“To be alive is Power.” – Emily Dickinson

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being ALIVE, change, dark, Emily Dickinson, labels, mental illness, stigma, suicide

My memories of the past several years are smeared, streaky and ghosted like an underdeveloped Polaroid. They are a part of my story and yet seem foggy and distant, the narrative of another person. It’s almost as if I’m the omniscient storyteller, the voiceover for a character in a movie I can replay in my head. I can watch it over and over, but in a way that is removed, slightly aloof. It is only in violent flashes that I actually recall living through these moments, that the person in the ambulance, the ICU, the treatment center, is me.

Mental illness began for me as a narrowing of my experience, a tightening of the seams, as if a thread was being pulled too hard, gathering all the stitches in one large bundle. Things that used to be spread out, allowed room for breathing, became uncomfortably close and thick. The world itself looked different from this place; the coloring was off, as if the lens I was peering through was filmy and sepia-toned. Things were brown around the edges, dull and old-fashioned, and appeared at a distance. It was like I was always carrying something heavy and awkward, something I couldn’t figure out how to put down.

In college, doctors called it “depression.” In my mid-twenties, it was “eating disorder.” Then it was “anxiety,” then “bipolar.” And, when I still wasn’t better, it became “Borderline.”

This ebb and flow of diagnoses, all very different in symptomatology, has followed me through the duration of my time in the mental health system. My experience with stigma has mirrored this as well, shifting according to my labels.

For it turns out that disclosing suicidal ideation when you are depressed warrants more resources, while revealing thoughts about killing yourself when you are Borderline is attention seeking and manipulative. Continuing to struggle when you are depressed makes you “recurrent;” when you are Borderline, it makes you “unwilling.”

As discussion of mental illness has increased, it has become organized in a hierarchical schema in the public sphere. Much like the bias of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, there are diagnoses that are viewed as organic and ones that are perceived as the person’s fault. This is as true in the media as it is in the emergency room or the therapist’s office; while great strides have been made in raising awareness, stigma still exists, especially around personality disorders and chronic suicidality.

I’ve been told that I’m 99.9% lethal to myself. I’ve been told that I’m an “atypical” Borderline patient because I’m so easy to work with. I’ve been told that I’m ungrateful for attempting suicide because there is nothing wrong with my life. In a meeting with my family during a hospitalization, a doctor told my parents they might as well buy my body bag now-with me in the room.

These instances stand out in the otherwise hazy recollection of my past because they are so horrifying. What is worse, though, is how such comments stopped when the label was removed from my chart. Now that I’m back to being “depressed” I am worthy of respectful care. It is as if my humanity is determined by a single word, or the absence of it.

We wonder why people die by suicide, and in the midst of the complex mess of a problem one thing stands out: silence. Is it any wonder that so many are afraid to talk about mental illness when it is so misunderstood? When seeking treatment comes with the burden of stigma and shame?

I purposely talk about my past and present struggles with mental illness with the hope that doing so will influence change. But I still feel a rise of fear when I put words like Borderline out into the world. Most of the time, I try to explain what I’ve gone through without the labels, for these small words that somehow hold such power do nothing to actually capture the reality of experience. And the reality of my experience has come down to moments.

Moments are tricky things to catch. They dart about like tiny fish weaving in and out of kelp forests on the murky ocean floor. If you look at the right time, you can glimpse the silver flash of sunbeams on scales or the flurry of tail-brushed sediment as it rises. It’s more likely, though, when the water is especially deep and dark, that you miss the movement altogether, that what you see is the vast dimness spread before you rather than the brief bursts of activity and light.

It’s so difficult, then, to do what is necessary and helpful in the moment, for when it is most vital, it can seem impossible to recognize it as a moment. If you can’t separate out one moment from the next, if time seems to blend together in a mess of blackness, then reaching out and grabbing the flashlight takes an unbelievable act of courage and strength. And then you must turn it on.

It is almost as if you have to go backwards. You can only see the moments after you turn the light on them, after you know to squint your eyes and wait patiently for the fish to emerge, even for a second, from the swirling seaweed. To do the hard thing in the moment, you have to leap and act even though it feels like you will have to act forever, that it won’t do any good because this doesn’t feel like a moment at all but a lifetime.

It’s standing up and moving one foot in front of another, forcing your legs to follow a path you can’t see, making your brain discount the panic and fear and total darkness that it’s registering and go into action without tangible reason, without any light or guidance at all. Moving when you can’t see what’s ahead of you; that’s an incredible act of bravery.

