I'm lost in depression/anxiety/mental health struggles... But in an  introspective way...

Yeah, depression/anxiety are everyday things. But it's also... typically more of a numbness than actual depression or anxiety. When it's something that I'm actually feeling, it's unsettling. That's the best way I could put it. It's this weird feeling that everything is just slightly wrong. That weird feeling is what pushes me into this brain space. This place of philosophical woes and painfully angsty views. Well. It was angsty when it wasn't life, it kind of is life for real now... on a global scale.

It's jarring. It's been hard to adapt and function daily. I've had to step back from reality. I've had a constant, life long problem with paranoia and doom, but it was always wrong. I KNEW it was nothing. I could tell that voice to hush and think about something else. The voice helped sometimes. It kept me prepared, over prepared most of the time, but I tried to keep it all in reason. I could tame it with logic...

Logic isn't taming anything anymore.

Logic is throwing every flammable thing it can find into this dumpster fire. Logic is sitting back and laughing like an evil villain and planning it's next overwhelmingly bizzaro world twist.

How the hell do I calm the anxiety when it has solid, strong roots in reality. When it isn't something that is outrageously impossible.

For those who don't know. When my depression gets to a certain point, it can start to walk a little closer to psychotic episodes. Typically that isn't as common with major depressive disorder, or so I have heard, but it also isn't rare, or impossible. Especially when you consider that it takes about 11 years of actively working with professionals to get a proper assessment (Study NAMI refers to [1]), I'm not saying my diagnosis is different. But I'm also not saying it isn't. But. I DO have the occasional psychotic episode. I consider them to be incredibly mild because I can keep my grounding, I can quell that part of my brain.

I can do that now. I struggled with it in my teens. It was harder then because I also had intense insomnia bouts. Lack of sleep does not help keep you grounded in reality. I think the most intense episode was one night where I clawed at my arm trying to pull worms from under my skin. I didn't realize until some years later that what I saw may have been a vein in my arm that was visible because of the heat.
In that moment though, I was terrified and didn't understand what happened. I remember how real it felt, I remember how certain I was that it couldn't have been anything else. It wasn't light scratched either, I drew blood and I hid it for days.

There were other events, but they were minor. They were typically easy to push past. There wasn't someone following me, the shadow I kept seeing was just my brain being weird, not a big deal, don't worry about that. Some things were normal miss heard things, the phantom person saying my name, everyone experiences some of those. I could always rely on logic... Logic would tell me that, if someone did call my name, then they know me and will find me, but most likely someone just said something that sounded like my name. That's nothing. Okay done.

Logic would remind me that I was alone in the room, I didn't see a shadow. If I DID see a shadow, it was probably the light, lack of sleep, maybe I should tell my eye doc in case it's something with my eye(s), or maybe hair was in my view and I didn't notice it. Those were far more likely options. It was not a weird shadow person following me around. I did not have some paranormal being following me. Hell I'm not special enough for that even if that was a thing that existed. Thank you logic.

Logic helped so much. Right now though...

I have to actively avoid current events right now. I think it's the only thing that is keeping me functional at the moment. If I were to really sit around and think about where reality is, where things are likely going, I'm honestly scared of where that would take me.

The bigger problem, I can't avoid reality forever. I have spent my whole life mentally saying "this is logic, that is improbable wait for more info before believing things, unicorns don't exist, so don't even worry about that thing." If I can't ground myself in reality, I have no idea where I'm going to float off too...

What do you do when the things you relied on to keep you functional only makes things worse?