Letters to Myself #3

Mental Health Awareness Week begins on May 11th.

I've done a lot of things to raise mental health profiles during this period over the last few years, but the one thing I've never been capable of achieving is an honest prose-based description of what my personal mental health issues entail. This week we are going to attempt to do just that.

I will refer at various points to childhood trauma, suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety. Please consider your own needs and act accordingly.

It's awful but you won't fix it  // 1

I was asked last year, in the same spot I am now typing this, whether I would consider standing for The Green Party as a local councillor for my ward. It was a surprise, I must admit: authority makes me itch and increasingly angry. The best work is done a step behind those people who are placed in charge, I was once told by someone I hugely respect as a professional agitator. I genuinely believe that’s the truth.

It’s really easy to be critical of other people at distance. That’s been the game plan on social media for many people over the last two decades: a less financially-fuelled form of subversion than the right wing media have become capable of reporting, and increasingly manufacturing as an opioid. First it was the newspapers, then it was films, then it was radio, then it was TV.

The internet now covers all those bases seamlessly.

I woke up this morning and found myself thinking about the first time I accepted the reality of progress. As a mum with two young kids, with a husband who was the only wage owner, and with a mental state that could not cope past those two intractables, I would often rationalise the terror of certain days in a sentence. It’s awful, but I can’t fix it. There was simply not enough extra mental capacity to think past each sunrise.

As the kids got older, there was a reckoning: a three month period where I decided that I was utterly surplus to requirement. I would not be missed if I wasn’t here. Suicidal ideation is different for everybody and having got to the point where I’d bought enough Paracetamol to line them all up and work out the best time to take them was the unexpected visualisation required as a revelation.

I flushed the lot away down the downstairs toilet an hour later.

The anger inside me for weeks afterwards made me question why I wasn’t thinking about myself as worthwhile. It’s awful but you won’t fix yourself. It took a decade to see why I was as scared as I was at doing anything that might make my situation improve. There was also, at the moment of comprehension, a maternal bond that I’d struggled for my entire existence as a mother up to that point to locate.

The youngest is 21 now, my eldest is 25, and in the last week both of them have looked to me for support in ways I’d not ever expected would take place. One also admitted to me how much they now appreciate my own journey to mental health stability, that my willingness to listen to them and not impose my trauma on them has been really important.

My kids are both smarter than I will ever be, and I am immensely proud of them both.

It was awful, and I’m still fixing it. This process never changes, it is always a journey, a series of challenges. Counselling has helped enormously as an education and as enlightenment, but there will always be days when I cannot do it all. I am still fucking awful at self-care, and self regulation. Sugar and inclines will always be my Kryptonite. I think it’s vitally important to accept you are never ‘cured’ totally when damaged by certain things.

In the last few years I have written a lot about my trauma. It’s made it into prose and poetry, used as wisdom during mentoring and teaching. It affects and colours literally every part of my existence. It has only been in the last twelve months that I’ve cracked the mental and physical exchange required to use it as fuel, as determination to find a space in the world for myself under my terms and nobody else’s.

That change remains the gift that keeps on giving.

A lot of progress is wrapped around a new statement: it’s not awful, it does not need fixing. Do not get me wrong, I am more than aware of the stupidity at play in large sections of reality, and how that’s not the stuff I need to be looking at right now. I will be back for that when I am ready. My poetry is capable of a great deal of debt lifting without me having to do too much at all, other than reflect who I have become.

What is now happening ahead of shining a light on ever aspect of Dumb that ails myself and others is making sure this only recently-created emotional stability is robust enough to deal with what I know it will need to address going forward. Repetition, habit forming and positive affirmation really have become life-changing abilities. This was the foundation of self-worth that was lacking for me as a kid.

Fixing things in my own way has renewed existence.