Like many people, I struggle with my mental health. I used to think my brand of it was abnormal - how can you be a public performer, a public voice, or someone who talks about how to get shit done, and also be broken and scared?
Turns out, that’s more common than not. I read once that over 70% of performers (musicians, actors, writers, speakers, et al) suffer from stage anxiety. As soon as I read that, it made perfect sense. If you’re a creative, you see and feel the world in a way that helps you to name and interpret experiences usefully. The price of that is the way it feels along the way. It’s hard to have one without the other.
My mental health is a peaks-and-troughs kind of experience. Sometimes I’m up, and other times, I’m down. The ups and downs are challenging, and I always notice them. I can tell when I’m deep in the pit, or high on an upswing.
What I don’t always notice is the more insidious creep of a new normal. A malaise setting in. A quiet normalising of dysfunction. Small changes, sneaking in bit by bit, until something has been lost, and you don’t know where to find it.
It’s a bit like the Funny Walking Stick in The Twits, a Roald Dahl book I read with my 8 year old recently:
The Funny Walking-Stick
To pay Mrs Twit back for the worms in his spaghetti, Mr Twit thought up a really clever nasty trick.
One night, when the old woman was asleep, he crept out of bed and took her walking-stick downstairs to his workshed. There he stuck a tiny round piece of wood (no thicker than a penny) on to the bottom of the stick.
This made the stick longer, but the difference was so small, the next morning Mrs Twist didn’t notice it.
The following nigh, Mr Twit stuck on another tiny bit of wood. Every night, he crept downstairs and added an extra tiny thickness of wood to the end of the walking-stick. He did it very neatly so that the extra bits looked like a part of the old stick.
Gradually, but oh so gradually, Mrs Twit’s walking-stick was getting longer and longer.
Now when something is growing very slowly, it is almost impossible to notice it happening. You yourself, for example, are actually growing taller every day, but you wouldn’t think it, would you? It’s happening so slowly you can’t even notice it from one week to the next.
It was the same with Mrs Twit’s walking-stick. It was all so slow and gradual that she didn’t notice how long it was getting even when it was halfway up to her shoulder.
‘That stick’s too long for you.’ Mr Twit said to her one day.
‘Why so it is!’ Mrs Twit said, looking at her stick. ‘I’ve had a feeling there was something wrong but I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was.’
‘There’s something wrong all right.’ Mr Twit said, beginning to enjoy himself.
‘What can have happened?’ Mrs Twist said, staring at her old walking-stick. ‘It must suddenly have grown longer.’
‘Don’t be a fool!’ Mr Twit said. ‘How can a walking-stick possibly grow longer? It’s made of dead wood, is'n’t it? Dead wood can’t grow.’
‘Then what on earth has happened?’ cried Mrs Twit.
‘It’s not the stick, it’s you!’ said Mr Twit, grinning horribly. ‘It’s you that’s getting shorter! I’ve been noticing it for some time now.’
‘That’s not true!’ cried Mrs Twit.
‘You’re shrinking, woman!’ said Mr Twist.
‘It’s not possible!’
‘Oh yes it jolly well is.’ said Mr Twit. ‘You’re shrinking fast! You’re shrinking dangerously fast! Why, you must have shrunk at leas a foot in the last few days!’
‘Never!’ she cried.
‘Of course you have! Take a look at your stick, you old goat, and see how much you’ve shrunk in comparison! You’ve got the shrinks, that’s what you’ve got! You’ve got the dreaded shrinks!’
Mrs Twit began to feel so trembly she had to sit down.
I had to sit down
Depression is my walking stick. The daily shifts feel so normal that I don’t notice until, like Mrs Twit, it’s gotten so bad I have no choice - or, alternatively, (and more usefully!) the stick is gone completely.
Of course, this requires getting better.
Which recently, I’ve done. I’ve just experienced a couple of weeks of real… health. Energy. Motivation. A desire to contribute, work, talk to people, go places and do things. I’ve written things, filmed others. Gone to meetings. Wanted to. Felt competent and capable. Smiled for no reason.
At first, I worried I might be having a manic episode. Was it normal to feel this good all the time?! But I wasn’t doing anything stupid, I just… felt OK.
Slowly it dawned on me: perhaps this is normal. Maybe the apathy, cynicism, fatigue and compulsion to hide aren’t the baseline to measure against. Perhaps instead, they’re my funny walking-stick, symptoms of not being OK.
It’s not normal to see your own experience as symptoms. Which makes sense. While awareness is useful, and emotional attunement a worthy goal, surely there’s little value in constantly doubting, categorising or pathologising your internal world.
