State of Mind

I don’t let what people say

affect what I do.

But the looks on their faces

still creep into my vision

and my imagination

is good at speaking for them.

At night, the images seep into my body,

playing in slow-motion, across my unconscious mind.

And I keep hearing their thoughts,

until they burn through my ears.

The video player of my mind

plays so much, it overheats.

And the words they once said

are branded onto my mind,

like the scars on my wrists,

that were caused by their thoughts

that perhaps didn’t exist.

But their words don’t affect me,

not even a little bit.

And I still don’t look in the mirror.

Because they’d never shut up.

Like life, this post is pointless.

All I know is uncertainty, in all of its intolerableness.

I told my parents that I wanted a gun for Christmas and they reminded me I was mentally ill. I remember when I used to tell them that and they would never believe me, blind to my suffering as much as I was. My mom once told me to kill myself, to see if I would actually do it. Every time they talk to me, the inside of me swells up. I feel like I’m gonna die without even doing it myself. But they care though, I guess they just don’t know how to do that very well. Well my therapist assures me they care and I guess I have to trust her. I can never think of something to talk about with my therapist, but we always end up talking abut something. That’s always a big insecurity is not being able to talk. And whoever my therapist is at any point in my life is one of few people or the only person I can rely on, and I’m not even making that up from my insecurities, it’s usually just true for people. I always prided myself because my therapists always either really liked me or thought I was their most interesting patient or etc. It’s been one of few validating experiences for me on this earth. That’s why I get nervous that I might start to bore them. My life is really boring right now and I don’t have any friends. Even when I think nothing’s happening, though, I guess it’s not true, because I always want to die, if only they knew. I bet I’d be good at dying. My suicide note would be a beautiful gratitude list mixed poetry and emo sayings. I’d definitely wanna go out with a bang. If I can’t love my life I’m sure as hell gonna love my death. I remember taking this african dance class when I was still in college and the teacher would always play this song that would just repeat the phrase “I love my life”. I always thought she was crazy but I’m starting to think now that there’s no such thing as craziness, just different experiences. That woman was crazy to me because loving life wasn’t normal to me, only hating it was. I never thought I was crazy but everyone else did. I never know how things originate. Like did people thinking I was crazy make me suicidal and not feeling like I belonged in the world. Or did my suicidality make people think I was crazy. And if the ladder is true than maybe all the reasons I feel like I don’t belong aren’t real. But I never felt like I belonged and people always thought I was crazy.

Meeting People Where They Are

I’ve been attending a therapy group everyday for a while now. It’s an IOP group that’s usually used to transition out of a partial hospitalization program to help patients use the skills they learned to transfer back into the swing of things. People come and go from the group all the time and today we had a young girl who had her head down the whole time and never made eye contact with anyone and when our therapist asked her questions about her situation and what she needed, her responses had an immense effect on the rest of the group. See, most of us in the group had already been to the hospital and went through partial; so we had already made a lot of changes in our lives and took long strides to get better. Yet this girl seemed to be at the very first step, which is actually wanting to try to get better, so basically, I began to figure out that she should really be in the hospital, or at least in partial. And I’m sure through battles with anxiety, depression, self harm and other mental health struggles, we all always wanted to get better, we just never want to actually take steps and make changes in our lives to actually change our situation and feel better. Usually it comes to a point when you hit rock bottom when you realize that you do want to change because you can’t take anymore pain. So here was this girl who was very depressed and suicidal, who kept making very black and white statements like “I’m never going to get better”, “None of this matters”, “These programs are a waste of time” and so on. And after a while, other group members were getting very upset with her, because they had already been through these programs and put a lot of work into them. These programs had basically changed our lives and helped us immensely, so many took offense to her saying that it was a waste of time. And those feelings are totally valid; of course I felt that too. But why is it that once we already have taken big measures to reach stability and have recovered in many ways, that we so quickly forget where we came from. I’m sure there was a time that all of us felt the way that this group member expressed. We all felt at one time that we were never going to get better and that everyone that was trying to help us were just feeding us bullshit. And sure, this girl probably made it a bit worse since she didn’t make any eye contact with anyone and didn’t care how she made the other group members feel or try to apologize or anything. But once we make so many changes in our lives, it’s so hard to relate to ourselves months before we started. Does taking strides to lead a mentally healthier life detach us from most other people in the world? Is it that easy to forget where we came from? We started off as extremely self destructive and hopeless people. Is seeing someone the way we used to be so difficult because it shows us that are battles with mental health affected those around us too? Is it too hard to see how mentally ill we were before that we choose to ignore it and judge others’ still in that position?

I found this situation today really interesting. It brought up a lot of these types of questions. I think it says a lot about the way we are quicker to judge others than we are to try to relate to them. Our feelings should be things that bring us together. When we share about them, there’s usually at least one other person to say, “I feel the same way.” Connecting with others is a lot easier than we think. When we make ourselves vulnerable is when we’re able to connect with others the most. And we can’t change people until they’re ready to change. We need to meet people where they’re at, not where we wish they would be.

Mental Illness in Media

Coming from someone whose battled mental illness for much of her life, I have to say every portrayal of mental illness I see in the media just always raises so many questions in my head. The media gets so many things wrong basically all the time. But even so I still wonder if we tend to put people with mental illness in a box. Every single portrayal of mental illness has people commenting on it; whether they got some things right or some things wrong, or just flat-out did the mentally ill dirty, and I think this is a good thing, to an extent. I think media should always be analyzed and have people comment on whether they felt offended or wronged or actually felt connected to certain characters. But as a mentally ill person, I can’t say I always feel the same. I know that when I see a character on tv struggle with things I can relate to, I can at least appreciate stories like mine being represented in media. And I always hear all of these comments through social media along the lines of “that’s not how mentally ill people act” or “that makes mentally people look bad” and so on. And I can appreciate those comments when it’s addressing the same tropes of the mentally ill we used to see all the time. But sometimes I think we need to take a step back. I think we should all share our personal stories and how certain media portrayals made us feel, whether it was more connected or more alienated. But I think when we make some of these comments with the best intentions of trying to include every story, we might actually be doing some alienating ourselves. I know for a fact that mental illness is different in everyone’s experience and it can show itself in all different types of behaviors and it affects all different types of people. Mental Illness doesn’t discriminate. And it is very common for people with mental illness to feel alone with their feelings; like they are the only person on the planet who feels this way. And say one portrayal in media made that person feel a little less alone, should we not let that person feel this way because some aspects of the show could have been damaging to other viewers. I mean portraying mental illness in media without making it triggering for the mentally ill viewers is a conundrum in itself. I still don’t know how to feel about that. But what is triggering to some, and rightfully so, might help another person who is mentally ill feel less alone because the media didn’t leave anything out. And I don’t know if this is making sense or if I even believe what I’m saying. In a way I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate. Like most of the time I agree with people’s grievances about media. It should continue to be criticized because it should always strive to be better and more inclusive. But sometimes I feel like being so critical can potentially push us in the wrong direction. The many different experiences of mental illness are not wrong; and sometimes I feel like all these critiques are telling us that there are ways to deal with mental illness that are right and ways that are wrong. Everyone has a different story. Sometimes I think our goal is to perfect the representation of a topic that is just simply not perfect at all.

So yeah I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this because I think it’s still all really confusing for me. Please feel free to completely disagree with me I just would love to hear back from others on what they think. Thanks!

Kelsey ❤