As any regular reader of my blog will know, I use it as an outlet to discuss or vent my feelings about my struggles with mental illness. For a while I have wanted to revisit some of the emotions and issues around the concept of losing ones mind. I thought it best to wait until a day when I was feeling particularly level headed and focussed, for want of a better word. Today is such a day.
An easily thrown about comment in the modern world is 'you must be out of your mind'. What a perjorative phrase. The truth is, I have been out of my mind, and it is nothing like the state of affairs proposed by that oft used phrase. In fact, it is the most terrifying thing I have experienced and one I am on constant guard against. To find onesself in the middle of Tescos car park, reduced to a sobbing standstill with no real conception of how you are supposed to make it to the front doors of the shop, let alone the next day, or all the days to follow, and with no control of emotional responses is not something I would ever recommend. It felt so far from reality, and yet it was reality. It was being taken from the cushion of the preceeding weeks and months where I had been 'out of my mind', using false coping mechanisms and denial to being faced with reality, the reality of suffering with severe depression, and socially debilitating OCD, the knowledge that I didn't have days or weeks of struggle ahead, but a lifetime. I was, in an instant, become the definition of abnormal in our causally ignorant world.
Its what came immedaitely after this that I really wanted to write about. To understand it better myself, and to explain to anyone reading why things are the way they are and why I say and do so many of the things I say and do. It was never so much the fact that mental illness can be a lifelong burden, it was the changed reality of accepting it, and accepting what that means about me, about my state of mind.
Percpetions can be powerful, especially peoples perception of you. To present onesself as a mental illness sufferer can be to invite perception of weakness, to allow that perception of abnormality (in this world, could there be a more inapt word for it?) It makes it very hard to be open about it the way one would a broken leg or asthma for example. That in itself is a cruelty, part of coping with mental illness is sharing and taking comfort from that sharing. Having said that, part of the blame must be mine, and still is. I am scared of being seen as weak, I do not want there to be seen any blot or stain upon the essence of me. It horrifies me to think of my family worrying about me, it scares me to think of friends stuck for something to say to me. Mental illness becomes for me a monster stalking me and taunting me for all the things I will never be, all the loves I will not allow myself, all the social and family situations I will hide from as the monster may rear its head and tarnish something beautiful. How hard it is sometimes to remember that I am not the monster, but of course I am not.
I said I was waiting until I was level headed and yet even today, at my most level headed, the tears are rolling down my cheeks. My life is a contradiction, to fight illness I have to be as tough as old leather and yet I am as soft as butter on a summers afternoon. The head tells me to fight silently and dilligently, but the heart screams at me to burn brightly. I feel like I will understand it all when I am old and, at the same time, that I knew it all instinctively from birth. The one thing I want to promise to myself, and to everyone I love is that my mind will stay whole and never again will the wheels start to come off, and thats the one thing I can't promise.
These entries are never easy reading, but I would have you know me better. And for that, they are a start.
