My brain spends a lot of time telling me lies.

Anxiety is my brain telling me there is danger when there isn’t any.  It causes my entire system to react as if there truly were a danger.

Suicidal thoughts cause my brain to think I really want to die, and at times I’ve attempted to act on those thoughts because they seem so real.

I spend a lot of my time trying to work out which thoughts are real, and which aren’t.  I have to work out what is anxiety and what is intuition.   Sometimes it is easy to get too wrapped up in my own head.

When your brain spends most of its time telling you lies, it becomes very difficult to trust yourself.  Sometimes that goes too far.

Now that I’m trying to write this out, it’s hard to put it into words, so try to follow along.

Sometimes I start questioning not only how others feel about me, but how I feel about others, and if my brain is playing tricks on me.

If my brain is capable of perceiving danger that isn’t really there, if people really do care about me and my brain is lying to me and telling me they don’t, then maybe my brain is lying to me about my feelings about other things and people too.

Do I even know how to love people?  Is this really what love is?  And not even just romantic love, or friendship love.  I felt this way as Kidlet was growing up too.

Maybe I don’t really know how to care about people.  Maybe it’s me who doesn’t care enough or know how to love and maybe what I feel isn’t really love and maybe I don’t even know what love actually feels like because my brain has been lying to me all along.

I start over analyzing all of it.

How many times does someone have to lie to you before you start questioning everything they tell you?

What if the person that lied was your own brain and it lies about your own thoughts?

How would you begin to trust yourself again?

What if as soon as you started trusting yourself another round of bad anxiety or suicidal thoughts happened again and you had to convince yourself not to trust those thoughts?

It takes a lot of energy to untangle this overthinking, and a lot of that energy is spent just sitting with the thoughts and letting them run as background noise.

I’m thankful when they can stay relatively quiet.  I’m thankful when the people in my life understand.  I’m thankful when I don’t have to work so hard to untangle what is real and what isn’t because none of it matters as much.

I’m thankful when I can just be.