Does your mental illness ever make you feel like a bad friend?

Because mine certainly does. Not only does the little depression voice in my head keep telling me but i feel awful when i don't have the energy to reply to people. I physically can't get myself out of bed some days which means bailing on plans and not responding for longass times. But listening to that voice can be a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you believe the voice of your mental illness the more you pull away and distance yourself and it just repeats and repeats until you're down the rabbit hole.

I put this question up on my story on instagram a while back and the responses from it largely followed the lines of "i shut myself away" or "i can't communicate". We are not alone in how we act and feel when we have an episode. Mostly, we just don't have the energy or we don't actually know how to communicate exactly what's going on with us. Or if it's not lack of communication then our mental illness makes us feel like a burden on our friends. We avoid people out of shame or to try avoid dragging them down. But the more we avoid people the more we build our problems up in our head.

So what i want to remind you all is that you aren't a bad person or a bad friend. You're trying your hardest to live your life with mental illness and sometimes that means bailing on plans and ignoring messages. But i know that you'll bounce back. You'll find the energy again soon and you'll be able to reply to the messages you've ignored and see your friends again. But in the mean time, be patient with yourself. Be kind to yourself. You deserve to give yourself more credit than you are because living with mental illness is mother fucking HARD. but you're still doing it and that makes you one bombass bitch! So don't listen to the voice of your mental illness, you are enough!