A problem I run into a lot is that I’m not good with words. Honestly, it’s a big reason I started writing this in the first place: to get better.

So I play this game on my computer, Township. Some of you have probably heard of it, some haven’t, and for the sake of the people that haven’t, I’ll explain. In this game, you build a town from scratch, based on agriculture (mainly wheat, carrots, and corn) and trade for the things you can’t produce on your own (such as bricks, glass, tools, etc.). You build houses, public buildings, town decor, and slowly expand by buying land on the edges of the plots you already own. All in all, it’s fairly uninteresting, and not particularly fun, but I find it fascinating. I think it’s because in this game, I have complete control. I can do just about anything I want, aside from having Godzilla run the place down. Outside of the game, in my real life, I feel as though I have very little control over anything.

I’m going to get honest with you right now, and tell you that I’m struggling with some pretty serious mental health issues, as well as the revitalization of a couple past problems. When I lived in Germany, I spent a great deal of time with the Military & Family Life Counselor (MFLC, for short), Albert, who started helping me work through things that had been messing with my head since I was very little, and we actually made what I feel was a great deal of progress in a short period of time, with some pretty crazy bat shizat. He was a game changer for my anger management issue, which I adore him for seeing as that was something I’d struggled with since early elementary school, and I’d burned a lot of bridges because of. Leaving him behind was tough, and contact was virtually impossible, seeing as the minute I was moved from Germany he was moved to Abu Dhabi.

My sophomore year of high school, in October, I began seeing a therapist with the Creative Counseling Group here in Cedar Rapids, because of a referral from my school’s counselor, Melea White. I was pushed in Michelle Takes’s direction (the counselor in question) because of her military background. Melea thought she may be better suited to handle some of the things in my life that she felt stemmed from my own experience with a military lifestyle, particularly symptoms of PTSD. Personally, I wasn’t sure how much it would help, but I went with it, and started seeing her. We dug into some pretty harsh stuff. We took a look at Nicholas’s death, the deaths of my grandfathers, my relationship with my grandmother, the bombing, my ex-boyfriend, and she poked a few times at my sexual abuse. There wasn’t much we didn’t discuss. A couple months in, she told me that she wanted me to be examined by a psychiatrist to confirm an official diagnoses of Unspecified Anxiety Disorder and Severe Clinical Depression – the tip of the iceberg, in her opinion. She wanted this because she wanted me on medication to mediate some of the more debilitating symptoms. However, my family doesn’t exactly have a positive history with drugs, seeing as I would describe the relationship as abusive. I’ve seen it ruin more than a few lives, some beyond repair, and I’d do just about anything to avoid going down that road, so I asked for some alternatives. As a stop-gap measure, I adopted Adeline, my emotional support animal. She’s a teeny tiny Russian Blue mix kitten, and I love her dearly. She does help, but after a few months with her, I realized that while she mediated a lot of my daily stress, she wasn’t a solution for our more serious concerns.

In January, when Michelle went to roll our sessions through with my insurance, TriCare, they refused payment, stating that, even as a Select member (who, according to their website, has the ability to self-refer with copayments of 20%), I would need a referral from someone other than the school counselor. Michelle told me to go to my college’s on-campus nurse practitioner for the referral, something she’d had students do in the past. I made an appointment, got the referral, e-mailed Michelle, and was promptly told the referral was insufficient, and that I would need one from an MD, not an ARNP, which would probably cost me more money to obtain than it would save me from paying the medical bills outright. The catch is that seeing the MD would also grant me something else: access to medication that just about everyone was telling me I needed.

Most of my friends would describe me a happy person, almost 24/7, aside from a selective few who know what I call my private sector, my unhappy place, my dark twisties. I put forward that image for a reason; that’s the person I want to be. I want to be happy, I want to have so much joy in my heart and head that it spills over. The truth is, though, on a daily basis, my highs and lows are so extreme it’s downright exhausting. I will go from feeling like I’m on top of the world, and I have everything, to hitting rock bottom and holding in so much sadness I felt like my chest would collapse. Nothing would cause it. There were no triggers. It just happened. No matter how many times it happens, it feels like the first time, and it hurts just as much as it did the first time it happened. I can’t explain what’s going on in my own head, and nothing is more frustrating than that. I have no control. It can’t be solved through coping techniques. I’ve tried exercise, dieting, reading self-help books, going for walks. I’ve just about done it all, and none of it has really helped. My reasons for not going on the medication have seriously paled in comparison to the promise of a real, tangible solution. I want the medication. Problem is, I can’t afford it. With my insurance, I have what are called co-payments. Essentially, the company will pay for anywhere between 70% and 80% of the total bill, and the rest of the cost is out-of-pocket, which with medical issues, can add up to a pretty penny, and as a broke college student, I don’t have a pretty penny. As a result, I don’t have the medication.

I’m trying to live my life with a fairly serious chemical imbalance in my head that I have no means of handling. l’m really faking it until I make it.

The reason I’m telling you this is because I think it’s a large part of what makes communication so difficult for me, which super duper sucks, since communication is one of the most important things to me. It’s immensely hard to say what you mean to say when you can’t even sort out what’s inside your head to figure out what it is you’re trying to say, let alone how you want to say it. It’s a little like one of those logic puzzles where you have to find out who brought what to the picnic, but you’re doing it without all the little clues they give you to help out. It’s not fun.

One thing I have noticed about communication, though, is that everyone, and I mean everyone, is different. No one will say the same thing the same way, and very rarely will someone say what they want to say outright. Instead, they beat around the bush, they play with the idea and taunt you with it, as if they’re waiting for you to figure it out instead of actually having to tell you. It’s as though they see the whole ordeal as a game we play with one another, the practice of puzzling out whether or not you and the other person are on the same page, instead of just asking, and I’ve learned that trying to accomplish real conversation like that is virtually impossible. When I do make an effort to participate, we’re definitely not on the same page. We’re not even reading the same damn book. Frankly, I’m tired of it, and I don’t plan to keep playing. I quit.

I think the reason I’m writing this is mainly to vent my frustration with the system, but I also want to put this out there for anyone who feels like they’re alone here. You’re not, trust me. Open discussion on mental illness is rare in the states, making it extraordinarily to obtain the help you need when you need it, and because of that, we’re often too late. Suicide is one of the top causes of death for Americans between the ages of 18-24. Symptoms of mental illness are missed all too frequently, because they’re either deliberately hidden, or deliberately overlooked. Personally, I don’t feel like continuing to be a negative statistic in research papers because of a social stigma. Put it out there. Own it. Advertise it.

Come on guys, let’s fuck it up.