Mental Illness – My Story Pt. 1

I recently took to twitter to bemoan the state of mental health in New Zealand. While I got some much needed support, mostly in the form of a couple of likes, I was ignored more than not. The nature of my illness translates that to no-one cares, despite the support I did receive from complete strangers. Despite the support I receive every day from my parents, my partner, and the couple friends who are willing to genuinely care, to engage, to recognize that oftentimes I just can’t do it. Despite, until recently, over a decade of support from a wonderful psychologist.
However regardless of those brief moments of feeling heard, despite the never-ending support from those closest to me, I still feel like I should not speak.
Oh no, Paula, not today. You can’t organize your thoughts in a way other people will understand. If they even see your words they will write you off as a self absorbed hysteric, a liar even, definitely not someone worth listening to. So, I hesitate. My words and mind are not nicely packaged, they are worth nothing.
I’ve been hesitating for near on a decade now, and before that I never truly discussed my issues seriously. Best to make it sound less than it is, make a joke, it’s so much more palatable. It was easier to be written off as a kooky young woman who clearly “isn’t THAT unwell”.
Play it down, play it down, my brain tells me over and over….as I sink further and begin to view others as much more significant threats to my mental and emotional wellbeing.

I have never truly let it all hang out. Why would I? I don’t trust anyone to listen, to believe, most certainly not to care. It’s hard to speak up when I feel like everything I say is utterly worthless, just there to be looked down upon. That’s the nature of my illness, I don’t trust you, or you, or you. I feel like everything I say or do is essentially worthless and completely inadequate. I’m not a high functioning wordsmith, one who can eloquently describe their struggle from the relative safety of gainful employment and a nice middle class lifestyle. My mind is messy, so is my life, there are stories I cannot tell for fear of retribution.
I hate to think of myself as marginalized, but after my long years of silence I now know that I am. Just are all the others who cannot package their experience into a nice article or blog post that sounds like how the world tries to tell me (us) it should.

But today, I thought, maybe it’s time. Time to be messy, because my mind is messy and the suffering that goes with it is daily. I’m not saying I don’t have good days, wonderful days, positive experiences. That would be an actual lie, it would be unfair. I can say though that those days are often tainted by my mental illness, in one way or another. I feel the pleasure, have the fun, but underneath that little voice of “You’re not good enough, you’re nothing” keeps on chipping away at my best self, my happier self.

Interestingly enough in the past nine years I also lost a lot of self belief due to a sudden desire to conform, to just be like everyone else. To package my mental illness in a socially acceptable way. I suddenly went from a proud non-conformist to someone who wanted nothing more than to be just like everyone else, even if that would kill my soul.
Kill my soul it did, and so many aspects of my personality that in my 20’s I was so proud of. I lost myself, not in a small way but a significant manner that has seen me spend my 30’s in a constant state of existential crisis and declining mental health, because I cannot be what the world wants me to be. I’m afraid, so deeply afraid of being myself. Who am I now anyway? It’s hard to know, except that I’m a shell of that youthful me. I’ve spent so long in a form of hiding that I lost so much of my best self.
During that process I unknowingly, at first, I helped my mental health to worsen. As I keep quiet, and tried so desperately to become normal, my mental health plummeted, and kept on plummeting. I’m still not sure that I’ve hit rock bottom. I still spend many a moment wishing that my last suicide attempt in 2010 was successful.

Yes, I do that. I often feel like if only I’d died in 2010 it would have been, better. My partner and family wouldn’t have had to suffer seven more years, and counting, of mental health decline. I wouldn’t have lost more and more of myself to mental illness, and later addiction. I wouldn’t have gotten that MCMI diagnosis of Avoidant Personality Disorder to go with my Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and gone into a tailspin as my inner fragility was exposed to myself. I wouldn’t have felt my mind slipping, not quite working properly, addiction or no.
I most certainly wouldn’t have sunk money I did not have into trying to self medicate while descending into a world where I couldn’t see any light without the weed. So many things wouldn’t have happened, good and bad, but my mind only informs me of the all the negativity I could have prevented, if only I’d just died.

