My Dumb Brain.
I have a lust for life, I love all of the beautiful things that fill this giant round floating ball of stuff. I think it’s incredible, and wonderful. This plethora of animals, plants, inventions and magic.
I love the art that humans create. I can’t express enough how much I respect the manifestation of creativity. I like to try my hand at it myself sometimes. I like to write stories, draw little doodles, write dumb songs on my guitar, and most recently: Talk to computers in a language familiar to them, so they spit out websites.
To me it’s the perfect blend of creativity and logic. I became obsessed with it the moment I started. I excelled at it and have in my opinion done a very good job at my job. The world is wonderful whispering happily to computers.
But some days I lift my head off my pillow in the morning and nothing matters. My dumb brain is riddled with voices that promote nihilism, and self-hatred. I am one of those lucky folks with: mental illness.
It started to really manifest itself when I was a teenager, I got extremely depressed. I got a bad case of the blues that never left. My mother also had a very bad case as well. In some ways I may have got it from her. It can be genetic you know, I wear them like a pair of blue genes.
As I got older it got worse. I spent sometime in the hospital for attempting to kill myself. It was too much for my dumb brain to bear. The voices didn’t seem like they would ever stop, and in fact they just got louder and louder. So I took the medicine they promised would help quiet things down and took it all, with a combination of sleeping pills. I remember laying in my bed of my sad basement apartment, the chemical cocktail slowly taking effect, I remember thinking warmly about freedom.
I woke up almost two days later, was taken to the hospital and held for 72 hours. In my hospital room there was a print of Van Gogh’s Fishing Boats on the Beach. The art that I loved so much warmed my heart enough to be willing to keep trying.
I met a therapist who helped immensely. He was young and was preferential to talking about my issues, providing strategies for coping with my triggers. Using medication sparingly as needed. Things got much better.
But I will never be cured, and that is why even now, I can still find myself greeting the day with nothing but contempt and hatred. I wanted to write this to try and explain that it’s very difficult sometimes.
I have a job that I love very much and the bright side of my brain wants nothing more than to excel at. But when I wake up on the other side it’s not going to happen.
I try to tough it out, but for the most part it blows up in my face. I don’t want my coworkers to have to deal with that side of me. It’s not fair to them, and most of the time my actions in that state leave me embarrassed and ashamed. When I wake up on that side, all I want to do is take a sick day.
But I don’t. The biggest problem is I’m afraid of the stigma, I’m afraid that because the hurt I feel isn’t physical, that my excuse of: I feel sad, or angry, or depressed, or helpless, or I can’t stop all these voices in my head from screaming and it makes it very hard to talk to this computer, aren’t valid.
But they should be. When things are so bad I can’t handle faking it, I sometimes use the excuse of a migraine. But I wish I could just be honest, and understood. I want the stigma to be broken down. One thing I have learned from the internet is that nothing about me is likely very unique, and if I feel this way, there must be others out there who feel the same. I want their stories and voices heard, I want them all to speak out, in great numbers our illnesses can be understood, and we can feel free to reach out for the help we need. From our friends, employers, and loved ones.
