Diaries of a headless chicken: Why?
This diary is actually about my experience with depression and anxiety. I’m writing it because it was too hard for me to make sense of what was happening, to accept that depression and anxiety are a real thing in my life. Eventually, I noticed that a good part of the resistance (and God, I had resistance) was because I didn’t have good information about it.
The encounters I’ve had with mental health issues have been short (no one wants to talk about it), many were very misinformed; they’ve been either very clinical, medicinal, and cold or covered in a sense of shame, guilt, and a lot of mystery.
Although this diary is definitely written with shame and many uncomfortable moments, I hope the story is a little warmer and more human. The idea is to steal a little power from those words that give horror like depression and anxiety. That the diary be a way to approach them more comfortably, like in Netflix nights and pajamas in the hut.
Oh, yes, the big question, what does a headless chicken have to do with anything? What the fuck?
In Candelaria de Naranjo, where I grew up, as far as I can remember, my mom has always had chickens. At some point, I heard a story that if you are going to eat a chicken (the only reason to kill a chicken) and you are going to kill the chicken by cutting off its head with an axe, apparently there is a possibility that when you cut off the head, the chicken’s body keeps running for a while. It takes the body a while to realize, stop, and fall. It’s supposed to keep running as if it could escape :(. I never saw that happen, but I heard stories so many times that it’s like a memory. For some reason, I can imagine a headless chicken running around a patio very clearly.
After thinking about several metaphors for depression and anxiety, I chose the headless chicken because it’s the closest to how I feel with depression and anxiety.
My head is full of thoughts ALL THE TIME, it doesn’t stop for a second. If you are a lucky person and don’t know what I’m talking about, when that happens, you are EXHAUSTED. My energy is constantly spent thinking about the things I have to do, the things I messed up, the conversations I’m going to have, what people think of me, what people are going to think of me, that time 30 years ago when I messed up and painted outside the lines… it’s true, I also have thoughts of gratitude, love, inspiration, etc., but the vast majority of thoughts are the ones that are not pretty or productive. I can’t think of how to explain how busy my head is, even rereading this description, it’s like I’ve only described a grain of sand of the things that go through my head when I have anxiety.
Having my head so busy basically disconnects it from my body. My body keeps moving, doing things, but my head that is busy with all the thoughts, doesn’t have energy to pay attention to the body, doesn’t concentrate on the present moment, doesn’t concentrate at all. That disconnection causes anything that happens in my body not to be nourishing or healing, as one would want it to be. My head doesn’t register pleasure and also ignores pain (in an unhealthy way). My head simply can’t hear my body, and the body keeps trying crazy things to be heard. The body is also exhausted.
Both my head and my body are trying to keep moving forward. I have my dogs, my family, my job, and a lot of reasons to get up every day, I felt like everything around me was also telling me that no matter what was happening, I had to keep going.
Eventually, it couldn’t take it anymore, a punch from life that left me lying on the ground. As in the case of the chicken that eventually the body realizes and both head and body end up lying on the ground. That happened to me, everything stopped. I was tired all the time, I couldn’t keep going. Of course, I didn’t know I was a headless chicken.
Luckily, I’m not literally a chicken and there are ways to restore the connection between my body and my mind and myself, that’s what this diary is about.