TL:DR - Mad Stuff

Some days are just not for you. That was how Friday felt. It was most definitely not for me. I woke up feeling distinctly ‘meh’ but for no obvious reason. My internal weather was just off.

I am a difficult creature at best. At worst, a nightmare. My mental health and I make an uneasy and largely ineffectual crime fighting duo, given that I am my own, worst enemy and spend large amounts of time trying to put myself in prisons of my own making.

When I was younger I was convinced that there would be a day when I would wake up ‘all better’. Over the years that conviction hurt too much because the day never came. I replaced it with a belief that I was just baseline mad and that the best I could hope for was high functioning madness with an ability to hide the worst of it from people in my day to day life.

Gradually, with lots of effort, I have been amending that belief. It is always a work in progress and when I am tired and there are lots of external pressures tapping away at me, I still fall into the madness line from time to time. Working hard at good mental health is very much the unpaid emotional labour of a relationship. It’s worse in a lot of ways because I still have to do all that shit for other people, and then I have to come home and do it for myself, too.

‘Normal’ is an abstract noun for me. The only sense of normal I have ever had is from watching other people, thinking I should do ‘that’ and then failing at it, either because I can’t do whatever it is, or because doing that makes me wildly unhappy. People would sometimes tell me that they thought I was brave for doing certain things differently to other people. I don’t think I was brave. I just had no choice.

The thing about ‘normal’ is that it gives you a baseline to operate from. A floor from which to build. My normal is like lava, which makes it really tricky to find stability. The more stresses I put on the thin crust of lava, the more I start to sink and the harder it becomes to clamber back up. That’s when depression starts pulling me down and I get more and more exhausted trying to achieve even the bare minimum.

What people who don’t suffer from depression or mental health conditions don’t appreciate is that I can’t really get ‘better’ until I get ‘normal’ because normal is not a given. We don’t all start in the same place. Some of us are way below the floor line, heading for the molten core at speed.

Better implies more. If it takes me all day to be functional, there is nothing left in the tank for more. And the more people insist that I ‘just’ go for a walk or ‘just’ cook a nutritious dinner or ‘just’ have a nap and I can’t, the worse I feel because how can I possibly get better if I can’t even get normal?

After years of coping without them, I discovered that anti-depressants are really helpful to me. In one of the lockdowns, when events in my life conspired to shatter what passed for normal and I was going down fast, I tried them because otherwise there was nothing else but more down.

I am one of the lucky people for whom the first choice of meds worked and worked almost instantly. Apart from weight gain, I have no side effects and I can live with being heavier, because it’s better than being deader.

I had been brought up to believe that I could think my way out of being mental into being well and if it wasn’t working, it was because my thinking was at fault. A sympathetic gp once told me that some people’s brains are just imbalanced and lacking in certain chemicals and that no amount of thinking is going to change that. I didn’t believe them at the time, and soldiered on for years, fighting my thinking and blaming myself when I didn’t turn into Pollyanna on demand.

I had believed that the pills wouldn’t stop the floor being lava, they would just deaden my response to it. I thought it would be like taking a valium, where everything is still awful but I just wouldn’t be bothered with it because I would be floating, so why would I need to put my feet on the ground? When I started taking the medication I was forced to re-examine all my beliefs. As the pills took effect I could feel the disparate parts of my lava floor coming together and beginning to cool off. Soon they were stable enough for me to stand on and then they were weight bearing, even when I jumped up and down.

For the first time in a long time, I felt stable. I felt that better was possible, because normal was now a thing for me and it was fucking great. Nobody in the history of ever has been so delighted to be normal. People tend to code normal as boring, but if you’ve never had a normal, it’s bloody thrilling.

I had also been led to believe that medication would stop me feeling my feelings. It was the thing I was most frightened of. My feelings were difficult and often overwhelming, but with the enormous lows, there were such moments of joy and beauty and connection, I didn’t want to lose that. I was afraid that the pills would take away the awful things but that the price would be a world of grey in which my overarching emotional response would be ‘meh’. I was so afraid of waking up in Kansas, Toto.

It didn’t happen. Not for me. I am very aware of how lucky I am in that respect by the way. I am not suggesting for one minute that everyone should cancel their therapy sessions and start a close, personal relationship with pharmaceuticals. I’m just saying what it was like for me. For me, I still felt everything, even the bad things, but there was a sense of proportion and scale to my feelings which made them more manageable.

I used the period of stability to get more therapy for things that had I unpacked and dealt with them previously I would have been seriously deranged by. I had learned that it is good to face your issues, but there are reasons why I buried certain things under forty tonnes of concrete never to be looked at again except at gunpoint. Digging them up was hard, painful work that made me madder before it made me better. That kind of therapeutic work was best undertaken with a given level of normal under my belt so I could do it and still function.

