MENTAL ILLNESS: DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS
“I don’t care.” He murmured.
She whispered back,” You do care. You care so much that with each lungful of air you take, you feel as if a thousand hands are cutting off your breath.”
Look at them.
The girl staring at the television screen, the theatre of Disney playing another happy ending, a phony smile curving her lips as she struggles to maintain a façade. The boy who laughs, faking it but never making it, the false warmth from the dying ember. The woman who is lost in her head, disappearing, fading into nothingness as she recedes into the background of the fabric that is her world. The old man sitting on a park bench in the middle of the commotion, hiding his sorrow while staring at the candid photograph in his hand, wondering where everything went wrong and when did he start feeling so lonely.
All of their hearts screaming for help but their minds echoing – ‘You are beyond help.’
Is illness only what can be seen? Are we ill only when we are dying from a thousand cuts, excruciating pain coursing through our veins? Why cannot we be ill when we feel as if we might die if someone doesn’t help heal a thousand unhealed scars on our hearts and our minds?
Those are the cuts that bleed slower but cause the most harm. Those are the scars that drown us in the sea of invisibility and death. People suffering from mental health problems are called a lot of words. Mental, lunatic, crazy, fanatic, eccentric, and so many more – each of which is another piece of their heart shredded.
“Why didn’t you ask for help before?” I ask the man in the wheelchair – paraplegic and lost in the sea of hopelessness – diagnosed with depression.
He gives a grim smile and replies, “I wanted to. Believe me, I wanted to. If only something were wrong with my body. I would truly wish to have anything wrong with my body rather than with my mind. At least then someone would believe me.”
When you are lost in this madness, you don’t realize it. You don’t know until it is too late. Reality is what you believe you see but when the fog clears out, you realize that what you saw was never truly the reality. We can try to be empathetic, but we can never truly understand what mental illness feels like.
What we don’t understand is that mental illness is like when our mind is being eaten away from the inside out, poisoning our thoughts, and convincing us that something is fundamentally wrong with us.
It is like a frightening hollowness that spreads a haze of darkness that tells us that we are worthless, that nobody loves us, or that there is no hope for us.
There must be a man, woman, or even child in the world looking at the blue sky, not with the joy of a great day but with a sorrow that comes with the realization that this is a time in their life when they cannot look at the beauty of a day without swelling tears in their eyes, dripping quietly onto the desk where they press their cheek, staring out the window, panic rising, and rising and it explodes inside them. Tears falling faster dripping –
Tick
Tick
Tick
A quiet whimper in their chest. Hoping. Praying for the anxiety to end.
It is not the truth that can cure the hurt of being dismissed as crazy. It is not the truth, not compassion, not generosity, not sincerity, and not even empathy that can cure the loss of hope that one feels when told ‘You are not ill’, ‘Do not pretend’, ‘You are just seeking attention’, ‘Mental illness is nothing but a sham’.
It is to those people who dismiss that I speak to. That I plead to change. To believe that these people are suffering, and they need our help. They need a helping hand to guide them to light. Mental health is a debilitating issue, and we need to work towards a mentally fit and happy world. I am not asking to spend lavishly on the state-of-the-art facilities, the research, or anything materialistic. That is what we, your government representatives, would do. I do not want anything from you that would cost you more than a ‘You’re okay’ or ‘I am here for you’. Your dark days are your strength. Your dark days are
the pressure that turns carbon into diamonds.
Some monsters are invisible, some demons attack from the inside – clawing through your being, and just because it cannot be seen does not mean it isn’t ripping through. Pain does not need to be seen. It only needs to be felt. Your pain is your own and cannot be compared with others.
Telling that there is no problem, will not solve the problem. That is not how miracles work. That is how sickness is grown. That is how rock bottom is reached.
You can be a survivor of depression or anxiety or schizophrenia. You can be a recovered alcoholic or a survivor of abuse or a casualty of war. You can lose everything – money, wife or husband, job, or even yourself to the hardships of this world and still be an exquisite, rare, and phenomenal misfit – the only one in this entire world who can tell the story the way you can.
Normal is subjective. Normal is vibrant. There is no standard of normal. There are more than seven billion colors of normal in the world.
This is to the girl who loved Disney, to the woman struggling to hold on to her last shred of sanity, to the old man lonely in a room full of people, and to all those fighting against the tsunami that is their illness –
Today is not a magnificent day to die.
You can and will survive everything that you have been going through and you will survive, no, thrive in the future. Hold on for the person you will become. You are far more than your illness. So much more than a spoilt day, week, month, or a year or even a lifetime. You are who are worthy of the world of multifarious opportunities.
I know it is real. I believe you. I know you can’t change it by wishing it away or rewinding the past. I know it is dark and raining and that everything is crashing down on you. It might be like this now, the day after tomorrow, or even a month from now. But it will be sunny soon. The dark clouds will move away and come out it will. Till it does and even after that, believe that we are with you.
Today is the day to finally breathe.
Today is the day to fall in love.
Today is the day to dream.
Today is a magnificent day to live.