Mental Health Awareness Week

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week.  I confess it's taken me all week to work out how I should comment on this - because I felt I should, but actually I'm not sure that there is a huge need for people to become aware of mental health issues - maybe I move in exceptionally sensitive circles, but pretty much everyone I know has had some kind of first hand experience of poor mental health, whether it's themself or a family member.  But then I thought a bit more, and realise that, despite the pages of what on a bad day I would consider self-indulgent rambling present on this blog, I don't talk much about my own mental health to the majority of people.  Most have a vague idea that I have had some struggles with it, some know the origins and a select group of unfortunate people have patiently stuck with me while I dredged the bottom of the barrel for anything that might help me to keep hold of a bit of hope that life might one day be worth living.  

But it's very, very rare that I talk about it in plain terms.  Why?  Is it stigma?  Well no, actually.  Mental health issues are considerably better understood now than even five years ago, and while one of the things I could conceivably be diagnosed with comes with a hefty dose of stigma even among psychology professionals, it isn't what keeps me quiet.  What stops me opening my mouth or putting words on paper or screen in any public sphere, is fear. Fear, mostly, of not being believed.  Of someone saying something that I may perceive as slightly dismissive, which I can then feed to the wolves of self-hatred who use it to torture me with the idea that it's my fault, that I have a choice over the way the chemicals in my brain work, and that I'm making a big deal of something that should never have been viewed as trauma.  Except it isn't my fault, I have no control over the way the receptors in my brain work, and I was a child when I was abused, physically, emotionally and sexually while coping with my mother's all-consuming illness. And I was barely more than a child when I experienced the incredibly traumatic sudden death of someone I loved who had finally given me the nurture and unconditional appreciation I had been searching for the 16 years previous. I hesitate to mention the various more recent triggers for the trauma response that has been ingrained, because really, how many slaps in the face can people believe someone to have had without on some level feeling there must be some exaggeration or at least some behaviour that invites such events?  Of course there are people who have had worse experiences, there is always someone better or worse off than you, but why should we censor ourselves for fear of sounding like one of life's Losers (in a TA sense, not a playground taunt), and feeling that undercurrent of suspicion?  Because it isn't really about stigma, it's about the inability of most people to handle the depth of another's pain, to sit with it and wholeheartedly believe in that person's reality.  Very rarely do those of us in the midst of mental illness expect or even want answers (in fact for myself I have sometimes been truly terrified of finding an answer and being well enough to fulfil my 'potential', but that's probably a whole other blog.).  What I would suspect from my own experience is just that we want to be heard, believed, and validated.  One of the most useful things someone recently said to me, when I related a difficult moment was simply 'shit, that must have hurt.' The same person also named what I'd gone through as a child as abuse, and trauma.  I haven't done that out loud yet, but here it is in writing.  I am saying it, and I believe me - and I would like others to be aware that what you see is not always the truth.    

There are two pictures at the bottom of this post.  There is 4.5 stone, 12 years and a lot of ups and downs in between them.  I'm pretty ill in both, but you probably wouldn't guess it if you talked to me at either of those points, and I certainly wouldn't have told you.  Thing is, shame and trauma and pain grow in the dark and die in the light , but only as long as they are gently and responsibly received by the people you choose to show. So that is what I would like to say about Mental Health Awareness Week - don't just be aware that people might not be ok - hear and believe what they say, and have the courage to sit with it, not try to make it better.  That is the greatest gift you could give me.

Hopelessness - another inadequate description

  

I thought I might talk of healing.

But maybe that's not what this is about?  I thought, perhaps, that means nothing is truly broken - but the opposite is true.  It is a need for full restoration, conversion.  The rough corners have been chipped off the square peg, and it is lodged - scraped and damaged - in its round hole.  Impossible to release, without stripping down further. The  force required to pull will surely send it flying, metres or light years from its home, ripping through all that it passes.

Do not flatter yourself.  A fleeting thought, that the damage might be greater if you stay, but why believe you are the lynch pin?  Perhaps it is you alone that will be further worn down, shattered, splintered, crumbling to dust.

And yet I know it, I am special, valued, made indispensable in this life which is not mine.  So firmly wedged there seems just one way out.  But I cannot justify the forceful tearing away, the cracking of the whole structure.  Too afraid to make the final gesture and flee from the crashing of the collapse, so I chip away, cowardly and insincere. 

