorrow, fear and anger that I will not succeed in making my life, and living my life, the way I want it to play out. I will never understand, experience, discover or live the life I am meant to live. I will stagnate in this version of purgatory or hell for the balance of my life.
I will die. I will not have accomplished anything that is real; anything I chose as opposed to activities, ways of living, occupations, and the failure to have an occupation. I will experience nothing except those things that were chosen for me. My life will have been a lesson in predetermination, rather than the freewill so many of us covet in the 21st century. That is not acceptable, desirable, or even an option for me. I want to choose my life.
So I fight, and I battle against nything that threatens to take my freewill away from me. This means I rage against my mood disorders symptoms. I battle its pull on me, its hold over me. I want so badly to believe I have a choice; to show myself I can change. I do not have to be this way. Unfortunately my belief in freewill means I must be choosing this way of life. I do not understand why I continue to be so depressed after all these years when I want so badly to change.
Do we have the power to change and direct our lives? Do our mental illnesses control us? If our mental illnesses are chronic, cycling, or always return, no matter what we do...is it worth fighting to create a life based on freewill, or is our life's path predetermined by our broken brains?