After that I weaned myself off my meds because I wanted to explore what my life was like without them after all the work. For quite a while the centre held and I was doing well, but I did notice that when I was very tired or very overwhelmed, slippages were occurring. It was the difference say, between weathering a hangover at twenty and weathering it at forty. I was having to build in more recovery time.

Then catastrophe struck, a catastrophe that is still rippling through my life, two years later. It happened alongside life, which is difficult enough in itself and then other fucking nonsense joined it until I became an automaton fuelled by the need to cope and ‘just get through this next bit’. The floor wasn’t even lava anymore. It felt like we were in a maelstrom, 24/7. I’d just get my head above water and ‘Blam!’ another bit of flotsam and I’d go under again. I have lived through some hard and terrifying things in my life, but I cannot recall a time when so much of it was going on all at once to so many of us.

Early this year I made the decision to go back on my meds, which my gp 100% supported. Without them, I’m not sure I’d be here right now. I’d be somewhere, but it would be a bad place. A very bad place. Even with the medication, the year was awful - until I washed up here.

The minute I walked onto this boat, I felt like I was home. I haven’t felt at home for a long, long time. Home is core to my wellbeing. I already knew this. I had discussed it with my therapist, way back when I was digging up all that concrete. I think I had forced myself to forget it because at the time, home was not possible for me. I’m not talking about a physical place, because I had that. I’m talking about the very distinct feeling of coming home to yourself. My husband once joked that home was wherever he was. It isn’t. That isn’t to diminish what we have, because I love him with every fibre of my being, but home is something specific to me. This boat has gifted it to me, whatever it is.

Home, for me, is ‘normal plus’. It takes that baseline and adds great curtains and a comfortable sofa. It takes the possibility of ‘better’ and makes it ‘betterer.’ It has given me a physical space to make better use of my mental space and begin to unpack a few things.

In recent terrible times I had to largely put away my own things. The needs of my child were an imperative. There are those who would argue this point, probably with the words ‘self care’. They are not the people who spent the last two years in a relentless, largely futile battle with education authorities and CAMHS, a broken NHS and a suicidal teenager so they can pipe the fuck down. For better or worse (and we must pray for better) I did what I needed to do to get us through. There are times when the niceties have to fall away and contentment comes from another day spent with everyone still breathing. My life has been like that for a long time. Too long. I am aware that a lot of damage has been done to me, sometimes by my own hand. It’s something I need to address but I couldn’t imagine that there would be space for that until I came here.

I write about my walks, which are a joy to me. I write about the hours I spend alone, just brushing up against the lives of others. This is also a joy to me. I spend much of my life up to my elbows in other people’s lives, so much so that it’s easy to get lost. I love the armour of a busy, indifferent city. It is my sword and my shield. I write about my boat, which is a joy to me, but under all that is the deep sense of rightness, of being home, of finally having a place that is mine where I can figure out how to be again. Where I can take deep breaths instead of that shallow gasping stutter of ever present panic. When I am here, the space of my mind feels twice as big and I feel a rightness and ownership of it that is both unusual and marvellous. It is a marvel.

As with the meds, it doesn’t mean that everything is brilliant. It isn’t. There are still terrible things happening, but because I am at home and safe, I have capacity for them. There is space to deal with them. They are not all crowded up in a mind that is shrinking in on itself with terror.

There is still terror. I am fairly sure that I have some kind of mild PTSD from everything that has happened. One of the girls sent me a text message asking if I had heard from my son one morning last week. She had been expecting him to visit and he hadn’t turned up. It turned out to be crossed wires and he was fine, but in the few minutes it took to ascertain this, I started shaking uncontrollably and was still shaking twenty minutes later. My voice was calm. I’m trained to respond well under pressure, but my body tells a different story.

In the recent past I would have had no time to deal with that response. I would have packed it down with everything else that was stopping me coping with what fresh hell had arisen. Now though, I feel I can start to deal with that. I don’t quite know how yet, but I am feeling my way towards it.

Just writing about it is a start. Acknowledging that this is happening rather than ignoring it. Sometimes that’s all that’s required. Not in this case, I know I need help with that, but on Friday morning, when I woke up feeling out of sorts, I just needed to make the space to feel my feelings. I’ve got quite a backlog from the last couple of years. It’s not like they go anywhere until I’ve processed them. They just form a queue and bide their time and on quiet days, when the wind is in the East and change is in the air, there is time to sit still and quiet and let them come in their battalions. It’s not comfortable, but it’s not the madness I used to think it was. And even if it makes me feel a little mad for a time, it’s only passing through.

Most of what I felt yesterday was grief. There is a lot of grief. I’m not even remotely done with it yet, but that’s ok. It’s ok to be sad about things that are sad. That’s the opposite of mad. It’s quite nice to be the opposite of mad for a while.