And so-moments. Because focusing on them is the source of hope when the world narrows, the thread tightens. And shining the light on these moments and how they feel, beyond labels, above single words, is the only way to expand the minds of people who have never experienced such things, to break the silence.

“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.” -Ursula K. Le Guin

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bravery, gratitude, light, Living, mentor, storytelling, words

I think the act of living has always been a story for me.  I can’t see the ocean without words cresting in my mind along with the tide, can’t feel the fur of my cats without adjectives coating my tongue.  Words are the pictures, the taste, the meaning in everything.

And maybe this is why, at first, depression was so startlingly hard to bare; it enveloped all the words.  Storytelling takes energy, vigor, light; without it, words dry up somewhere inside you without ever reaching the surface.

And perhaps this is why we still struggle so much with the concept of mental illness.  If you have no language to describe what is going on within you, there is no way to communicate your pain to someone else.  Words make things real.  If the very disease that is gripping you removes them, what is left?

I remember an evening in the Emergency Room, checking in at the registration desk. I was crying, and when asked my reason for the visit, couldn’t think of anything to say. The receptionist kindly said, “I see; you’re sad.”

And that’s just it; depression is not sadness.  I’m not sure how to describe it beyond that-what it’s not.  But in some ways I’ve grown to see that as a gift.

One of the reasons I’m alive today is because someone believed in my light, saw the glimmer of my story even when my words had long been dormant.  This person showed me how to be in this world in all the ways that depression is not.

She showed me it is possible to get out of bed on mornings when panic clogs your throat and it feels like all the awful possibilities are closing in on you.  She showed me it is possible to dance in an emptying auditorium just because, for a moment, you feel giddy with joy.  She showed me that you don’t have to settle for the status quo, that it is possible to innovate with fervent empathy.  She showed me, through her own willingness, what it means to truly be yourself-something I had lost in hospital rooms and prescription bottles, and probably long before.

Depression is not dancing, not words.  It is not connection, not light, not life.  It chips away at who you are, piece by piece, like a strong wave pounding on a rock, until you are a grain of sand lost amidst millions of other grains.  What a gift I have been given, to know that what it is not can prove a daily guide. That my story can continue through the pounding, even when words are harder to find in the swells.  And what a gift that she, by shining her own blazing light, gave me back my own light, my own story.

“But who ever said the easiest path is the one you should choose?” – Ellen Hopkins, Rumble

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bravery, change, Intensity, journey, Living, mental illness, social work, vulnerability, words

I can feel it lately, though I don’t know how to describe it other than a deep internal rumbling, almost like hunger but thicker and complicated by a stew of emotions.

It started during my first graduate school class, when my professor told us that silence condones, that our voices as social workers are one of the most powerful tools in our possession, that words are a vehicle towards change.

It continued as my eyes were opened to the unearned privilege I’ve carried my entire life with complete unawareness, unawareness born because of that very privilege.  It strengthened as I learned about our American system and how it is oppressive at it’s very core, how for the first 30 years of my life I have been quietly and passively walking on soil that is stained and stolen.

It grew louder, more ferocious, when the majority of the academic community which so loudly touted social justice values went mute surrounding mental illness issues. It writhed with loneliness and fear when I was told not to speak of my own struggles, not to share my personal story, not to be who I am.

And it’s there now, this rumbling, as I write these words.  I’ve cried over it, denied it, tried to throw it away.  I don’t want the heaviness of caring so much.

But I do.

So I’m releasing that rumbling, turning it into a thunder clap, a roar.  I don’t want to be a part of a world where so much is broken, so many differences are ostracized and demonized and oppressed.  I don’t know what it’s like to be black, to be homeless, to be Native American, and I hope to continue in my learning about allieship, about ways in which I can be a part of empowering those communities, raising those valuable voices above the din of privilege.

I do know what it’s like to have a mental illness.  And I’m finished walking the tightrope between silent safety and outright openness.  In a year and a half I am going to be a social worker who has attempted suicide, has scars from self-harm, has been in a psychiatric hospital multiple times.  And I’m going to be a damn good one.

And I’m allowing that rumble to guide me, that passion to drive me towards working for change.  I’ve always believed in the power of storytelling, that words matter.  Now my words will have rumbling behind them.