How I Turned into an Acorn.

A few minutes ago I did something absolutely stupendous.  I don’t expect anyone noticed.  In fact a couple may have done that shuffley thing many English women do when they start off being embarrassed and metaphorically shake themselves, remembering that it’s ok to talk about mental illness now. (Not being snide – I find it endearing).

See, it’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s quite another to throw it casually into the conversational pit. Especially when that conversation is public and with people one’s never met.

Oh, I’ll sit in front of an audience and tell a few hundred people about mental illness. I’ll write articles about it and get interviewed about it quite happily. Literally - because I’m always so happy to get people engaging and talking freely. Especially the one’s who’ve gone all their lives thinking they were the only ones.

But socially – well it’s pretty much the kiss of death.Try sipping your glass of complimentary wine, when someone says over the hub-bub, “How have you been?.” It’s social convention, of course, not a genuine enquiry. You know that: but sometimes, there’s such an overwhelming urge to say

 “I’m ok as long as I’m in here but the minute I walk out that door I have an urge to walk out into the traffic.

 But, hey enough about me. How are you?”

You just can’t do that sort of thing to people, though.  And even though I might have my moments, I am not a cruel woman. I would never advocate being ungracious. Nor would I want, willingly, to embarrass someone else. I know perfectly well that scenario would probably qualify as someone else’s worst nightmare.

But I can’t swear that I would never dream of doing it. I do, often.

Fortunately  I have always had people around me that I could say things like that to. And those occasional sleep-overs in The Bin means you get surrounded by other people who have been similarly constrained. I think that release is part of the cure:    “Hey Cass, whatsup?”

 “Jaysus, they were half an hour late with the meds to-day! I started running round looking for me chainsaw.” (C’mon: we do-lally’s have a sense of humour too, y’know.)

The other reason we can’t ever make reference to our state of mind except to close friends or those similarly affected, is that there are those who think that mentioning it in convos. is some kind of one up-manship. Like a Blackdog day/week/month/year somehow trumps diabetes but folds to leukaemia, perhaps?

There's a school of thought also that we are just attention seeking narcissists who use “so-called” mental illness as an excuse for our failings and should have been smacked regularly as children. Considering that at one school I went to, the cane hadn’t been used in over 20 years and was revived exclusively for me, I consider myself well, and absolutely professionally, smacked quite enough for one childhood though.

And finally  it’s I doing the mental shuffling:- ok, I confess: I don’t/didn’t like people to think I was a bit strange. Especially not the people one interacts with professionally. Because they don’t know how this works and it puts them in an awful quandry. Do they discount every word from my lips? Pat me on the back and thank me for my paper but bin it in the office?

And I realised: I don’t know.

Maybe, (as so many things are) it’s all in the head and I’ll never learn the truth of it? Maybe they figure that if I’m walking and talking the brain must be engaged to at least functioning capacity? Maybe they just think ‘Oh shit! Not another paper to read!’

I have had to accept that, without treatment or support, I am never going to be as I used to be. But, meh! If you absolutely have to face a fact that will impede you, you have to learn how to live with that fact. Unless you are, indeed, certifiably insane. And I just took a huge step to that end. (Oh yeah: no baby-steps for this baby!).

So from now on, I don’t have the flu. Or a gyppy tummy. I haven't had sudden visitors, or had to go away. 

The Black Dog of a downer is currently lodged contentedly on my shoulder. And I didn’t lie about it. Dear god, if all the people I deal with around the place got together to compare notes on how often my frail body is wracked with illness they’d conclude I was a walking marvel of nature and would beg my body for Science.

So I’m not going to make excuses any longer. I’m just going to put an icon. That’s how I am. At the moment. I’m in a bad patch. That’s not to claim special status. That’s just how I am right now. Tomorrow? I could get rushed up in an express lift  right to the top of the buildingon a high.

So yeah, I’m not too good. But the great thing is if anyone was even thinking of offering sympathy, by the time they did I’ll probably have shot out of it.

How dumb of me to bewail that so many people don’t know how to react to admissions of mental illness when we – well certainly “I” – won’t give them a chance to!

So thanks all you wonderful and strong women. I’ve been emboldened by you all to actually, practically, not just face the fact that my life is a bit different now in a lot of ways: but to finally make a plan of how to factor this in.

It isn’t just with an icon, of course, that’s just s symbol - which I wouldn’t use very much anyway.

But I really have done something rather momentous, and you guys have been the all unwitting agency for it. 

Crazy how we rarely think we impact on others - yet it happens.  Thanks once more.