What right does someone like me have to live anyway?
In mid-2017 our then Minister of Health, Jonathan Coleman declared The People’s Mental Health Report invalid because they were all “left-wing anti government extremists”. Yes, he did that, right in the face of yet another youth suicide, an ever increasing problem in the New Zealand Health sector.
I’m not even young, and our health minister (pre-Labour/NZ First coalition in October) clearly deemed me not good enough to live too. After all, I’m left wing and mentally ill, I was enraged of course, but the niggle was intensified. Do I really deserve to be here? Shouldn’t I just die too?
I’d like to say right now, fuck you Jonathan Coleman, John Snow knows more than you ever possibly could as do all of us who suffer your malicious ignorance. But he’s not the Minister of Health now, and I digress a little. Yet I ask you, just for a second imagine how it feels to want mental health reform, in the hopes of getting even a little more support, and being told by the Health Minister that I most certainly do not matter. The youth suicide rate doesn’t matter, so the mental health of a woman pushing 40 can only be irrelevant at best.
The saddest thing was that so few were as enraged as I.
Maybe I do not deserve to be alive.
Even with a new government forming, do I count?
The answer always feels like, no.

Can you see why sometimes I wish my suicide attempts, one in particular, had been successful? I fear not, because how could I possibly say that? Even those who would look at me as nothing but a waste of space would hesitate and distance themselves from someone who hasn’t actually gotten over surviving. They cannot understand what it’s like to not only wish death upon oneself but to continue to regret having survived. I should be grateful, just grateful.
Don’t get me wrong, oftentimes I am grateful I survived. I’m grateful for the Paramedics and the team in Accident and Emergency, they saved my life. They did a stirling job of it, and my parents and partner remain ever grateful. I respect, admire, and am thankful for their efforts. I just also happen not to always be thankful to be alive, to have survived.

Yet here I am, alive and in the mood for some kicking. It scares me, because I so deeply fear ridicule, but I will try to speak. If not for my own benefit then maybe, hopefully, for others. Especially the others who like me have lost their voice somehow and so deeply want to be heard, to be understood.
For those of us who don’t fit into the nice mould presented by John Kirwan advertisements on mental health. Those of us who remain ill in a debilitating way no matter how hard we try, no matter how many drugs we are prescribed. We do not have a voice, it’s hard to envision ever being listened to, to be seen. But today I fight, with what little I have for all with mental illness but especially for those who suffer the ongoing disability various mental health problems can cause.

I stand for those of us with Personality Disorders deemed to difficult to even bother with.
I speak for those of us who do not respond to the medication the psychiatrists assume must make us better, and if not it’s our fault.
I stand for those we have lost. For those we are at dire risk of losing.
I stand for those of us who haven’t had a voice, and may never be taken seriously.
I stand for those who their mental health is an ongoing and debilitating issue to the point where interacting with the world in a socially acceptable way becomes near on impossible. For those who are repeatedly shunned by society for daring to be that ill.
I stand with those who support us, and against those who ignore us and put us in the too hard box.
We may be difficult, unable to package our experiences in a socially acceptable way.
I stand with everyone suffering from mental illness and inadequate support and treatment.
Finally, I stand with what’s left of my voice and I’m going to tell my story,  and hope that somewhere somehow it makes a difference. Though I do fear it will not. That again, I and my fellow sufferers will continue to go into that too hard box.
I stand with fear, of ridicule and so little hope. But it is time to stand, no matter how much it hurts to do so. To read this and see all that is wrong with my voice and nothing that is right.

This is but a small part of my story, and the greater story that there a many like me. Voiceless, in the wilderness of society and oftentimes powerless to be heard.
Please start listening, even if it is hard to understand, to be around us, please listen.
Try to remember that mental illness comes in many forms, and sometimes you can’t just fix it, or ignore it, because mental illness is not one size fits all.
I am but one of far too many. Here in the wilderness.