MENTAL
All you know about the first family to live here is that they didn’t stay long, and you can’t blame them.
Near as you can figure, the house was probably built for them, sometime in the late sixties. The flood in 1998 took away most of the telltale furnishings — such as the green shag rug, that Sarlacc of the American home which swallowed up no end of food and other detritus to digest in its muppety belly for a thousand years, or the brown tweed couch, custom-made for Nehru-jacket-wearing lounge lizards to forever preen upon in a Sears catalogue’s wet dreams — along with several other martyrs to taste from that point in time between the beginning of the party and the end of the bad trip. (They also left behind a strange symbol painted on the walls of the garage that your mother once thought had some sort of satanic meaning. Remembering what you do of the old decor, you think she had a point.)
At least one prominent part remains: the wooden paneling that lines the living room. You’ve spent nearly thirty years living in this house, and even though most of the paneling has long since been covered up, you still avoid walking through that room whenever you can help it. You don’t know what kind of wood it is, but you can’t remember anything like the particular long melty patterns of its warped rings and knotted eyes in any stump or slice of timber that you’ve ever seen. Saner people than you have told you that it looked full of faces.
But as far as you know, you’re the only one that’s ever seen them come to life.
The doctors callled it simpler things at first. One of them called it hyperactivity, another called it depression. Some of them called it a chemical imbalance. If other words were tossed around, you didn’t hear them, or don’t remember them. They gave you ritalin long before you hit puberty — not too long after they gave it to Linda Blair, and you can only guess for how many of the same reasons — and kept you on it into your twenties. You remember later being told that you were one of the first kids in the country to be put on ritalin for treating it, at least so early, and so steadily.
You can’t remember when it stopped being enough. You can’t even remember if it ever was.
As you grew up, they called it other things. One called it manic-depression; later on, another one called it bipolar. Another called it ADD, then ADHD, and somewhere in there OCD came along for the ride. Still others called it agoraphobia and social anxiety disorder. Somewhere in there someone called it schizoaffective; later on, autistic. You wonder how many of these things you were ever supposed to be at the same time.
Each name they gave you for it was a question, and they told you that each one had an answer. Some of them talked to you and told you that the answer was just to keep talking. Some of them gave you “homework” — places to go, things to try. Words to say when no one but you was listening.
One of them strapped you into a gurney and put you in a mental ward. Then another doctor put you in another one.
All along, each question may or may not have had an answer after all, but they always had pills. So very, very many pills. Sometimes it seemed as if there were only so many defenses available in the battleground of your brain, and the best of the pills could only rearrange them along a forever-incomplete Maginot line. You fought the Battle of Paxil, the Zyprexa Campaign, the Siege of Lithium — but the enemy could always wait out the best of them, outflank the good, and overwhelm the rest.
And those, at least, are the ones you can remember; some of the others, like the thorazine, you can barely remember now at all. You can’t remember who you were on some of them — and for some of them, you may as well have stopped existing altogether. Maybe, in every way that matters, you did.
For all the problems you’ve had with being alive, though, the real problem — the real bitch of it, the bitter joke at the cold heart of everything — is that you still want to be alive. You always have.
And sometimes that feels like the craziest thing of all.
. . .
“Gay” was such a small word. A small and simple word that meant such a small and simple thing.
But growing up in a fundamentalist-christian environment — in south Texas, during the eighties — it was still a big enough word, and carried with it enough meaning, to end childhood friendships, get the shit kicked out of you in locker rooms, have your life threatened to your face, be loudly and repeatedly damned to hell, and nearly tear your family apart.
And if that word could pack so much damage, then what could the words mental illness do?
The word “gay,” once it got rid of everyone it could and lost its sting for everyone that remained, long ago finally became as unimportant in your life as the thing it describes — but here was a thing that, in all its guises and labels and aspects, would never stop being relevant. These words didn’t even have smallness and simplicity going for them; the term sounds simple enough, but it never did, and never could, be just one thing. You’re not even sure you can ever know all the things it is.
