WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH
A not so rational, and probably rather biased, take on mental health.
The problem with how mental health is portrayed or talked about is that you are either a monster, completely unstable and fundamentally evil, or some sort of dysfunctional garbage, too fragile to function and add any sort of worth value to the real world, the one that exists outside of your loony brain.
If these are the only two boxes that the world will allow you to fit in, how on earth will you ever be able to open up???
And this is how this sick loneliness starts crawling under your skin, day in and day out.
At the beginning you do not even realize it, you think that you are just tired, you start believing that this is how adults live, you start avoiding certain topics because you cannot talk over dinner about how meditation simply does not work for you, because the moment you close your eyes there is only one instinct inside of you, one immense force, definitely too strong for you, that with a silent shout orders you to kill yourself.
You cannot drink prosecco and lightly say: “oh by the way, I have tried mindfulness but when I close my eyes, there are shadows that are holding knives and they are attacking me and well, funny thing is, now I see them also with when I open my eyes”.
Nobody would ever invite you, like ever again, if this is all you can bring to the table.
But after a while, this stops making any difference.
Because even if they invite you, you stop saying yes, you are physically uncomfortable around them because you start noticing that you feel less and less like a person and more like a mechanical plaything.
You start imitating their gestures to see if you can grasp their secret but no matter how much you try to copy them, you are still you.
And this is another problem with how we are talking about mental health: it is rarely described how all this mess has such a huge impact on your body as well.
Day in and day out, you become your pain and you feel it all over you, all inside of you.
It is in your mouth, it is in your blood and no matter how viciously you cut yourself, no matter how aggressively you scratch away your skin to see if there is a snake inside of you, infecting you with all its venom, because this is not you, you cannot be this, this is not you … no matter how deep you go into your body, no matter how much you try to smash your bones, it does not go away.
Because now you have become this pain and you are a black blob of hurt, so sticky and slimy that it is impossible to wash it away.
It is already in your lungs and it is so subtle, because it does not kill you, it simply makes your life a living hell, and with every breath it gets a little bit harder not to drown, but it is never impossible.
So, you are condemned to remain alert while you are slowing fading away.
You are trapped into this death in life nightmare and every waking second of your existence is a painful reminder of some ancient sin that you have forgotten committing and for which you will now eternally repent.
And like this, you are not only pain anymore, you have become anguish and rage and hate and disgust; but love and compassion and kindness are still there, somewhere in between all your blood and bruises but the red thread that was connecting you to them is becoming thinner and thinner.
And you have become blind and deaf to any sort of light and you would like to gouge your own eyes out of your skull because you cannot connect to reality anymore.
But you keep on paying your bills, you keep on showing up at work on time until you slowly disappear, you are stuck in this vicious cycle where you start losing the connection and of course you start panicking about it, so you desperately try to fit in.
But there is no box for you, no box will ever be big enough for how uncomfortable you feel.
So, you start moving frantically, you start this loosing war against time and space, hoping that if you jump from one thing to another, your brain will eventually get tired.
But it does not work like this and the more you jump, the smaller the box becomes.
You start obsessing about being functional, so much so that it becomes your permanent mask, it becomes your invisibility cloak that fools you into believing that having a steady job, over working, paying your taxes, producing, producing, producing will set you free or at least makes you like them.
Or makes you less you.
Whatever is faster.
The problem though is that you are not wired that way, for you any tiny little mistake is the end of the world because it is the proof that you really are worthless and you are unlawfully occupying a physical space in this world.
It is the demonstration that no matter how many titles will be after your last name, no matter how many materialistic things you will accumulate, no matter how many people will appreciate you, you will always be 10 km behind everyone else.
And a part of you will be actually comforted by this confirmation, indeed this feeling of defeat will taste sweet in your mouth because at least you will stop trying for a while.
The problem with you stop trying though is that it does not look like letting go, it does not look like giving yourself a break.
It looks like isolating, it looks like reaching for the bottle, it looks like picking your skin until you bleed, it looks like another line, it looks like punching yourself until you have a dark bruise on your cheek, it looks like being disconnected from all your realities and at the same time, it looks like being so connected to everything and everyone around you, it looks like being so vulnerable that simply being looked at is as painful as being stabbed.
It looks like being ready to say goodbye to the person you love the most without any regret.
The crazy thing though, the one that is almost never portrayed by the media, not even the specialized one, is what you keep on doing while you are living with mental illness.
You keep on living, well of course if you manage not to kill yourself which trust me is another level of challenge, I was saying you keep on living kindly, you keep on loving.
You have been raped by a man and yet you try very hard not to hate them all.
You have all this crazy rage inside of you that you cannot even verbalize yet you are so gentle with your kids and you always find new ways of playing with them.
You have been raped by a kid when you were a kid yourself and yet you have been so compassionate to try to understand why that happened and you found out that there was no hate inside of you, because that kid did not know anything but abuse and violence in the first place.
You do not have the words to express your own pain and yet you ask everyone tons of questions with genuine curiosity, hoping to find in other people’s stories the thread that will bring you back to yourself.
The thread that will bring you back home, that home that you still love so much and that has been devastated by human brutality.
You have been conditioned to become a monster and yet you are so brave to face yourself in the mirror and admit what has been done to you, the atrocious things that you have done to others and how, from now on, you want to take full ownership of your life, darkest sides included.
Because you know that only facing those horrible truths will set you free.
You are almost always in pain, either physical or mental, and yet you never fail to smile to anyone who looks a bit sad. You always try to include everyone. Because you know that loneliness is not a gentle companion and you hate the thought of someone, anyone, being in that situation.
You have spent so many years wasting away and yet you still want to be playful because there are some moments when your liveliness is stronger than any darkness and you must hold on to that.
You have been spat on, you have been walked all over, you have been shattered and yet all you can exude is grace.
You have been raised in a place that was anything but safe and yet you have decided to share your painful story because your instinct to help other people will always be stronger than all your wounds. And you do not even realize what an inspiration you are. Your wall of pain is so high that you do not see that there are people out there that are immensely grateful to have you in their lives.
You have been deprived of love since a young age and from that moment on, it is like there is this huge hole inside of you and yet, the amount of care and attention you put into other people is heart-warming but it is also heart-wrenching to see how much of yourself you keep on sacrificing for other people simply because you do not believe that you are worthy of love.
And you are too blind to realize that for some people the word “lovable” is the first one that comes into their mind when they look at you, because for those people loving you is a natural instinct and there is nothing they can do against it.
You have this monster inside of you that is trying to kill you and yet you still try to reason with it every waking second of your life and on the outside, you just keep on doing your best.
I guess I got a bit lost in my thoughts and memories but what I am trying to convey is that if all the above stories would be truthfully portrayed, people would probably stop mocking us, pitying us and judging us and they might start celebrating us like the fucking warriors that we are.
And this is not about romanticizing mental illness, because there is nothing sweet about it.
This is more an exhausted plea for the plain, so painful and yet so beautiful, truth.
