i've been through two mental breakdowns

the first one was instigated by a personal decision to drop out of school. the lingering effects from that were mostly what caused the breakdown: lack of coherent self, disappearance of circle of friends, nasty depression to where i was in my car in the garage at least twice with a glass of gin in my hand ready to turn the ignition

to be honest, i don't know your friends and family, and these things can vary so greatly it'd be tough for me to give you advice because of the many variables involved in issues of mental illness (and the support system naturally ingrained in such an illness)

i didn't really have any good friends to get me through the mess, just a bunch of people who pretended they were my friends while we smoked pot and drank abhorrent amounts of alcohol. and i definitely didn't want to tell my family, though it's something that they naturally noticed just via disposition and change in reactive nature.

i got through it on my own, and it was the goddamned toughest thing i've ever had to do. when you wake up in the morning with this devout emptiness, almost like a religious devotion to nothingness and the loss of the self, it's the most painstakingly empty feeling in the world. it's almost like in a few ways, i reverted to my primordial self, where i was at when i was a baby or just a child.

what did i do to get through it? i suppose nothing. i waited for it to calmly end. at a certain point, it seems to me as though it's not a matter of moving beyond such an event, but accepting it as part of your nature and trying your best to utilize that experience to the best of your abilities. i don't know if i'll ever be the same, but i know that if someone ever came to me for help in such a situation, i'd drop everything i was fucking doing and help them out, and you know what, that's more than most people.

so maybe it's learning to take pride in your negative aspects. maybe it's accepting that the good and the bad are both intertwined and interchangeable, that everything is relative and that soon the bad will feed into the good. or maybe it's just knowing that if i'm ever placed in a situation that my friends/family were placed in, i'd react in an entirely different way, and that maybe, somewhere, my purpose is to help someone better than myself out in a way that most others couldn't.