Of course, as soon as I got a solid run of these good times on the board, I experienced a wobble. A test, if you like, of my new vibe. A test that I resoundingly failed. This week, I slipped back into the pit for a while.
The funny walking-stick came back, emerging slyly from the shed, and my body responded as though I’d collided with a wall. I’ve often marvelled at how physical depression and anxiety are. It’s astonishing that we still refer to these conditions as ‘mental health’ when they’re nothing short of a a full-body experience. Within the hour, I was exhausted, drained, limping toward my bed.
The shock, the whiplash, from my collision hit me like a car crash, and reverberated through my body. My shoulders slumped, eyelids drooped. My stomach cramped and seized. My back began to ache. In the sting of shame and sorrow, I suddenly realise that not only did I feel like shit, but my newfound motivation was gone.
Meetings I was excited about now loomed scarily in front of me. A throbbing set in behind my eyes and I wanted nothing more than to curl up un-noticed and hibernate for the winter. Or at least for the day.
But this time, I could see it. After months of struggling to get around, wondering what was wrong, and blaming myself, a new sense of perspective had made the difference glaringly obvious. The walking-stick was wrong, not me.
These are symptoms, not personality traits.
The label and the jar
The advantage to experiencing a wild ride of ups and downs is that you eventually come to see both for what they are.
I have a post-it note stuck to my monitor, which reads: “You can’t read the label from inside the jar.” I’ve been back in the jar the last couple of days, but I can still remember what the label says.
While it’s little comfort in the blurry, tired ache of malaise, I know that this too is a feeling that will pass, and will be soon replaced by another. And thanks to a recent upswing, I can remember how that felt and hold that in my memory, even if I can’t imagine feeling that way in the moment.
Pay attention
I’ve been reading Andrew Sean Greer’s Less Is Lost this week, the sequel to the delightful, Pulitzer Prize winning Less. I needed something light, and it’s been doing the job. But like many light reads, there are scatters of searing insight within.
Last night, I read a passage where the protagonist recalls a conversation he had with his lover, in the grip of desperate grief. It was this passage that led me to write this. Shuddering at the prospect of crawling from beneath my shroud of shame to put words into the world, I used this passage to find the will to show up.
Here it is:
It was in Provincetown Less learned that his mother had cancer. He sat shaking at the rickety little table; a thunderstorm had driven them indoors. A fire crackled beside the captain’s bed. Less said he was flying home to Delaware, and Robert said nothing. Less said he was giving up on the novel. It was all vanity anyway. How could he write while his mother was dying?
“I’m sorry you’ve become a writer,” Robert said at last, kneeling beside him and taking his hand. “I’m sorry this disaster has come for you. I love you. But you have to pay attention. It won’t help now, I don’t know what will help now, but I promise it will help later. That’s all you need to do. Pay attention.
Less said he would not use his mother’s death as a writing exercise.
Robert stood up and got a bottle of wine, opened it, and poured two glasses. The fire ticked like a clock beside them; Robert’s sandalwood cologne completed the sense of solace.
“When I was teaching in Padua, my sister died. I’ve told you that. He painted that chapel in 1305. Dante visited him. And in the scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents is one of the first realistic depictions of human tears. How they leave a trail down the cheek and hang on for a moment on the jaw before falling. Someone noticed, seven hundred years ago. Someone knew my pain.”
He put Less’s glass on the table. “That’s what you have to do. Pay attention. It’s not for yourself. It’s for someone seven hundred years from now.”
Seven hundred minutes
While I doubt my Substack has a seven hundred year life, I’ll settle for seven hundred minutes.
Maybe you’re hobbled by a funny walking-stick, one that’s grown so imperceptibly that you haven’t noticed the sneaking change, and you’re blaming yourself for why you can’t walk anymore.
Maybe you were similarly disabled, and it’s different now, and you too can suddenly see it for what it was. Perhaps you’re out of the jar, reading the label, and reality is dawning on you. Or maybe these feelings are entirely unfamiliar to you, but you’ve gained a new perspective on how people in your life who struggle with their mental health feel when they hit the wall.
In any case, I hope this was useful. I don’t have the answers for you, but I’ll keep paying attention.
I really appreciate your support, as I shift my focus more toward my writing work. I love writing and sharing with you, and this is a fully reader-supported effort.
Yes Alicia. To all of this. I hear you, I see you, I feel all of it.
Thanks for being able to put in words the stuff I struggle to find a clear way to express. You are appreciated.
Thank you for sharing this.