Ramblings on Living with Mental Illness from A Kaleidoscope Mind
Safer here than on my ‘real’ blog, but regardless, this.
1.
You do not keep sharp objects in the house anymore. You cut your vegetables and fruit with a butter knife. It reminds you of sawing on your arm at a red light with a plastic knife you found in the glove compartment. They tell you that you were feeling something at the moment. You weren’t feeling anything. That was the problem. You were at a red light.
Some nights, you feel like you’re waiting at a red light again. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you want to. You find your scissors, nail clippers, your house keys. You do what it takes. When someone asks you, why, you can only shrug because you don’t remember a time when you didn’t think why not
2.
You wonder about that. You wonder how others can go through their lives and not see suicide everywhere around them. You are jealous. You begin to resent them for their ability to function in a world without death. They do not hold onto railings to stop themselves from throwing their bodies in front of trains. They do not see their imaginary fall down a set of stairs. They are not afraid to look out high rise windows because they don’t even know that they may be tempted. They are not afraid to move into buildings with rooftop access. They are not afraid of their cars in their garages. They are not afraid of their bathtubs. They do not know that what they should really fear is their own capacity for self-ending. And they do not think of it like that because they do not think suicide happens to them.
You know better.
3.
You turn on the lights to feel less alone in a world too frightening to share with others. You leave the lights on all night. You leave open all the doors. You like the radio because it drowns out your thoughts. You dream so often of home invasions that you wonder if you don’t wish for one, just to have the company of someone also alone in the world, also seeking strange dark paths to less loneliness.
They say, are you manic or are you depressed? And you think maybe you are both at the same time. You say, manically depressed. They say, you can’t be both. They’re polar opposites. You think, I know that. But you don’t really because in your head, you think they are doing the exact same black and white thinking they warn you against. You think I am wildly depressed. I am pathetically manic. Aren’t I? But you aren’t sure. They introduced doubt.
You can’t breathe. You heart keeps beating but you can’t breath. They tell you nothing is wrong with you, but they asked what went wrong. To you, the first cannot be true if the second can be answered. They are the same thing: you walked out the door.
There is a space between your ribs and you fill it with your doubts and your fears. When you are alone, and when you are not alone, you run your fingers over them, counting. Always counting. They reassure you with their presence. . You don’t believe you can live without them. Their existence promises you that you are alive.
The counterweight is you can’t live with them either.
You stepped on a sidewalk crack today. You cried. You didn’t eat. You hit your head against the bathroom wall while you showered. While you scrubbed yourself raw.
You checked the locks. You videotaped yourself checking the locks. You told a friend you checked the locks.
Still, in your car, you can’t be sure.
So you go inside, again, to check the locks. To be sure. To be less afraid. Again.
You create rituals to save yourself from your rituals.
You scare yourself in the bathroom. Was that you in the mirror?
You think about removing your right forefinger. It doesn’t seem necessary anymore. In fact, it seems cumbersome. It inhibits you. You think that maybe everything will be better if that finger is gone. Yes. It must go.
It isn’t that that you are not sane. It’s that your interpretation on sanity is different than others’. Isn’t sanity, after all, merely a prism reflecting light differently depending on which side you peer into?
Then again, sanity is not a synonym for reality.
Sanity is what you lose in reality.
He touches you and you scream. Your hand covers your mouth too late and your apologies come too slow. He backs away from you. He will not touch you again. You do not have the words to tell him you want his touch to erase the touch you remember.
You shower too often. You shower not often enough. The shower is the only place where your brain turns off. The shower is the place where you can see your body. The water runs cold.
15.
He touches your scars, wants to know where they’re from. He gives you an out, asks with a laugh if your cat is a jerk. You can’t answer him. You don’t want to lie. You don’t want to forget.
You took a final exam once with exactly seventy marks on your arms, three on each hip, five on each thigh, and three on each side right along your ribs. You made them with a single blade razor you bought at the drugstore the day before the exam, before your last study session with your classmates. The marks made you feel safe. They kept your secrets. The edges of your skin where you came apart held you together.
Now you run your fingers over the ridges of your scars. You wish you had a blade to show him how beautiful it was. You wish your arms were unharmed.
Once you received help. You drove every day to a daily outpatient treatment center to talk about your feelings and learn to eat and learn to understand the mechanics of what you did and why you did it. What you learned was: you will never be sick enough.
They said, you improved. go home. be well.
You went home and dove into the wreck of your mind. You ate nothing but egg whites and macaroons for weeks. You ran miles. You fell apart and felt stronger. You lost your mind.
You tell them you wrote a book in a weekend. You tell them you wrote four books in six weeks. They are amazed. They are jealous.
They don’t ask you how or why.
You know they don’t want the answer.
You’ve climbed the cliff and fallen off it so many times that your hands smell like red dirt and dust, mouse droppings and sweat, all the time. You know that mountains aren’t like they look like in posters. Mountains are cold, windy, and lonely. You can climb a mountain a hundred times, and still find something new every climb, every descent. You’ve stood on a firetower and not thrown yourself off. You’ve seen the edge of the cliff and you gripped the rock instead of tasting the air.
You’ve learned the only way to stay is to stay, no matter what. There is no other way.
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