Living with anxiety and depression, or any mental illness really, is difficult, to say the least. The tiniest tasks or most routine regularities can be mountainous challenges. Trying to manage your emotions, mood swings, and stress while maintaining a facade of professionalism and normalcy are hard and exhausting.
What a lot of people don't realize though, is that dealing with all of that within a relationship can actually be even more complicated. Yes, an emotional support system is so important, but it can also make it hard to indulge in your anxiety releasing behavior.
We all have the ways we cope with our extra, overwhelming, or negative emotions. I like to watch a sad movie so I can pretend I'm crying about something other than the fact that I think my new friends are actually annoyed by me and secretly hate me (anxiety loves to paint these irrational portraits in my mind). Or I would take a scalding hot shower and sing at the top of my lungs. Or I would maybe win imaginary arguments dramatically in my kitchen.
Basically, when I lived alone I could come home, close out the world, and unleash the swamp monster of emotion. I was confined by four walls, and the world was safe from my irrational anger and irritability. Unfortunately for my husband, this is no longer the case.
We live together like most married people do, so when swamp monster comes out, there is a civilian in danger. Now I would like to give my husband a lot of credit. He is always very supportive of me and does what he can to help me. On more than one occasion he's been awoken from blissful sleep to me sobbing and shaking for no conceivable reason and he rubs my back while I go through the hell of a panic attack.
However, being in a relationship and having a mental illness can be emotionally complicated. One of the biggest issues I had to work through in therapy was accepting that the people around me were not going to abandon me or stop loving me because of my mental illness. Accepting this meant learning to let go of my irrational guilt over my anxious behaviors and my down days.
Here's where it really gets complicated though, because my anxiety often manifests in extreme irritability and anger, I did have to learn to apologize when those behaviors took aim at my husband. I had to find the delicate balance between not feeling guilty for having a mental illness, but being accountable for my actions while dealing with it.
To clarify, when I'm having a bad day or an anxious, irritable day, I don't just lash out at my husband freely, verbally abusing him only to return the next day with a flippant "Sorry babe!" I also had to learn to cope with my anxiety and depression and find new, healthier outlets that allowed me to work through my feelings without going Godzilla and flattening a city.
This was not easy and because of how fatally stubborn I am it was not fun to relearn behaviors I had deemed appropriate. But it was worth it. I do still lose my cool. I'm not perfect. I still get sassy (fine, bitchy) with my husband, but it is less frequent. And when swamp monster does come out and destroy the city, I make a peace offering, and I apologize, and when I apologize I always make a point of saying "I'm sorry for how I treated you. I need to be better about not taking my anxiety out on you" because I want it to be clear that I'm not irrationally sorry for having a 3 a.m. panic attack. I'm sorry for acting like he was murdering puppies and innocent children when in reality he was just existing in proximity to my irritability.
There is a balance out there between apologizing for every quirk out of fear of abandonment and owning up to the moments where we don't handle our shit as well as we could. It's hard, and less than fun, but we can all find that balance and show the world that anxiety, depression, and everything on the spectrum of mental illness doesn't preclude us from functioning.
We are strong. We are messy. We're hot messes, but we're sorry.