Physical illnesses are physically tangible, testable, treatable; wounds can be measured, cancers biopsied, broken bones touched. But minds can become ill in ways that no MRI or CT scan can yet show, leaving them to give accounts of themselves, when and if they can, from within its own bias; other people can see the things that mental illness makes you do, and you can see what it does in others, but even you can never see the illness itself. You can’t know what your own face looks like in a world where nothing is capable of providing a clear, complete, undistorted reflection of it.
But you can feel for the wetness where you are cut, and the aches where you are broken.
The illness is many things.
It may never be simple, but at least it can sometimes be simple things. Sadness without reason, recklessness without regret.
Sometimes it’s the places you couldn’t go, the things you couldn’t say. Sometimes it’s your throat closing up so tightly in the company of strangers that it would sooner literally stop you from breathing than let you speak. Sometimes it makes the air so heavy that it keeps you pressed into your bed for days at a time; sometimes it makes your blanket the heaviest weight you’ve ever had to push. Sometimes it makes standing at the threshold of your own front door feels like standing on the threshold of skydiving without a parachute. As you write this, it’s kept you from seeing anyone in the flesh besides your family for three years, or from setting foot outside this past year more than twice.
Sometimes it’s even been a kind of gift in spite of itself, a fire that burned you alive with ideas and ambition. But everything you’ve pulled out of that fire — every finished photograph, everything you’ve written or painted or played, every way that you’ve ever tried to give some meaning to your own fucking life — all of it, at least all that was ever good of it, was in spite of the flames.
The illness never wanted any of those things; it only wanted to turn you into ash.
. . .
Sometimes it’s the dirty way that it tries to make you clean.
It started in your teens, and started with razors. You’ve known “cutters” who cut themselves to give themselves a valve for a pain beyond the blood, or just to take on the markings of the vast voiceless tribe of everyone who feels like a stranger to themselves. Sometimes you gave yourself versions of those reasons, and sometimes those were the reasons.
But the illness didn’t stay satisfied with that, so it brought in the worms.
They were — they are — thin and tiny, like snippets of thread beneath your skin. Mostly in your scalp, chest, back and upper arms. You pick at them, squeeze and cut at them with your nails until it feels to stop them where they live before they feel like they’re pushing up through the surface and perforating you with little holes — and then you pick at the ravaged areas, pull off all their body hairs, digging at every bump and scraping off the ridges of every scab, until at least it feels clean again; the illness has no eyes for it, only touch, only the skin needing to feel clear to itself again. For all the slicks and sores it opens up, to the illness, the blood and the pus of it is only a benefit, a lubrication that helps smooth everything over. Place by place, hour by hour, it blindly picks its battlefields clean until the worms resume the war.
For most of your twenties — especially after you left the mental ward, and spent the next several years shutting out the world as best you could — the worms did not come back very often, and were more manageable when they did; and it was enough to use your nails against them instead of razors. They started coming back much more after you watched your husband and your sister die, but at least you’ve avoided going back to razors so far; you take painkillers every day now so that at least your nails will remain enough for it.
You’ve heard so many other rape survivors talk about the deep sense of dirtiness it leaves them with that it’s almost a truism. You wonder if there’s any rape survivor in the world who hasn’t at least once in their lives felt it stuck to their bones, and spent hours taking a shower trying to wash it out. There’s little enough of your life you can remember before the rape as it is, and you don’t know if that’s where the illness got it from, but for you, the illness turned that around: you’ve avoided bathing when you could help it (when you didn’t have to meet anyone, for instance, and maybe that plays its small part in why you don’t meet people anymore), because no matter how well you clean the surface, the illness will just use it to remind you of the dirt that all the showers in the world can’t wash away.
The illness has its eyes for things, but this is not one of them. In this, the illness has its own hands, and they only sometimes still seem to be your own.
Most of the illness keeps itself inside.
Sometimes, especially when you try to sleep, it’s the channels in your head forever broadcasting its programming to itself, locking you inside with its thousand monitors showing a thousand different stations at once, with no off switch and no volume control. It takes any sights and sounds it can and wears it into any groove in your brain that’ll hold it: the music stuck in loops; the unfinished or unspoken conversations trying to resolve themselves; scraps of video from the camera of your memories stuttering between the shreds of static; every received transmission of your life-experience looping back upon itself with ever-greater distortion and ever-louder feedback.
