Why?

This diaries are actually my experience with depression and anxiety. I’m writing them because I had a really hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I am dealing with depression and anxiety, accepting the fact that they are a real thing in my life. Eventually I noticed that part of the resistance was because I was really misinformed about this things.

The encounters I’ve had about mental health where short (no one wants to talk about this), a lot of them misguided, either very clinical, steril and cold or veiled by a sense of shame, guilt and lots of mystery.

Even though writing these diaries does not come free of shame and lots of awkwardness I’m hoping the story will be a little bit more approachable and relatable. Taking the power away from those big daunting words that at times depression and anxiety seem to be. Allowing us to sit with them and get to know them in a more comfy, sweatpants and netflix kind of way.

Oh the big question you have, what does a headless chicken have to do with all this? WTF?

Well, I grew up in a small town in the country in Costa Rica, where I heard that supposedly if you need to kill a chicken (because you need sustenance, only good reason to kill a chicken) and to do so you decide to chop its head off, apparently there is a chance that the chicken’s body is going to run for a while without its head (gross I know). It takes a while for the body to catch up and actually stop and fall. It keeps going in a sort of a futile attempt to escape death. I never saw this as a child, but I seem to have heard about it so many times it’s kind of a memory, I for some reason can imagine very vividly a headless chicken running around.

After many metaphors about depression and anxiety I decided to use this one for the titles of my diaries because that’s how it feels for me to have depression and anxiety.

My head is filled with thoughts ALL OF THE TIME, it does not stop for a second. In case you don’t know this is EXHAUSTING. There is constant energy being spent in the things that I need to do, in the things that I did wrong, in what people think of me, in the conversations I’m going to have, in what people are going to think of me, in that time 30 years ago I made a mistake while coloring... I also have thoughts of gratitude, love, inspiration, etc, but the bulk of them are the not so nice or productive kind of thoughts. I don’t know how to convey how busy my head is, even reading this description seems I just wrote a tiny grain of sand of how full my head is when I feel anxious.

This fullness of my head basically detaches my mind from my body. My body keeps going, but my head being busy with all the thoughts, just doesn’t have energy to pay attention to the body, doesn’t focus on living the present moment. The consequence of the disconnect is: anything that happens in the body is not as nourishing as one would wish. My mind does not register pleasure and might also be ignoring pain, my mind just can’t listen to my body, and the body keeps trying crazy things to be heard. The body is also exhausted.

Both my body and mind are trying to keep us moving forward, I mean I have a job, a family, lots of reasons to want to keep going, and I felt like everything around me told me keep going, no matter what is happening just keep going.

Eventually this resulted in a crash down. In the case of the chicken eventually the body and head both rest motionless. That is what happen to me, everything came to halt, I was totally exhausted all the time, could not move forward anymore and of course I had no idea I was a headless chicken.

Luckily I’m not literally a chicken and there are ways to reestablish my connection with body and head and that is what this diaries are about.