Hello mental health, it’s me speaking
I keep forgetting where I am and how I got here, so I’ve decided to type out my diary. The last few weeks have been very low, which is seemingly counter-intuitive as I’ve been coping very well with lots of changes without a panic attack in sight. I hate writing that. Makes me feel like I am willing bad luck; like there’s some bad witch out there watching for the slightest hint of a smile on my face, just so she can point that spindly finger and vanish all my dreams away. That’s a crazy notion I know, but something I need to deal with. That’s the fear talking, saying Don’t shine the light on me, don’t. Because you know what will happen when you shine the light. The fear tells you that your recovery is impermanent, that if you blast that torch in its direction your tentative little life will fall apart. But what really happens is that shining the light, speaking your fear, extinguishes the darkness.
The fear is fearful of its demise. After-all, it has been your companion for so long. It whispers, What a lonely life it will be once I’m gone. Maybe that’s why I feel sad: it’s the end of an era. That sounds so strange, doesn’t it? Like the Beatles breaking up or the death of Monet. Like suddenly you’re not going to see another vision of those water lilies again; whether they’re purple or that lovely orange-brown they descended into as Monet became blinded by cataracts. To feel upset for a time in your life that has been hellish doesn’t (on the surface) make sense. What people don’t realise is that when you peek through the bars of the dungeon of your own nightmares you see a key that is so luminous, your quest can become like that for the Holy Grail. If you have spent your life searching for a cure, what do you get when you finally clasp the cup in your hands? Once you’ve drunk from it what then?
Don’t worry about that now; there’s a road you need to tread between here and salvation. Now off you go and have a banana. The banana is gone, so I’m having a pear. That’s one thing you have to keep in mind with this program; if you have focussed your mind on a goal and you set about achieving it, and what you’re doing isn’t working, then you need to change tack. As in sailing, if there’s no wind you may have to power up the motor. If you’re in a little Taser and you have no motor you may just have to wait for someone to tow you back to shore. Either way if there’s no wind you need to reassess. So it is with mental health treatment. Last year I was driving and driving, trying to get to a place so I could be at my brother’s wedding. The more kilometres I crunched the more tense I got. I was not paying attention to the internal warning signs screaming at me You are going off course. When I faltered I fell very hard. The reflection of how hard I fell had a direct correlation with how hard I was pushing myself. Deep down I was saying I must not panic. I must not panic. What I should have been doing was noting the rising panic and dealing with that and those emotions, instead of doing purely scientific, ‘getting there’ type activities. I confused my journey to freedom with physical distance. But the distance to wellness is not measured in kilometres.
Setbacks are inevitable, just like the beta testing of a computer program, before you release it on the world. When I was working on a Y2K team I learned that simple things (like putting ‘20’ into dates) can be essential; so too panic setbacks remind us of the little details. The need to stop and fill your lungs. The need to say howdie to your best friend. The need to look at what’s important, quit a horrible job or walk the dog.
Most people who experience panic have perfectionist personalities: they expect to climb the Olympus of their fears every day. They push and push until their muscles weaken, their clamps come loose, and their fingers are black from frostbite. Our society has this fascination with material things, like whether we own a house, or have children, or own the latest flat screen plasma TV. But people are far more complex than this, and often the spirit of a person is harder to see and gauge. Sometimes we lose focus on the goal and we get caught up in what other people say. We unconsciously accept the propaganda, Yes, I must have a house to be happy. I must own this boat and all these little trinkets. It’s usually at this time that our blood pressure begins to rise and those familiar panicky feelings take hold.
Fear might be just another way of telling you to stop working so hard, stop abusing your body, stop denying your feelings, stop, stop, stop. So you do.
And life is never the same again.
In my case life truly did stop. This came in the form of a monumental quaking that opened a great fissure underneath me; I looked down, and (at first) I could only see a gaping drop of unfathomable black depth. I could not begin to imagine life outside my swaying corridor. My job, an hour’s drive away may as well have been Mount Fuji, and I a snail. I was blind to it at the time, but this illness was to become truly a blessing. Prior to the panic my job had become a production line, one after another manuscripts mounted, till I had to sequester another desk. Inside my heart was screaming, When do I get to the bottom of the stack? But I never heard its call. Never even considered leaving. This was the dream of publishing I had nurtured for so long. I had ignored my heart for so long that now my body conspired to ignore me. Against all my wishes a shaking took over, a sick stomach, blurry eyed weakness that (at first) I simply could not fight. And when I did go into battle to leave the house after several weeks I wondered: Why would I want to continue working so hard, abusing my body, denying my feelings? Take this opportunity to grow. To learn to strive for all those things I’ve never had time to strive for. Take a hard, hard look. This is the message. The chance to start over and re-build is one not given to everyone.
If we start looking upon this as a blessing rather than a witch’s evil concoction, life takes on new meaning. Beauty is no longer something you see with your eyes; it is in everything. In the early days of my illness my only wish was to wash my car. Wistfully I watched the city dust descend on my white car and dreamed of the day I could get there with a polishing cloth. If I could just get downstairs, I thought. So when the day came and I finally made it into the carpark, bucket in hand, warm water washing the dust away, it was the best day. Better than publishing a thousand page book, better than chocolate.