I am offered hands, falsely gentle, taking hold to help to ease me out, but they begin to tug and wrench, and I cannot trust them, making me see the truth only tightens the vice.  And can it be so wrong to disregard selfish clamour, is freedom really the joy I am promised?  Is the risk for me, or for someone else's agenda?  From one life which is not mine to another, drifting as always with the current, utterly convinced of others' reality.  Trust all, or trust none, and the first is impossible, when views are poles apart.  So I keep a pole's length between, waiting for it to drive into me, and force me one way or another.

Healing?

No, waiting.

Addict

 Eating disorders are often, very reasonably, considered a type of addiction. There is the same obsession over getting a 'fix' whatever the method, be it binging, exercising, purging, or the strange and dizzying high of a day fasting and seeing the number go down when you step on the scales.  There is the same desperation when you know you can't control something, the use of behaviours to push aside feelings, and eventually, the same realisation that you are completely fucked and have no idea how to stop.

Now imagine you really want to stop.  Addicts usually hit a point where they realise they need to, because it's getting dangerous, and it just isn't working any more.  So you put it down, right?  Stop drinking, stop injecting drugs, stop calling your dealer, and take the option completely off the table, so to speak.  

I can't do that.  I am in no way suggesting that it's not hard for the alcoholic or the heroin addict to stop - the physical effects of withdrawal in addition to the mental effort required to make that change must be incredible.  But at least they can.  As a bulimic and compulsive exerciser, the easiest possible way to stop, would be not to have food around at all, and to stop exercising full stop.  See the problem?  We have to eat, still.  We have to find a way to eat a sensible, healthy amount and establish a moderate, healthy relationship with food.  Imagine that in the light of other addictions - say to the alcoholic, ah, yes, you want to stop being an addict - you just need to make sure you have a measure of vodka and a glass of wine every day - just the one - or you'll die.  Now add guidelines and media. Hey there, drug addict, I'm sorry you find it so hard to limit yourself, but everyone in the world should have a hit three times a week, if you can do it more often, so much the better.  What, you don't like heroin that much?  Well that's ok, find something you do like - crack twice a week with your friends can keep you fit and healthy too. Or the social occasions - 'go on, have another biscuit, you're skinny, you'll be fine' (the equivalent possibly stretches the metaphor a little - 'go on, have a drink, you don't look like you have a dodgy liver, so it's not going to do you any harm').  Well actually no, because the incredible level of willpower it took to eat one biscuit in the first place is going to entirely evaporate when you start eating the second one, and that's the whole day ruined, because now you've messed it up once, you may as well make it a proper binge if you're going to have to get rid of it anyway.  And suddenly, not only are you having the last straw thrust almost literally down your throat, but everyone is looking too, and it feels like the shame might just eat you first, because who, apart from a bulimic really understands the need to consume vast quantities of food and throw it all up again?  It's just greed, right?  Not to mention wasteful.  You're not even going to digest it - it's pure momentary gratification.  

And that's why, parallel as EDs and addictions may be on many levels, the only way to get past them is to reframe the definition of your drug of choice, and focus on a behaviour attached to it.  The addiction cannot be to food itself, but to the controlling measures that we place on ourselves to create a certain body type or shape, to losing weight, to the high that comes from the swift transition between the comfort of 'full' to the weak/powerful paradox of 'empty'.  Feelings, not food.  Learning to see it as life-giving, a means to thrive and participate in the present moment.  

It's really fucking hard.

Dissociation - an inadequate description...

Where have you gone?

Somewhere apart.

A retreat behind the porcelain wall.

A place of quiet,

Where the tangle and crash of thoughts and feelings

Cannot reach.

Once I feared the shattering

Unsure if the delicate shell would hold.

Confident now, it is not fragile - 

But smooth, cool and solid.

It slides between us,

A swift exit without moving an inch.

They can beat against it 

With barbs, sharp-tongued arrows

And crushing loads

But I do not even hear them

In the impenetrable quiet of this cell.

A gentle tap,

Quietly, you try to draw me back.

Talk to me.

I want to, but we do not use words here. 

If you look very carefully,

You may find the crack

To reach in and connect.

But a wrong move,

Too fast, too hard, too loud, an inch from the safe place

And the wall is sealed against my wishes.

I take a look around the side

Long to return to the world 

Of colour and movement

But it is too big, too loud, and

I am afraid.

Here is safe. Quiet. Cool.

I do not love it, but

It holds me, I need not fight.

It does not swirl with light and laughter

And words tumbling over one another

In rich texture and meaning.

I want to join in, spin and weave into the pattern

Let myself be swept into vibrant freedom

To feel joy, melt into a caress,

Engage and push and pull at the threads of life, Frothing and bubbling over the wall

Even the language is alive - 

And yet, 

I am afraid. 

