My brain is trying to kill me
1
I am sitting in a classroom in Vancouver trying to act normal. I’m not quite sure what normal is supposed to look like, but I am pretty sure I’m doing it wrong. I’ve developed the habit of wrapping my arm around my head and sticking my fingers into my mouth. I don’t know where this comes from. It’s like my body is receiving the panicked, desperate signals from my brain and decides, Fuck this, let’s do what we like. I’ve just moved to Vancouver from Montreal. I am eleven years old.
2
I am fifteen. I’ve just finished hiking for a week along the Harrison-Lillooet trail with about 60 other teenagers. We are dirty and smelly and hormonal. I’ve spent the entire trip falling desperately in love with a classmate and wondering if she noticed. (I would confirm later — she had no idea.) We are all sitting on the floor of the train taking us from Pemberton back to Vancouver, signing each other’s hike guides. (This was back in the day when everything was printed and better than it is now.) I am holding the aforementioned girl’s printed guide and all I can think to write is the line from The Breakfast Club: On Monday, what happens? Are we still friends? She asks me what this means. I start crying.
3
I am twenty. I’ve fallen in love with a young man. I am also deeply involved in Evangelical Christianity. These two sides of my existence are playing a fun game of trying to rip my mind apart. I feel broken in a fundamental way. I am letting everyone down. I am deeply, profoundly unhappy.
4
I am twenty-eight and in law school and think I’m having a heart attack. There’s a stabbing pain in my chest. I can’t breathe. I finally go to a clinic and the doctor reassures me I am not going into cardiac arrest. Then he asks me if I’m under a lot of stress. Then he asks me if I’m doing any drugs. Then he asks me what I know about anxiety.
5
I’m 40 and sitting at a long table trying to write about fairies sending secret letters to children and my brain is actually trying to climb out of my head and strangle me. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I can feel it pushing against my skull and if it makes it out I’m pretty sure it will beat me to death with a spoon. Because I’m a terrible writer and a terrible person and a general failure and about a dozen other incredibly cheerful thoughts. And it’s some time around here, after literally running out of the office to escape and walking faster and faster mumbling utter gibberish to myself — it’s somewhere along this trajectory that the part of my brain that actually likes me pokes its head up and says, You need to deal with this.
6
Today. Those five vignettes, taken separately, probably sound like plot lines for a series of young adult novels (and maybe a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal.) Unfortunately, they are actual scenes from my actual life. A life I’ve spent wilfully ignoring some pretty compelling evidence that I have the Brain Problems. The thing with the Brain Problems is they can be really good at hiding out in amazingly creative ways. Sometimes they get disguised as crappy poetry. Sometimes they feel a lot like heartache, or infatuation, or a bad cause of emo.
If you’re “creative” and kind of “clever” you can generally style the whole mental illness thing out… that is, until you go crazy. Say you have social anxiety that carries with it an obsessive desire to please people. If you’re eleven and just moved to a new city and everyone in your class knows you’re in therapy, including the blonde asshole who has decided that instead of learning he’d rather make fun of your haircut — every day, without fail — and you have a pretty high level of emotional empathy, you figure out what you need to say and do to get out of that therapy really quickly. Including pretending that your happy place is a beach (as a chubby kid it was not the beach at all) and listening to all the ocean sound tapes you need to, for as long as you need to, until they say, Hey you seem fine no more of that weird therapy where we noticeably take you out of class new kid!
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) categorises someone experiencing a major depressive disorder as having five of these present nearly every day:
Depressed mood or irritable most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful).
Decreased interest or pleasure in most activities, most of each day.
Significant weight change (5%) or change in appetite.
Change in sleep: Insomnia or hypersomnia.
Change in activity: Psychomotor agitation or retardation.
Fatigue or loss of energy.
Guilt/worthlessness: Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt.
Concentration: diminished ability to think or concentrate, or more indecisiveness.
Suicidality: Thoughts of death or suicide, or has suicide plan.
For the past 20+ years I’ve experienced at least one of these on a daily basis. For stretches of time, ranging from a week to a particularly bad run of months, I’ve experienced all nine. All of them. Daily.
If you’re a reasonable person, you’re probably asking yourself… how the fuck?
The simple and truest answer is you need to have incredible luck and be born into an amazing family. I cannot stress this enough. If you’re going to spend your life avoiding your mental health issues, you’ll need a wildly supportive and top-notch family backing you up. Without them, I’d likely be dead.
Then, you need to be even more lucky and have people like you. This is also important, because you’ll be taking advantage of those people a lot and it’s vital you never find yourself alone. Because you’re terrible and not to be trusted.
Finally you’ll need to develop a series of increasingly elaborate and ineffective coping mechanisms. The crazier the better. I’ve tried many, including:
- Evangelical Christianity
- Drugs (both prescribed and very not prescribed)
- Alcohol
- Elaborate networks of lies
- Relationships of indeterminate purpose
- Pretending I’m a spy and following people around
- Getting on planes and flying places with the intention of disappearing
- Constantly changing careers
- Overeating
- Undereating
- Pretending I work in offices and seeing how far I can get inside
- Stalking
- Recreational sleep deprivation
I’ll likely discuss all of these at some point, because they’re painful and weird but frequently hilarious. Like life!
But I’ll start here:
When I was thirteen I didn’t want to to exist anymore. “Join the club” I can hear you saying. Yes, anonymous reader, most teenagers want not to exist (which is… a problem, yes? Like we think this is a bad thing, right? We don’t just joke about it and make thousands of movies and songs on the topic for the monies, right? Oh.)
So one day I decided I wanted to end my life. This sounds dramatic. It wasn’t. Which is a really, really bad sign. It should be an amazingly hard decision, to decide not to exist. But it wasn’t. It was super easy. I hated existing and I wanted not to and there was a way to make it stop.
Why didn’t I tell anyone you would ask if you knew I didn’t. This is bad storytelling. Anyway, I didn’t tell anyone because it’s absolutely batshit fucking weird to talk to people about this stuff at any age, nevermind awkward hair and clothes age because human is hard and we bad at it.
Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half, provides this helpful guide:
Her second post on depression is basically the best description of it, ever.
Any details would be gratuitous, but obviously I did not stop existing that day, although maybe a version of Thom did. Because that day I decided to keep existing… but also, in a way, not to keep existing. In order to do that I put aside certain parts of me and elevated others, and that’s been my standard operating procedure for the last 27 years.
