Bottled up emotions
The struggles of my mind
By Erika Rosas-Lopez
(Martin Pechy / Pexels)
When I was four years old, my father passed away. I was diagnosed with depression shortly after and my mind became a minefield. Overthinking became a permanent fixture. My mom will say it was the medication I was on for my absence seizures. To give her credit that might have been the case or the trigger for it, but I know different now. Depression is a battle I’ll always have to fight.
Not even a year after my father’s death my mom remarried, and I was okay with that because it meant I got a new dad. The fact that I became a part of someone else’s family was a bonus. And for a period of time life was sweet, but it didn’t last long. Their failed marriage isn’t what propelled me into my downward spiral at a young age. It was the man I came to call “abuelito.”
It took me years to admit to my mother that I was sexually abused as a child. How could I admit to her that I let him slip his hand down the front part of my pants or that he forced me to do the same to him? All I could think about was the times she told me not to let anyone touch my “private part,” and I let him. It was my fault and no one else's, so I had to deal with the consequences. At least that’s what I told myself.
I turned to self harming because that was the only way I felt I could release my feelings and not affect anyone around me. I scratched my face until I couldn’t take the pain of it. Six years later is when I finally admitted what happened. My mother admitted me to an outpatient program where they helped me work through my issues. It did help for a while but that didn’t last.
For me, my mind has always been a place where I struggled. My mind can run at a pace that not even the fastest person in the world can keep up with. I either thank God for giving me a brain that gets me to where I am academically or I’m frustrated with the fact that my mind is to blame for the dark places it leads me. One minute I can tell myself that there is so much in this world I have yet to accomplish, the next I can say there is nothing left that is worth living for.
As I grew older my mind got worse and worse. I guess my developing mind grew more than just with knowledge, It developed the capability for me to be harsher on myself. The older I got, the worse my thinking grew.
I kept all thoughts and feelings to myself because who cares what’s going on in my life when there are people who are homeless or dying of cancer. I felt like other things in this world needed attention and I wasn’t one of them. My problems were nothing compared to those of others. Life was easier if I just didn’t share how I was feeling so I shut down. I couldn’t be a burden on anyone else because that’s just not what I did. There are still times where my mind will try to revert back to this way of thinking, and it's a challenge to get me out of it.
I hit an all-time low after my high school graduation. “I peaked in high school” kept racing through my mind. It wasn’t something that anyone ever said to me, but they didn’t have to because once it was in my mind, I was done for. This thinking sent me on a downward spiral. It didn’t matter that I had all these awards and successes because I firmly believed that high school was it for me. That’s as far as I would get in life.
I started to notice little things here and there that I can now say were signs of my bottled up emotions. Weight gain was one, but I didn’t mind it because food was a comfort. My depression making a comeback was the second. I slowly stopped caring. I didn’t care what I looked like. I preferred to stay in bed all day rather than hang out with my friends and family. It’s not that I didn’t want to but it was a struggle to drag myself out of bed. Bottling up my emotions and keeping things to myself was doing more harm than good. I’ve gone through life keeping everything in because “nothing was ever wrong with Erika” and that’s a front that I wanted to uphold.
I realized this was an issue when I found myself crying almost everyday. Yes, crying is healthy and even therapeutic, but this type of crying is not. The type where you find yourself sitting in your car with tears coming down your face. Where you’re driving and your mind is just racing and all you want is to just quiet the noise. Where you think that maybe if you just ran your car off the road, it would silence all those racing thoughts. When you get to the point that you actually write a suicide note. That’s how I knew it was bad and I needed to get help.
I still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that I was to the point where I needed help. So I did what most do when in doubt, I googled it. “How to know if you’re depressed and need help” was my exact google search. One of the first things that popped up was a self evaluation test. It took me through a series of questions and at the end it gave me a score. That score then correlated with a recommendation for you. My results read “strongly recommended you talk with a health professional.”
I wasn’t sure where to go from there so I talked to the one person I knew I could count on — my mom. She took the reins in getting me connected to someone who could help. After that it was really on me to stay committed to getting help, and I did. I attended sessions once a week and talked about anything and everything. Everytime I came out of a session I felt as if a giant weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
Crying is healthy, but it crosses the line to unhealthy when it happens more often than not. Getting help can be scary, but so worth it. There is no shame in asking for help. It’s one of the best steps you can take in recovering. It will take some time to get to where you want to be but eventually you’ll get there.
Erika Rosas-Lopez was born in Chicago, Illinois but currently resides in Aurora, Illinois. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism in May 2021. She lives at home with her mother and younger siblings. Her main focus has been sports writing but she has found writing about her mental health journey therapeutic. She hopes to continue writing about her mental health and inspire others to do the same.
This piece was written and shared during the IDONTMIND Writing Workshop. Learn more about our free, nine-week course and be the first to know about the next workshop here. Visit Mental Health Connecticut’s YouTube channel for a video version of Erika’s story.