Mental Health IS Health

I recently posted this on The Book of Face and thought I’d share it here among the dust and tumbleweeds…

~~~~~

Don’t panic.  This ISN’T ABOUT ME.

I mean, it is, but it isn’t.

It’s about what I know of my own experience as a person who has been all up in this mental illness swamp since I was about 6 years old.  I just turned 54.  That’s 48 years for those keeping score.  

I call it The Variety Plate.  Why order just one thing when you can taste ‘em all?  Severe treatment resistant depression, OCD, paranoia, agoraphobia, acrophobia, and claustrophobia are the mains, and why not a little bit of spectrum* sprinkles for garnish.

My brain is constantly trying to kill me.

This is a battle that never ends, will never end, because it isn’t simply experiential…it is also physiical and chemical.  I have yet to meet the medication that works - I run on pure cussed determination and orneriness.  Also caffeine.

Humans have made some strides in understanding and treating mental health, but we have a long way to go before the stigma is banished, and until the stigma is banished and we simply see it as one aspect of health as a whole?  People are going to die.

It’s so easy to get lost in the internal noise, to believe the insidious whispering of a mind intent on its own destruction.  It’s exhausting to keep going, to slog through the existential morrass.  It’s so awfully disheartening to fight culture while fighting dark, internal tides.  We are the butt of jokes.  We are willfully misunderstood by those who don’t want to know better.  We are demonized by those who need excuses.  We are minimized because we are inconvenient.  

We are told to reach out, but in reaching out we are brushed aside or ignored, and we stop reaching.

All that to say this:  Suicide isn’t about wanting to die.  Suicide is about not wanting to keep living this way but not seeing any other way out. 

I know that feeling.  Bone deep.  Deeper.

I’m still here.  I will be here.  Not because it hasn’t gotten bad enough (Someone said that to me, once, and holy crap, don’t fucking do that because seriously?) but because I made a promise, and because nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

May the souls of those who opened that door find peace, and may those who stand at the threshold find the reserves to fight on.