Panic is almost like being paralysed from the inside. Only in some ways worse than being wheelchair bound, because people don’t recognise it as an illness. You often get told, Just get over it. Like if you try hard enough you can climb the mountain, without ropes, the proper shoes or stamina. People think, If you want it enough you can conjure that calm. But internal peace is a skill, especially when your body conspires against you in such a dramatic fashion. Suddenly, the very things you take for granted, being able to operate a car, breathing without fear of blacking out, walking past your front doorstep into a benign world, have simply vanished, or they are so different to what you are used to, you question everything. If I go there can I escape quickly? Does this road force me to drive through the city? Where are the exits in case I need to leave? Sometimes the bodily reverberations are so strong, all you want to do is stop every source of feedback touching your body. You close all the windows and the doors, stop taking food in, sit in a corner of a room and fall to pieces, hoping that if you’re not exposed to the world whatever is causing the shaking will stop. This is agoraphobia. Looking around with panicky eyes is akin to seeing the world with upside down glasses. All your senses are suddenly wrong. As you learn to recover you discover that you must re-interpret the world. When your brain tells you to run, you need to stay. When you want to turn left, because that takes you closer to home you flick your blinker to right. When every sense is experiencing overload and you want to stay holed up in the darkness, you must open the door and walk into the sunshine. For every time you give in to the panic is two times you must say no to it. So in the end you learn to do the opposite of your panicky intuition. Many won’t appreciate the time it takes to learn that sense of confidence again, but some do, usually those who have also gone through it and come out shining on the other side. A friend of mine who has also experienced panic says to me ‘Take all the time you need.’ Patience and understanding, I find, can be the greatest gifts a person can give you. This acts as a role model for the patience you give to yourself.
Your time is so different to everyone else’s.
Mental health, what is it? Increasingly I find it is about being able to turn to the one person in your life who will always be by your side when governments, friendships and work falls apart: that person is you. Your own best friend, confidant, diary, self.
I used to dream that people were walking ahead of me, so far and so fast that their legs blurred like a comic strip Road Runner. I worried that soon I would be so far out of step with them that I would be left alone. Now I’m happy to walk and hum and occasionally stop and photograph the flowers. My closest friends understand that I’m just taking in the scenery. Sometimes they fall behind to greet me, which is so nice. But if they don’t, or if I’m having a quiet moment, I am still never alone.
The fear is fearful of its demise. After-all, it has been your companion for so long. It whispers, What a lonely life it will be once I’m gone. Maybe that’s why I feel sad: it’s the end of an era. That sounds so strange, doesn’t it? Like the Beatles breaking up or the death of Monet. Like suddenly you’re not going to see another vision of those water lilies again; whether they’re purple or that lovely orange-brown they descended into as Monet became blinded by cataracts. To feel upset for a time in your life that has been hellish doesn’t (on the surface) make sense. What people don’t realise is that when you peek through the bars of the dungeon of your own nightmares you see a key that is so luminous, your quest can become like that for the Holy Grail. If you have spent your life searching for a cure, what do you get when you finally clasp the cup in your hands? Once you’ve drunk from it what then?
Don’t worry about that now; there’s a road you need to tread between here and salvation. Now off you go and have a banana. The banana is gone, so I’m having a pear. That’s one thing you have to keep in mind with this program; if you have focussed your mind on a goal and you set about achieving it, and what you’re doing isn’t working, then you need to change tack. As in sailing, if there’s no wind you may have to power up the motor. If you’re in a little Taser and you have no motor you may just have to wait for someone to tow you back to shore. Either way if there’s no wind you need to reassess. So it is with mental health treatment. Last year I was driving and driving, trying to get to a place so I could be at my brother’s wedding. The more kilometres I crunched the more tense I got. I was not paying attention to the internal warning signs screaming at me You are going off course. When I faltered I fell very hard. The reflection of how hard I fell had a direct correlation with how hard I was pushing myself. Deep down I was saying I must not panic. I must not panic. What I should have been doing was noting the rising panic and dealing with that and those emotions, instead of doing purely scientific, ‘getting there’ type activities. I confused my journey to freedom with physical distance. But the distance to wellness is not measured in kilometres.
Setbacks are inevitable, just like the beta testing of a computer program, before you release it on the world. When I was working on a Y2K team I learned that simple things (like putting ‘20’ into dates) can be essential; so too panic setbacks remind us of the little details. The need to stop and fill your lungs. The need to say howdie to your best friend. The need to look at what’s important, quit a horrible job or walk the dog.
Most people who experience panic have perfectionist personalities: they expect to climb the Olympus of their fears every day. They push and push until their muscles weaken, their clamps come loose, and their fingers are black from frostbite. Our society has this fascination with material things, like whether we own a house, or have children, or own the latest flat screen plasma TV. But people are far more complex than this, and often the spirit of a person is harder to see and gauge. Sometimes we lose focus on the goal and we get caught up in what other people say. We unconsciously accept the propaganda, Yes, I must have a house to be happy. I must own this boat and all these little trinkets. It’s usually at this time that our blood pressure begins to rise and those familiar panicky feelings take hold.
