Metaphors Are Hard

#dispair #depression #suicidalideation #selfharm #relapsing

They say that glitter is the equivalent of craft herpes. Once you’ve opened that can o’ worms, you ain’t never getting rid of it.

Okay. That was a mixed metaphor that just didn’t work. It made sense in my head, but like a lot of other things that make sense in my head, something got lost in translation.

I had a point about the glitter. And the herpes. I’m just not sure what it was.

oh. yeah. that.

Mental illness is like glitter, only not as sparkly. Which would make it a lot more like, well, herpes.

So mental illness is like herpes, really. You might think you’re fine for a while and then suddenly you’re wearing your underpants on your head and things have gone oozy and manky.

Man, I am not on my metaphor game at all, am I?

ah, fuck it.

Let’s start again. Mental illness is one of those things that sometimes tricks you into thinking you’re normal. Sometimes you will have periods of time where things are pretty much okay. Maybe you’ve started some new meds, or are seeing a new therapist, or tried a different treatment modality. Whatever it is, it seems to be working. You think you’ve vacuumed up all the glitter and your house no longer looks like a Twilight vampire exploded all over it.

This is particularly true of people who are just getting to know their flavor of crazy. Ones that still have some optimism that crazy can be cured, who haven’t been riding the batshit coaster for years. Those of us who are in it to win it (and by it I mean a gold medal in the Fucked Up Olympics) know better but sometimes even we can get caught up in wishful thinking.

Because it never just “goes away”. It’s still there, lurking like a creepy stalker. Just biding its time until you get a little complacent and it can sucker-punch you in the mental equivalent of your nuts. Even if you don’t actually have nuts, you totally have the mental equivalent. Or maybe they’re the mental equivalent of ovaries, I don’t know. I dunno that you can be sucker-punched in the ovaries, exactly, but you can totally get sucker-punched BY your ovaries.

Sorry. I almost squirrelled there. Because my ovaries and I? Have a HISTORY.

Regardless.

That shit (and by that shit I mean the crazy this time, not the ovaries) will sucker-punch you the moment you think you’ve got your shit sorted and can maybe have a normal life. Suddenly, nothing is working any more. Not your meds, not your therapist, not a single god-damn one of the tools you’ve learned over the years. Maybe not even your terrible, unhealthy, last-ditch coping mechanisms you spent nearly as many years trying to un-learn.

There is, in fact, not enough ice cream in the world to fix it, not even a little.

I’ve been crazy since my teens. Maybe even earlier. But I wasn’t officially “diagnosed” until my early twenties, and didn’t start medication until my mid-twenties. And I would go through periods of time where I would almost have my shit together. Where I seemed to be effectively juggling work and home and hobbies and the kind of fun a lot of people get up to in their twenties that generally falls under the heading of “partying”, although mine was a lot geekier than what you’re probably picturing because it involved LARPing.

Where I was no more messed up than the average twenty-something. Because EVERYONE gets a little messed up in their twenties, BY their twenties. You’re doing some kind of weird on-the-job training in being a successful adult, and half the time don’t have a fucking clue what’s supposed to be happening.

But it would never last.

My life has been an endless game of Jenga where I would think I was building up a normal, successful life, never realizing that it was all resting on one very wobbly block; a brain that somehow got volunteered for some neurochemical fuckery when I wasn’t looking. And it would all come tumbling down, and I would painstakingly build it back up again only to have it fall apart. See, the higher-functioning you are, the more you can be lured into thinking that everything will all be okay one day, and when that day comes you stupidly expect the okay to last.

Which it won’t.

Because the crazy? Is a bag of dicks.

I am no longer a high-functioning crazy person. I realized that when I attempted to return to the “normal” nine-to-five working world after ten years as a self-employed gig worker. It was like half my Jenga blocks were made of jello. I couldn’t even fake it. I was already failing miserably when life decided that shit wasn’t fucked up enough and I ended up as my mum’s full-time caregiver after a stroke left her with left-sided hemiparesis.

Because, you know, I was clearly not able to adult for myself so I might as well try to adult for another person as well.

Of course, this time, because I was already failing at Being Okay, the bit where shit goes pineapple-shaped wasn’t so bad. Then again, I might just have been so focused on nearly losing my mum that the grief and stress overwhelmed my usual cocktail of depression and anxiety. Or maybe even it was because ten years ago I finally realized that no matter how many times you vacuum, the glitter always comes back.

Always.

Either way, I was actually kinda prepared for the inevitable relapse when it happened. And I wasn’t even surprised when this time when I reached the suicidal event horizon and just… stayed there. After all, the mental illness never goes away. It only lets you think it does.

And it’s a sadistic. little. whoreson.

Because this time I got a new flavor of crazy, one I’d only previously very, very briefly experienced due to a drug reaction.

I wanted to hurt myself.

Not kill myself. Suicidal ideation is old hat to me. I wanted to HURT myself.

I pictured taking a knife and jabbing it into my leg. Digging my nails into my forearm and ripping the flesh from it. I wanted to feel that pain. Needed to.

I hate pain. I have dozens of old soft-tissue injuries from my days as a crash-test-dummy throughout my teens and twenties and… okay, I stopped actively doing dumb things in my thirties but started passively doing dumb things instead so I’ve continued to injure myself (or to re-injure old, poorly healed semi-scar-tissue). Point of fact, I have enough trouble with chronic pain that I can tell you unequivocally that I. Hate. Pain.

But I still wanted to hurt myself so. badly.

So. Very. Badly.

Once again the shrinks and I are dealing with acute mental illness. To bring it back to the terrible metaphors, awkward questions are being asked about how many strippers I hired and what they must have been doing because, otherwise, where else could this much glitter come from? Wasn’t that shit vacuumed up a long time ago?

So I’ve got some new drugs, and they’re helping me sleep if nothing else, because nothing feeds the crazy like sleep deprivation. And I’m gonna enjoy every little thing that feels better while I can. I might be cynical in outlook, but at least I know enough to grab hold of the “better” and the “okay” or even the “I don’t actively feel like I want to hurt and/or kill myself right this second” and appreciate it. After all, it won’t last.

Nothing ever does.

Except glitter.