Take a look.

Take a risk.

Take an opportunity

To try reality again. 

Come back. 

Stay. 

A New Journey

 

The realisation is sudden, illuminating, like the sun breaking through the clouds.  Clarity, the removal of the lens, and I can see colour again.  It casts a light on the new path, it is frozen, untrodden by the deceiving warmth of familiarity, but it sparkles.  Take a step, noting the false horizons, the rough patches, but finally trusting that it is the right one.

 I am here, at the top, and I will wait for you – no more running around searching for you. It wasn’t me that was lost, it was you, looking at someone else’s map, trying to follow incomplete instructions, guessing at what filled the blank spaces.  It’s ok.  You didn’t know any different.  But it’s time to set out along the path, come and find me, make us complete and strong.  I will wait, be patient as you stumble across the heather, sink into the boggy patches, crash through the ice into the water, and I will fly to meet you when you come into view, travel with you where it is safe for me to go – I am the key, the truth – your freedom, if you choose to let me join you. I have the innate wisdom you have forgotten, the character that will allow you to be whole.  So set out on the path without fear, it might hurt, you will probably fall, but it takes you somewhere new, somewhere I instinctively inhabit – I may be small and scared but I have the spontaneity and certainty you long for – we can share.  I am generous, joyful, quick to forgive – truly forgive, not push to one side to pretend it didn’t hurt – and I am totally ready to forgive and trust you, even after all your mistakes.  They were not yours, you see – just a continuation of the mistakes inflicted on you, on me, on us from the start.  In fact, it is amazing we have got to here, survived.  But it’s time to do more than survive, let us leap, dance, live.  It will be amazing. Tough, but amazing – and real.

All I ask… is that you want me. 

Back to the start?

 It's interesting to consider what prompts me to write.  It comes in fits and starts, a rush of enthusiasm and an outpouring of what is going on within, an earnest attempt to connect with self and occasionally very select others.  It's always in the context of shaky mental health, and it always helps. 

What is it about writing that makes it cathartic?  Would it not be just as helpful, or even more so, to have a conversation with someone? Well actually, yes, it probably would - but a crucial element is often missing here - courage. It may be evident from past writings, that I think a lot about what other people might think, and what they might think of me, and while I have worked really hard to become secure enough in my own thinking and feeling to acknowledge where I stand, it is often nothing short of impossible to actually open my mouth and say it out loud.

The world is in a strange place right now - contact limited, connection mostly over video link, and it shows the incredible limitations of words without the extra communication layer of being in a room with someone, and makes the importance of which words are said even greater.  So as someone who does not necessarily think very quickly in conversation, and likes space to think about how to convey something important in words rather than by gesture, writing is currently a more powerful tool to connect and honestly express.

It's been a tough year for everyone, and as I was already wobbling off the straight and narrow, it has been particularly tough to keep going in any kind of direction.  Previously, I've likened recovery/illness to a series of paths which I've set off along, only to realise I was going the wrong way and come back to centre to start again.  It felt a bit like that earlier this year, when I decided (OK, let's be honest, someone drew my attention to the fact) that the time had come for another round of therapy.  I found this pretty hard to accept, given that I have 'done' it so many times before. Talking to newly acquired therapist, he pointed out, as I already know, that I have learned my process, I know what my flawed thinking is and why it is, and yet still every now and then I come back to a point where I need to delve again into the hurt-box and remember where to find my voice.  But that doesn't mean I have lost the learning I have already done - I might be returning to the centre, to the 'start', but that doesn't mean the journey before was fruitless.  Sure, it led to a dead end and there were some really fucking bumpy bits along it, but navigating that road means I picked things up on the way, even if a lot of those things were grazes and bruises from tripping over the bumpy sections.  I have learned and keep in mind, this time, perspective.  

There are days, and quite honestly many of them, when I don't actually want to be here, such is the background level of hurt, shame, and just plain sadness which lingers from years past and is ready to spring up to hijack any kind of ordinary, if challenging, life event.  It's my experience that therapists greatly enjoy a metaphor - as do I - so in explaining where things sat for me at the time, I likened my experience to a science experiment that stuck with me in primary school, whereby a jar was filled with beans - when no more beans can go in, is it full?  Well yes, of course.  But what if you then added sand? Somehow there is space for more - but surely now it is full?  Yes.  Until you add some water.  Such is the way I've treated myself for a long time, and probably even more so of late - having a child, a husband, caring responsibilities for elderly mother in law, little practical help close by and then, if you please, a fucking national lockdown that prevented seeing friends and finding any light relief from the above responsibilities - well it became almost necessary to keep adding stuff to the jar.  Eventually, however, it does become full, and it starts spilling over the sides.   Realistically, I will always have a jar which is full of beans.  I can't delete the past, I can't remove the effect it had on me, and I can't change the chemistry of my brain.  But I can stop adding sand, or at the very least, recognise that once the sand is in, it really is full and trying to add water is only going to make the whole of the contents spill, beans and all. 