Fear might be just another way of telling you to stop working so hard, stop abusing your body, stop denying your feelings, stop, stop, stop. So you do.
And life is never the same again.
In my case life truly did stop. This came in the form of a monumental quaking that opened a great fissure underneath me; I looked down, and (at first) I could only see a gaping drop of unfathomable black depth. I could not begin to imagine life outside my swaying corridor. My job, an hour’s drive away may as well have been Mount Fuji, and I a snail. I was blind to it at the time, but this illness was to become truly a blessing. Prior to the panic my job had become a production line, one after another manuscripts mounted, till I had to sequester another desk. Inside my heart was screaming, When do I get to the bottom of the stack? But I never heard its call. Never even considered leaving. This was the dream of publishing I had nurtured for so long. I had ignored my heart for so long that now my body conspired to ignore me. Against all my wishes a shaking took over, a sick stomach, blurry eyed weakness that (at first) I simply could not fight. And when I did go into battle to leave the house after several weeks I wondered: Why would I want to continue working so hard, abusing my body, denying my feelings? Take this opportunity to grow. To learn to strive for all those things I’ve never had time to strive for. Take a hard, hard look. This is the message. The chance to start over and re-build is one not given to everyone.
If we start looking upon this as a blessing rather than a witch’s evil concoction, life takes on new meaning. Beauty is no longer something you see with your eyes; it is in everything. In the early days of my illness my only wish was to wash my car. Wistfully I watched the city dust descend on my white car and dreamed of the day I could get there with a polishing cloth. If I could just get downstairs, I thought. So when the day came and I finally made it into the carpark, bucket in hand, warm water washing the dust away, it was the best day. Better than publishing a thousand page book, better than chocolate.
Panic is almost like being paralysed from the inside. Only in some ways worse than being wheelchair bound, because people don’t recognise it as an illness. You often get told, Just get over it. Like if you try hard enough you can climb the mountain, without ropes, the proper shoes or stamina. People think, If you want it enough you can conjure that calm. But internal peace is a skill, especially when your body conspires against you in such a dramatic fashion. Suddenly, the very things you take for granted, being able to operate a car, breathing without fear of blacking out, walking past your front doorstep into a benign world, have simply vanished, or they are so different to what you are used to, you question everything. If I go there can I escape quickly? Does this road force me to drive through the city? Where are the exits in case I need to leave? Sometimes the bodily reverberations are so strong, all you want to do is stop every source of feedback touching your body. You close all the windows and the doors, stop taking food in, sit in a corner of a room and fall to pieces, hoping that if you’re not exposed to the world whatever is causing the shaking will stop. This is agoraphobia. Looking around with panicky eyes is akin to seeing the world with upside down glasses. All your senses are suddenly wrong. As you learn to recover you discover that you must re-interpret the world. When your brain tells you to run, you need to stay. When you want to turn left, because that takes you closer to home you flick your blinker to right. When every sense is experiencing overload and you want to stay holed up in the darkness, you must open the door and walk into the sunshine. For every time you give in to the panic is two times you must say no to it. So in the end you learn to do the opposite of your panicky intuition. Many won’t appreciate the time it takes to learn that sense of confidence again, but some do, usually those who have also gone through it and come out shining on the other side. A friend of mine who has also experienced panic says to me ‘Take all the time you need.’ Patience and understanding, I find, can be the greatest gifts a person can give you. This acts as a role model for the patience you give to yourself.
Your time is so different to everyone else’s.
Mental health, what is it? Increasingly I find it is about being able to turn to the one person in your life who will always be by your side when governments, friendships and work falls apart: that person is you. Your own best friend, confidant, diary, self.
I used to dream that people were walking ahead of me, so far and so fast that their legs blurred like a comic strip Road Runner. I worried that soon I would be so far out of step with them that I would be left alone. Now I’m happy to walk and hum and occasionally stop and photograph the flowers. My closest friends understand that I’m just taking in the scenery. Sometimes they fall behind to greet me, which is so nice. But if they don’t, or if I’m having a quiet moment, I am still never alone.
posted by Jessica at 5:29 pm
2 Comments:
you are never alone, there are lots of us out there, walking at the same pace as you, keeping you company in the collective spirit, we here in Port Augusta think and talk of you often. You are our idol, living in a big city, omg, how brave is that???? We think of you as we sneak into the tiny shopping centre to buy food for the kids, and race home to feel we have climbed Mount Everest. The accroutements of life, tv's houses etc., how much easier it would be if that was all that made us happy. BUT how boring, how less creative, how horribly normal. No thanks, give me a bit of pain anyday, it makes us wonderful.
Queeni again
My beautiful Queenie I only just saw this! You are my inspiration. Promise me you'll never be sane and boring like the rest? Love always j x
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