There are a few drugs I’ve been on where after being on them for a day or a week, I will wake up and look in the mirror to see a stranger. Whether it be strong pain killers or just steroids, once you get to the point of not seeing yourself in the mirror, how do you deal with it?
Self-harm may seem like the answer at times. The following images you may find disturbing. I still struggle today with self-harm, however it became a common behaviour for me when I was at this point in my life with depression and image altering drugs.
So what is the right way to deal with this situation of not looking like yourself?
I will not pretend to know the answer to this. I still struggling going on certain medications today. The drug that always scares me the most is prednisone. I explain in more detail about this drug in my post about steroids. But all that you need to know for this article is that the kind of steroid I have to take is just deigned to lower my immune system to control my inflammation in either my kidneys or colon for either of my conditions. And the side effects include acne, weight gain, due to water weight retention, increased appetite, depression and the shakes.
Not all of these side effects will affect everyone who takes them and obviously they do have some positive side effects otherwise no one would take them.
So when I wake up and I see someone else looking back at me in the bathroom mirror, how do I deal with this feeling of dread and sadness?
The truth is I can’t. When you get to the point where you are on the edge of darkness, and you know that you could fall over. It’s not about thinking about how to get to safety. It’s about thinking about how to stay balanced and to not fall. Because even though you may still be staring into the darkness, if you can still feel a piece of ground under your feet, you aren’t defeated yet. And I may not look like myself when I wear this mask of illness and disease, but I know that this is not the end, and at the end of the dreaded night of illness, the mask will come off.
It’s not the mask that defines you, but what you do to stop yourself from falling. Even though I may feel down, after doing even a half workout and I can feel my muscles getting stronger it’s like giving the middle finger to the drug. ‘I will still get stronger with the weight of this mask’, ‘I can scream into the darkness and hear an echo, which means there is an end to the darkness.
So whatever you love, whatever hope that you can scavenge, whatever echo you can hear emerge from the darkness, know that you have not fallen yet. Whether you are bed bound or completely mobile, you will always have hope, because in order to see black, light still makes it back to your eye
This is a picture of me in hospital and my mum was helping me eat. But I was still smiling, unable to stand or even sit up. So if I can, so can you.