True Stuff

After my last post, I caught myself thinking: ‘That’s a lie.’ It haunted me. I read it over several times with the idea in my mind that maybe I would catch myself out and then I could delete it.

This is a weird thought. It is not the thought of someone at the top of their mental health game. Because I am not at the top of my mental health game, this did not occur to me in the moment. Just like catching myself measuring whether I could make it round Asda without bursting into tears last week did not seem weird until I said it to Jason during a discussion about how I’m doing.

I think the answer to that is clearly: ‘not well’.

The lie thing started with a good dose of whataboutery. You say you’re having a hard time with your mental health, but what about the fact that you had a nice weekend? If you were truly poorly, you wouldn’t have been able to do that. I went on to the ‘not all men’ bullshit, where I feel that I have to qualify any statement I make so that it won’t get hijacked or misinterpreted and ended up gaslighting myself. I finished by questioning the reality of my entire existence. Then I had a really good cry. Ironically, the fact that I ended up shouting at myself for several hours until I burst into tears is confirmation, if any were needed, that I’m not doing so well.

Writing is an important part of how I process my thoughts and feelings. Writing helps me to connect to and organise big, unwieldy stuff that otherwise clogs up my head. I think too many things in the course of a normal day. I say day, I mean every ten minutes. My head is a noisy, busy place. My thoughts about my mental health sit alongside my thoughts about what to have for dinner and whether I’ve hurt my friend’s feelings with that thing I said to her three weeks ago that I keep worrying about even though she has probably completely forgotten about it.

Writing about one strand of what’s going on allows me to cut away all the extraneous things that surround it. It allows for focus, that particularly in my anxious brain, is hard to come by under other circumstances. Once I’ve pinned the words down I can refer back to them and test them out. In this case, the possibility that I was lying about my mental health. Was I just playing the sympathy card?

No, is the short answer to that.

Brains are complicated things, aggravated by the fact that life is a complicated thing. There are too many moving parts. Just because I am not curled up on the sofa in the foetal position all day doesn’t mean everything is alright actually. I think that very much plays into a subconscious belief that in order for my mental health to be taken seriously, it must look and feel serious to everyone else. I feel like I need proof that I am not making things up. I realised that I believe that when I tell people about my mental health, they will think I’m lazy and I’m using it as an excuse to loll around all day unless I provide video evidence of me rocking back and forth in the corner, howling. It’s just another bullshit way of thinking that unless I’m thinking of killing myself, I am doing well enough not to need help.

All the things I wrote were true. It was also true that I had a really nice weekend. I had a terrible day on Monday. Today has been a pretty good day. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? It won’t bring the smear test I was dreading, because I cancelled it. So that’s a good way to start.

This stuff is not linear. If it was more organised, there might be a better chance of dealing with it, because there would be rules and plans. There would be things to avoid and things to embrace. That’s not how it is for me. It’s all smushed up together. On Sunday we went for lunch in Stoke Newington and a walk in Clissold Park. It was a beautiful, Autumn day. I saw some top notch fallow deer. There were lots of good dogs about. There was a man attempting and failing to fly an enormous kite, which delighted me. It was all great. In the middle of it I had a panic attack for absolutely no reason at all. One minute I was laughing at a disgruntled deer attempting to extend his authority over his wimmen deer. The next minute I felt like my heart was trying to climb out of my mouth. Ten minutes after that I was fine again.

A lot of the time I prefer it if people don’t immediately think: ‘There goes a mental woman, being all mental,’ when they first see me. It’s a lot. I’m a repressed, British woman. I struggle with raw feelings. I still remember that time I burst into tears on the 210 bus from Highgate to Golders Green. I held it together until the bend at Spaniard’s Inn and then it was game over. It was nearly thirty years ago and I still worry about catching that bus, just in case someone remembers me as ‘the crying woman.’

I was able to persuade myself that I genuinely am having a hard time because I reminded myself that I burst into tears while I was trying to talk about a spreadsheet on the phone with my best friend last week. We have known each other since we were 14. She probably knows me better than I do myself, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have cried in front of her. I have never, ever, cried about a spreadsheet. That’s bleak. I scared her so much, she burst into tears. There was a lot of weeping. We will never speak of it again.

I will write about it though, because it’s true.