So writing is my attempt to filter out the sand - to make sure I don't add more without taking something out first.  I might be back at the start, but I can begin the next path with the intention of shedding some of the load along the way, as I pick up new, more useful things.

Cadence

Could it be that old song of mine, drifting from the speakers?  It could have the simplicity of a folk tune, four square conventional harmony, phrasing as regular as the tick of a clock.

The thin, wavering note could become anything, could swell to a rich, textured sweep of strings from bass to somewhere beyond the stratosphere, endless harmonics layering their vibrations to tether the sky to the earth.  Or it could tease out single notes from round about, a scraping dissonance to lead here, there, towards each dead end in the maze.  Breath held, can it be held as long as the note?  Of course not, the animal must take in oxygen, cannot be exalted to the unwordly frequency of the string.  It has no need, could stay suspended in the air forever, until you remember that the note is attached to the instrument, the arm that plays it.  The arm will weaken and shake - fall – eventually.

A tentative thud of deep percussion, felt more than heard.  It is an unsteady heartbeat of imperceptible tone, still unable to hint at modality.  Waiting.  Wistful.  And still the note, hovering above.  At last, with the imperceptible communication that the listener joins, a wordless understanding that it will move, and the breath is held yet tighter as the heart lifts to tumble over with the change of note and harmony floods through as if via an artery, understood at last, energising the spirit and flowing toward each extremity.

But still there is no major or minor, it is a conference where words tumble over one another, but nothing is said.  The uncertainty is potential, until the point of commitment the music could go anywhere, a rubber band held taught and poised for flight. 

And then the warm resonance of the middle notes.  A certainty at last – the bright third of the major key.  A pulse.  How can the disembodied sound become a part of the physique? And yet it does, it takes possession of the body, a sigh, a lift, a sway – not just heard but absorbed and mirrored. The recognisable, almost jolly tune is an intrusion, its garish predictability at odds with the subtlety of the first note, the melody insufficiently cerebral, no indulging of the fragile drama I had created within, just… life.  In all its ordinariness.

But still the resonance lingers from that first hint at what could be, too late to prevent the hairline fracture which it swiftly pinpointed and into which it immediately headed, like water finding the crack in the glass and imperceptibly leaking through.  Harmony is already challenged, cadence no longer certain. 

Sure enough, interruptions begin to shake the tune, fissures appearing in its implicated pattern of I, IV, V.  It begins to crack, and fragment.  Modulation?  It shudders through the veins, flowing back towards the heart, blue now, heavy and disturbing.  No, I didn’t mean it.  Give it back, that safe, secure and familiar melody.  I did not love it, but it held me in a supported, confined webbing that did not tip and sway and threaten to cast me into unfathomable atonality.  And now I am the melody, and everything around is challenging harmony, nothing underpinning the dogged, focused drive towards the cadence I had planned.  It is not the surrounding harmony that is wrong – it is rich, textured, filled with tugging suspensions that yearn to pull me into the resolution.  Imaginative, unpredictable, but not departed from the tonality of the piece.  It is I, wandering off on a cadenza of my own, refusing to acknowledge the new key, that prevents the dovetailing of the chords. 

Stop.  Abandon the resistance – let it rise to the surface and join with the inexorable shifting of the music around, it will clash, twang and squeeze at the ears but it will set the way, prepare for the cadence.  Pressing on without a change in direction will only result in another interruption, the music has changed key, it is not my old song. 

The crescendo, muffled by hands pressed hard against the ears will reach a climactic height, making clinging to the old piece impossible.  I can let it be overwritten, or I can drift in to join it.  I can reach out to catch the pivot chord, participate in the perfect cadence, and let it go smoothly and softly.  And there will be other music, sewing up this tune does not end the concert, never to be played again.  It will never be played precisely the same, but the series of notes can be picked up again and new instruments can present a myriad of opportunities for different timbres, still more perfect vibrations and harmonics, new tempi and contrasting movements.  There is another to be played, as the dying notes of the last spin away, released into the silent past.