“To be alive is Power.” – Emily Dickinson

Tags

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.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” -Rumi

Tags

change, dark, dialectics, Ghandi, light, Living, the bus, thesamedifferent

It’s the hardest of simple things, and the

heaviest of lite loads,

that all i have to do,

and all i can do,

is put one foot in front of the other,

with my eyes truly open,

and notice the gentle ways in which

i can shake the world,

walking out of my wounded Darkness

and into my own

Light.

“Good things come, and I’m not just referring to riding the buses.” -Lionel Blue Read

Tags

dark, emotions, faith, human, light, the bus, vulnerability

The day bus and the night bus are different.  In the sunlight, people board brief-cased and fresh.  We have a purpose, or the air of one, a destination in mind as we check our watches with a practiced flick of the head and sigh into our Smart Phones.

In the shadows, riders come and go unseen and silent.  We move with a weight, the stench of exhaustion heavy on our sloped shoulders.  Defeat is a passenger on the night bus, and Poverty, and Loneliness.

The bus itself is an entirely separate creature in the dark.  Like the fluorescent fish that haunt the ocean’s unlit trenches, the bus brings streaks of dazzling glow to the sullied and tired corners of the city.  It lures the drunk and tired with light that bursts forth, effulgent amidst dingy brick buildings and parked cars.  Alleyways that remain mired in gloom even in the noon sun are suddenly exposed by headlamps, and people crawl forth like termites from the woodwork, scuttling towards the blaze and quiet community of fellow riders.

I realized, recently, that even when I’m riding next to Defeat, musty and crumpled, I’m sitting three seats away from Hope, too.  I can catch an eye-glimmer from Glee, who is wearing a sunshine-yellow suit and whose jolly-nosed red shoes seem to be tap dancing under the bench.  It might be me who is Sorrow, walking in the trenches of my well-trained Brain, until I look up and see Joy bouncing down the aisle with an alligator-grabber from the Zoo gift shop and the wide smear of a chocolate grin.

At a time when it is scary and uncomfortable for me to Come As I Am, the bus community reminds me that sometimes it is okay.  Evenings right now are especially challenging, as the fatigue of the day wears through my protective coat, and I long to be alone and held all at once.  So as dusk settles in, the bus pulls blazingly, blindingly up to my downtown stop, and my fellow termites and I scurry on board, join this tiny subsection of the Human Community with all its Emotions and Thoughts.  And in a strange way, I am held by this sea of people, even as they are all alone in their own heads.  We are alone, and yet forced to connect for a split second when we stand to allow someone else to sit, united when we hear the giggle of a child.  Whoever I sit next to, whether it’s Shame or Frustration or Happiness, I get to hold a little piece of it for a short time, even if they don’t know it.  And I get to give up a little piece of Who I Am, in the moment, too.  In a strange way I am struggling to articulate, we strangers on the bus share the Weight of being Human until we get off at our stop.

It is imperfectly perfect, this Coming As We Are, this showing up as Human.  I’m going to keep trying it, with Faith that good things come-on the night bus, on the day bus, and beyond.

“Can you understand? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.” ― Sylvia Plath

Tags

dark, Emily Dickinson, emotions, light, panicjoy, poetry, skillz, Sylvia Plath

Last night was one of heart-clawing panic.  It was one of those “Evenings of the Brain” that Emily Dickinson knew well.  If that sounds Intense, that’s because it was.  It’s difficult for me to even acknowledge that in Words now that I have a small, expanding window into the Sufferings of this world.  My pain last night was a sand grain compared to the mountains of famine and loss and injustice.  And it was still Intensely Intense.

I’ve learned that my Brain interprets the world in big, bold colors, in the shadows that hover between lights and darks.  I feel things in a Big Way-the Intense Intensity.  When I am truly living in my Sarahness, the experience of joy is a physical bursting that has me dancing on the sidewalk, the experience of sadness is a weight behind my eyes that is oceans deep.  It’s a gorgeous way of living, and it’s one that nearly killed me.

I know this to be different from the way many other Brains work.  Last week I stood at a busy downtown intersection, fogged with that empty-tiredness that sometimes comes from truly Living.  My attention was caught by the honking of car horns and swerve of tires that are leaving tread; there was a seagull in the street.  This isn’t uncommon where I live; we are surrounded by Ocean.  This bird, though, was injured, or sick, or both.  He looked like an old man, gray tufts of feathers sticking out haphazardly from the top of his head, stooped like a cane.  And he couldn’t manage to get himself out of traffic.  Over and over I watched as he was narrowly missed by trucks and taxi cabs, would just barely hop flutter out of danger, only to settle for a second and be almost hit again.

Watching this unfold, I also became aware of two men standing next to me.  They had ID badges hanging from their belt loops and ties loosened around their necks, and they were laughing.  “That one sure isn’t gonna make it,” one told the other, nodding his head towards the gull as it dodged a fender by inches.  They chuckled, and then shifted towards dinner plans.  My vision expanded-I saw the bird in the road, these men who saw it and then moved on, the tears in my eyes.  I felt incredibly alone.  My urge was to run into that intersection and scoop that tired soul up, cradle it and comfort it.  I felt angry that these men could find humor in such pure suffering, and then anger towards my Brain that couldn’t-can’t-witness suffering (or perhaps it is more accurate to say suffering I can’t immediately change?) and then move on to the next meal.

The layers of that experience are still unfolding.  I try to describe it because it makes me feel less alone when Words are put on it, because it is true that I have a way of existing in this world that I believe is foreign to many AND familiar to more than is apparent, because it’s a way of validating my Intense Intensity when it is so easy not to.

The anecdote to Panic is moving towards it, turning to face the roaring beast in the eye, staring it down and then welcoming it in.  It’s some of the hardest, scariest work I’ve ever done, being that I’ve spent most of my life desperately trying not to feel my Intense Intensity.  I’m still figuring out what it looks like, exactly, when I make friends with the Beasts.  It’s an imperfect process–thank goodness.  And because I’m newly facing it with my Sarahness, it is Intensely Intense.  I wouldn’t have it any other way…and still I have so very much to learn.

“But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own” -Mary Oliver

Tags

dark, Emily Dickinson, light, Living, Mary Oliver, ocean, skillz, voice, Walt Whitman, wants, words

This is all about Light and Dark.  This is all about Starstuff- the gaps that allow light to shine through. This is all about Words.  This is my Journey.  This is my beginning, again, until my next beginning.  This is my weapon against the “old tug at my ankles” that Mary Oliver writes of.  This is my reminder to myself of myself.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable…I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world” -Walt Whitman

This is my barbaric yawp.  This is me using my wild, trembling voice.  This is me saving myself through metaphor, through storytelling, through the lovely, messy vine-tangle of Words.  This is me returning to a Truth of mine that has been buried underneath hospital gauze and Labels and Intense Sensitivity.

“Everybody will get their wants, when they heartily want.”
-Santosh Kawlar

This is my Hearty Wants List.  This is my road map to my Essence, my Self undistilled.  This is my declaration of my Sarahness.  This is my Opposite Action to shame.

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to… to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry.” -Emily Dickinson

This is my Manifesto.  And that is this:

I want to find my Phosphorescence, my marine Glow that penetrates even the blackest of Darks, my Light Within, and hold it tight, and let it shine inwardly so that it may reflect out into the world.