And sometimes it’s having nightmares while you’re awake. Sometimes it’s a conscious waking flashback of the rape, longer and bloodier than your memory’s ever allowed you to remember it being. Tears opening up in your skin where you’ve never had a wound. Your feet feeling burned alive by walking through flames that you can’t see. Sometimes it’s your sense of touch telling you that you’re being cut open by something that none of your other senses can detect at all.
Sometimes it’s everyone you’ve ever loved telling you every hateful thing you’ve ever heard. Sometimes it’s the faces of your dead husband and sisters taking shape out of any distortion to assemble into a version of themselves that your eyes had never seen.
Sometimes even this is so much less worse than the ways it sometimes shows them back to you exactly as they always were.
. . .
The illness is not the grief, but it’s learned to make the grief its greatest weapon. For all that you try every day to keep the illness locked inside, sooner or later it keeps using the grief to let itself back out.
And sometimes the grief splits you back open all by itself.
. . .
The illness has been many things. It’s never been all of them at the same time. It hasn’t been some of those things for many years, and it’s only been some of them a handful of times. Some of them were stronger when you were younger, and some — a few — seem to be gone for good (although you know better than to count anything out); some have only started manifesting in the past few years; some went away for awhile and come back later in different forms. But it’s been all of these things — and some things you still can’t talk about — at least once in your life, and most of them often enough.
The illness has been many things, but the only thing it has always been is fear.
And of all the things that fear can do to you — of all the ways it can scar you and sabotage you and sink you — it can do one thing that’s worse than all the rest put together.
It can make you get used to it.
. . .
A recovering alcoholic you know once told you that he never considered himself to have stopped drinking — only that every day is a day that he tries, and so far succeeds, in not taking a drink.
You can barely remember the illness never being present in your life, in one form or another. It grew with you, and you can’t know how much it managed to grow on its own strength aside from all the things it found along the way to use as food; everything’s dissolved into the same dark chemical soup. It’s the gravitational pull beneath every moment, even (sometimes especially) the best and happiest, around which the most you’ll ever do is maintain a wobbly orbit.
There is no escaping it. No “getting over it.” No hour of your life in which you cease to be aware of it. No goddamned motherfucking closure. Each and every day is a day that it can win.
And each day is just another day you try not to take the drink.
The illness is the worst enemy you’ve ever had that pretends to be your friend.
When it drops the mask, there is, at least, part of you that — so far — remains capable of seeing it on those terms, after the fact if rarely during it. The hallucinations will never last; the worms always recede; some burned bridges can, with care and time, be rebuilt; and if it isn’t the source of all your nightmares, its nightmares are at least ones you can wake up from.
But it does its worst damage when it tells you that it knows what’s best for you. It tells you that you can heal while you hide. It tells you to keep quiet and to shut everybody out, so that you can’t hurt anyone with anything you do or say, or be hurt by them in your turn. It tells you that you’re safe in your isolation, and that every chance you never took and every opportunity you threw away was its way of protecting you. Go back and stand by the front door, and it’ll remind you of all the things on the other side of it that can, and have, and will, hurt you.
The worst part is that it’s right. It often is right, about a great many things; that’s one of the best weapons it has. You have been hurt, and caused hurt. Silence is always safer, and isolation does keep out a world of real risks and real terrors. Life always has been easier in that isolation — not better, no, but undeniably easier. And it always reminds you that you “just” watched your husband and your sister die (it may be four years away now, but it may as well have been yesterday), so what the hell is wrong with taking the easy way out, now of all times? (And you know, you always know — and have tried more than once to take — the one way out that’s even easier.)
When was better ever promised to you, or promised to anyone in the whole fucking world?
. . .
Right now, it’s giving you so many reasons as you sit here and type not to say the words. Leave the words unsaid, then there’s no one they can hurt, no opportunities they can deny you, no work they can sabotage, nobody they can scare away.
And through all of this, after all this time, after every goddamned thing that’s happened, it would still be easier not to sit here right now in a cold sweat with your hands shaking and not type out the simple, sharp, naked motherfucking words: I am mentally ill.
And the illness is right: better was never promised to anyone.
But easier never was, either.
JUNE 10, 2011