Blogging about Mental Illness (When You’re Not a Famous Blogger)

It’s no secret that there’s a stigma about mental illness. Sometimes it seems like mental illness not being talked about is talked about more than mental illness itself, as people grapple with this stigma, trying to unpack it and open the conversation up.

There was a time in my life when this stigma — talking about mental illness — didn’t mean as much. I talked about it a lot. Not coincidentally, this was the time in my life when I was, arguably, the most mentally ill I’ll ever been.

For the better part of 2010 and 2011, I was suffering mostly from anxiety— although something about the word “anxiety” makes it sound so trivial. In general, I’m an introverted worrywart, as I’m sure many people are. But this anxiety was a different beast altogether.

It utterly dominated my life. It manifested in obsessive-compulsion, paranoia, suicidal ideation and self-injury. It caused me to regularly hallucinate and hear voices, self-medicate and withdraw from friends and loved ones. It was beyond a mental or emotional state: I felt the anxiety physically. I couldn’t breathe deeply and I felt a million bugs crawling across my skin, always. I wasn’t housebound, but only barely because I couldn’t be housebound — I had to go to work. This, naturally, only increased my anxiety until I was literally sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.

And in this complete domination of all my other senses, I cared less how or when I talked about it or who heard me. I talked about it in-person. I would say to a coworker, for instance, “Can you repeat that? Sorry, I’m on a lot of Xanax.” Mostly, though, I blogged about it on Tumblr. I only had about 200 followers, but for whatever reason, a LOT of people in my personal life were unofficially keeping up with my blog posts. Old friends from my past, distant family members, acquaintances at school and work. These people occasionally reached out to me, to tell me they liked my posts or whatever.

When I started blogging more about mental illness, many reached out to me about that. Many more than I would have anticipated, given that I was far from a famous blogger. I wrote about the miserable side effects of Zoloft. I wrote about the brain zaps of Celexa. I wrote about the therapist who could never remember what school I was going to. I wrote about the tiny details of my day, like sitting on the floor of my kitchen and trying to decide which limb to move first to get back up. I wrote about my desperation and fears and frustration, and people responded. People asked for antidepressant recommendations. People reached out.

The thing is, people want to talk about the hell they’re going through. I truly believe that part of what maintains the stigma of not talking about mental illness is that people aren’t given an opportunity to. Give them a window, a small wave or smile that it’s okay for them to talk about it, and a lot of them will.

Maybe it mattered that so many of these people weren’t close to me. Maybe I was a safely-distant person for them to confide in. Still, my openness somehow made them open. They had questions, and they seemed to think that I had answers.

I don’t actually know if any answers I gave were helpful. I’m glad I was open about what I was going through, if for no other reason than it would have made things even more difficult if I hadn’t been. Yet these days, I feel that I’ve retreated back to not-talking about mental illness since that time. I started a new Tumblr, feeling that my old one was too vulnerable, too public. I’ve been doing great, so I guess it makes sense that’s what I share on social media now.

Still, I hope to see more people talking about mental illness. I hope that more people will open the crack on these kinds of conversations so that others can peek in and say hello. You don’t have to have a large audience to do it. People are ready and willing to be shared with.