Saying “I Have a Mental Illness,” and What Follows
The first time I had a suicidal thought I was too small to ride a rollercoaster. It is not that I never experienced joy, but that pain came in equal measure on a scale that tipped of its own accord. I was programmed this way long before I understood, and when I first admitted it out loud, I felt like the east coast representative. These days, if you aren't talking about your mental illness, it seems you may be out of touch with the state of things. In the beginning, it took time even for me to believe the ideology I was suddenly proselytizing. This is not a story of overnight self-acceptance; it's a slow-moving, messy one that required far more reassurance and validation than I'm proud to admit.
It terrified my parents when I chose, all in one moment, to expose something that, for many reasons, seemed easier to keep in a box. Every one of us is conditioned to hide parts of ourselves for the comfort of others, and I just couldn't do it anymore. I also refused to place a pseudonym on my own story in a world where so many of us hide behind something even as we proceed to call ourselves real. I figure that in a hundred years I won't be talked about anyway, so I may as well leave behind a couple of kids who know they have permission to be utterly and unapologetically honest about what they feel. Generational silence is such shitty legacy to preserve.
And until you've experienced the moment of absolutely deafening silence between admitting to someone you have a mental illness and getting a response, you haven't lived. It really is an immense privilege both to know this feeling, and to have the safety and support it requires to tell the whole truth.
I could not have carried on much longer in that pressure cooker, and there were times I tried not to. Silence is quietly insidious - an infection that festers invisibly until we become a news headline no one wants to read. It is lying so freely that we begin to convince ourselves of our own bullshit while it kills us from the outside in.
When I spoke up, what started as a slow trickle became a flash flood nobody asked for or saw coming. Some people swam with me for the better, and others ran straight off the map. There is only a "before and after' with those who stayed; my heart swelled ten sizes, I grew closer to the person I most needed in the before-times, and I grew closer to who my friends needed still. I chose to honor myself by promising I would never go back. The true depth of my hollowness came into full view the minute I closed that window only to look back through it from a safe distance.
Sometimes from within the echo chamber of my world, I forget that some people still live in absolute silence. The quietest place in the U.S. is contained in Olympic National Park - some call it "one square inch of silence," and there is no other such unadulterated space on the map. I view this as a metaphor for being trapped inside your body with a mental illness, seeing no way out. There is no lonelier place than that, no place as loud and as quiet - a paradox that brutalizes the soul.
What I am describing is life at an intolerable frequency I encourage you to escape. Write it all down and send it somewhere. Bury it in a bottle or burn it if you must, but set it free. Put it in my inbox or in the inbox of someone you know who would be a safe home for your story. There is room for you next to me - a life that feels better than the insular hell that burns you. There are strangers ready to listen and friends whose empathy might surprise you. And know that while it may never go away, it does get easier to hold the weight once your darkness sees light. I believe that one day it won't be radical to let the humanity in you show. With every small step we take into the dark as individuals, we come miles closer to the light as a collective. That feels like a world I want to live in, and I hope you do too.