mental-illness

There's a quote from 'The Breakfast Club' that goes "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it." I have it on a poster but I took a Sharpie to it and scratched out the word "hiding" because it reminds me that there's a certain pride and freedom that comes from wearing your unique bizarreness like a badge of honor.

Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease.

I used mental illness as a springboard to rest of my life.

Why did things have to get so backwards in our house? Since she couldn__ be the adult, I knew that it had to be me. But that didn__ stop me from hating it--from wishing it was just over. I__ give anything to be a kid again and not to be the responsible one in the house. It was like I was trapped in a horrible virtual-reality game, except there was no way for me to quit.

I used my mental illness as a springboard to the rest of my life.

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.

In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw them¬selves over a cliff.

I__e found that it__ of some help to think of one__ moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather. Here are some obvious things about the weather:It's real. You can't change it by wishing it away.If it's dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can't alter it.It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.BUTit will be sunny one day.It isn't under one's control when the sun comes out, but come out it will.One day.It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are all are real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE'S CONTROL. Not one's fault.BUTThey will pass: really they will.In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, "Today is a really crap day," is a perfectly realistic approach. It's all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. "Hey-ho, it's raining inside; it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage.

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was mean to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative__ intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as more electrical than ethical.

You were never created to live depressed, defeated, guilty, condemned, ashamed or unworthy. We were created to be victorious.

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.

My mother sat motionless at the kitchen table, her head cradled on one arm, the other extended toward her ever-present coffee mug. This was going to be another of her bad days. It was hard to pinpoint when I__ given up hope that she would pull herself together--that me being in charge would be a temporary thing. But too many months had passed with nothing changing, except somewhere along the way I__ stopped feeling sympathy for her. Or anger. It was easier to not feel anything where my mother was concerned because then I could never be let down.

Light existed all along. Of course it did. Who says it didn't because I couldn't see it?

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.

A Depressive?' 'Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill in her head.' Olive tapped her temple. 'And here.' She touched her heart.

I wake up scared and I'm scared all day. I'm scared of being scared. Scared of "losing it". Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home - that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.

I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.