I want to preface this entire piece by saying that nothing I say below is to be taken as a moral judgment or an implication that mentally ill people are less deserving of respect and human courtesy, any less intelligent, or any of that. I don't see
how that might happen, but it doesn't mean I haven't put my foot in my mouth. I'm also not speaking for everyone. I'm aware that there are people out there who don't have a hard time dealing with their issues. I'm talking about the people who
do.
I also want to say that this, too, is hewn from a longer piece, so I can't vouch for its coherence or its lack of redundancy.
Back on
that same Feministe post, another good quote.
Emily, on what she sees as a difference between physical and mental disabilities, says that
". . . if mental illnesses are analogous to physical disabilities, it seems like you want to reframe mental illness as something not really wrong with the mentally ill person, but a failure on the part of society to accommodate that person.
"This rubs me the wrong way because many mental illnesses are, in and of themselves and regardless of how society treats someone, hellish states of existence."Yeah, our social and moral attitudes toward mental illness
are beyond fucked, but believe me, being bipolar sucks just fine all on its own without any help from ignorant assholes. For many, if not all, the suck is a built-in feature of the illness.
". . . . I guess the main point I’m making is that I think a distinction needs to be made between . . . [conditions] in which a person can live a happy, full life provided that they are properly accommodated, and disabilities and illnesses which do visit profound harm upon the sufferer, as do many mental illnesses. . . .
The fact that many of these people suffer deeply due to their illnesses should be recognized and . . . treatment, insofar as it is available and useful, should be embraced."Here's my truth: being bipolar is a bad thing for me. I'm not saying that I'm morally bad for being this way. I am saying that it is bad because a lot of the time
it sucks wide. I mean, Jesus, I have already lost years of my creative and emotional life to it, and it may well cause me to kill myself someday. How the fuck is that not a bad thing?
So the constant denials that there is anything wrong with me and assurances that this condition has not
really robbed me of anything worthwhile, the promises that if I do the "acceptance" thing just right it will quit sucking, the assertion that I am not seeing the bright side,
man do those ever hurt.
It hurts when people imply that my perception of things is wrong. It is not. I know my own potential better than anyone. Let me tell you, internets, depression is
not the same as pessimism. Some of the most optimistic, cheerful people I know are
fucking hideously depressed. I know, it's crazy, but that's why they call us . . . ermm . . . crazy.
So yeah, my emotions are fucked, but I know where I am. I know this illness, its cycles, its rhythms, where it is likely to take me, where it means I cannot go. Telling me there is nothing wrong with me does not make me feel
better. It makes me feel stupid and weak and lazy . . . and so goddamn
alone.Alone is perhaps the worst of it. When I am trying to tell it like it is and someone just won't
listen, when they insist that I will get better someday, find a magic pill, or figure out how to look at it so that it will stop fucking
hurting, it means that I need to educate that person about the reality of my situation before they are going to be able to help me. I mean, if someone doesn't see that your problem is a problem, going to them when you need comfort is not such a hot idea.
When this happens, it makes me feel that much smaller, that much sadder, that much more cut off. It makes me withdraw just that much more trust. It makes any comfort I find that much colder.
I tried for years to look on the bright side of this. There are some fucking awesome things about being this way. And for me, that's not enough to make me not hate and fear it. I tried for years to be a magical madman, to embrace my inner fuckup and love myself into a state of transcendent batshit craziness. It still sucked. You know the only thing that helped me not want to blow my head off? Acknowledging that it was never going to stop being what it was,
acknowledging that the bad outweighed the good, and then
medicating the bitch!When someone tells me to behave as though this will someday stop beating the emotional shit out of me, or to live for those between times, or that if I really accepted myself I would be happy (thus implying that since I am not happy, I have not accepted myself) . . . that person is
not helping me get better. My doubt that my bipolar disorder will ever change seems like a terrible thing to a lot of folks, but it's not. I am hopeful, still, but it's not hope that it will go away or that I will get better, but that I will find a way of dealing with this that works well enough to make me happy again.
I am trying, but it's an ugly process. The only way out is
through. I need to cope with reality as it is, not reality as I would like it to be. I need to make plans based on what is most likely, not plan based on the most favorable circumstances. I need to be able to function when things suck at their worst.
And the need to live with shit that sucks is not something that society addresses.
We teach people to accept that there is nothing evil about having a mental illness, and that some bad things can't be changed. Okay, we teach those things
badly, but in the stupid process of trying to be human and love each other we
do make stabs at it. But freakin'
nobody addresses what happens
after you admit you can't change it and understand that it doesn't make you evil.
Nobody really talks about the emotional sewage farming of having to deal with this shit every day for the rest of your life. Most of what I've seen is geared toward people who are newly-diagnosed, and the Welcome to Being Fucked Up 101 manual is seriously lacking in advanced protocols. Nobody talks about learning to accept permanently diminished capacity – not just accepting that it won't go away, but accepting that you are going to have to live with it forever.
There
is a difference between accepting the fact that something is permanent and actually learning to live with it. I mean, there's a difference between accepting the fact that you are going to have a baby, and then learning to live with and care for that baby, right? It's not any different with an illness, injury, disability, so on.
It doesn't help that the whole "acceptance" discussion is always painted as a positive step involving positive emotions, with a lot of emphasis on how much better life will be once we accept ourselves. But as long as we are framing conversations about injury or illness or disability of any kind solely in terms of making positives out of negatives, as long as we tell people it will get better when they accept themselves, we are forcing people into roles that are seldom applicable to
real life, and we are preparing them very poorly for life as whatever sort of fucked up they are.
The assertion that all pain is simply a blessing in disguise is terribly unhelpful. After all, if you are struggling to accept how things are, and someone tells you that you are
wrong about how things are, that you're just looking at it wrong . . . well, that implies that you are either lazy for not just wising up and doing the legwork of loving yourself, or that you are too stupid to realize how deluded you are, you poor little thing. Someone says "Your problems aren't as bad as they seem!" How else to understand that besides "You are a lying, lazy faker who could do so much better if you just tried!" At best, it's "What's wrong with you? Don't you appreciate how wonderful your life is?"
Yeah, great. Thanks, you've given me so much fucking hope. If this is wonderful, I can't wait to see what shitty looks like.
And what happens when people accept what they are and find that their life is still hard, that it still sucks? Oh, that's what doctors and therapists and shrinks are for, right? Yeah. That's not going to be enough. Even a really good team working together can't fix it all. That's something a person has to do in the larger world. And most people
don't have access to a good doctor or therapist or shrink. This is slack that society needs to take up.
And the shitty part is that I don't know what we should do for each other. I am still trying to figure it out for myself. Becaue the need in me has not been met, I can't say what would fill it. Only that there's a huge gap in our culture where help for people with major fucking issues should be, and I've fallen into it myself.
All I can say is that accepting what we -- all of us whose emotional need for support through major emotional suck is not getting met -- accepting what we say about our lives as
fact, accepting that there may not
be a bright side to whatever it is we are dealing with, and helping us to learn to live with whatever truths are ours would be a mighty fine place to start.
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One girl had brought a single red rose wrapped in petrol station cellophane, which she laid respectfully within the fenced-off tribute zone. Others added their comments in marker pen to the wall of whiteboards behind - "King of Pop Forever", "This girl is yours", "Micheal We Luv U", "Thank you for making me want to dance". There was no intense grief on display, more a feeling of muted celebration, and nothing especially emotional or coherent either 
headachey
