Mental Illness

image by Chris Koehler

What is obvious is the flaw. The awful, gaping void in the fabric of wholeness we want so badly to claim, to keep, to show. Then, the flaw made worse: denial. Frantic attempts at mirage, magician-ship, transformation, and then cluelessness turned into it's own void- pretending no knowledge of the truth, turning the pretender into a vapid phantom person, a Harry Potter shape shifter who becomes so lost in the change, they can never return to the original body.

I don't want to disappear. A typically female manuever historically, and most definitely in my family history, a long, long chain of women pretending they do not see and cannot name what is in front of them, vanishing from our family photos and collective memories because their denial made necessary an inhuman emotional repression that leads to deadness in all facets. The mind remembers to forget, but forgets what it is supposed to be blanking, and so in default: Delete All Slowly the spark skuttles to the clean kitchen floor, emotional intimacy restrained and gagged, sexuality feared, creativity stifled and guided toward safe hobby. Then standing in the clean, organized home, harried and angry faced, seen primarily as humorless, angry and strangely irritable, she realizes she has saved nothing, and all she has hidden has let a smell so strange and sour no guest can enter her home without wrinkling their face and wondering at the shy shirking they feel in their gut.

Mental illness runs rampant in my family. Is running. Rampant. All sides. Including in myself.

I had not thought of mental illness as a stigma because I had been thrust into the subculture of Alcoholics Anonymous at 17. Engulfed in the flames of my childhood, still burning strong, my mother forced me into AA as a last ditch effort to save me. She forced me to the meetings, both driving me and picking me up, waiting outside to ensure I actually went, I actually sat, I had to hear. I hated her for it, I said, and I lied. I loved her for it. I knew it meant she loved me and I was secretly ( not to anyone who could see adolescents clearly ) desperate for salvation of some kind. So I went, and I got sober, and remained so until the age of 30, when I quit smoking and started drinking. * This is 14 years of AA, 14 years of the stories of drunks and druggies twice my age, three times my age, stories so raw, so honest, so absolutely in the dregs of despair and soul mutilation that my family history and life became something as easy for me to talk about, to share about, as what kind of coffee we liked in the mornings.

Enter adulthood minus AA:

ME ' Hi Svetlana, it's cool to see you again, how are ya? '

S ' Okay, Okay, you know work is suck right now, but cool. My boyfriend and I went to Long Beach

over the weekend and we met the bassist from Journey! Isn't that cool? What's up with you? '

ME ' Well my Grandpa- I think I mentioned him, you know the paranoid schizophrenic, he totally

lost it at the ice cream shop and was like, freaking screaming at the ice cream lady because she couldn't understand what he was asking for when he was saying 'cokecola' and he was all, YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL COCOLA IS LADY YOU ARE JUST HIRED BY THE GOVERNMENT' and she's all ' No I was hired by the Friedman's' and I was like, Oh my God! And then my Dad who I don't talk to anymore because he was really abusive to me, he called and left me this message and I'm trying to figure out how he got my number.... '

S ' ...... '

ME ' Uh .... so how was Long Beach? '

This is actually how I talked to people. I . know.

So I slowly learned not to assault and terrify everyone I met by instantly being honest about every question or remark and relearning - OK learning- social mores. While learning how to Win Friends and Impress People, I also became electrically aware of my reality: I had a family packed with mental illness, and, people are terrified and ashamed of mental illness. They don't want you talk about it. At all. Ever. Not even when they love you. Not even when it's you who are sick. Not even- MORESO when- it's them who are sick. And not even when it's them who have mental illness in their family, oh especially not then. Isn't, you can feel them pleading in the subtext, anything else at all we can talk about right now? Underwater basket weaving? Chris Brown's bowtie? Lady Ga-Ga: Hot or Not? The religous right? How do they get those ships in those bottles anyway?

And so I am quiet. And it's killing me. I need someone to talk to. So raise your hand, bloggers, if you feel me. Talk to me so I can talk to you. Help me out here. Email me if you like:

beezus74@hotmail.com

You want a subject list? I'll give you a rundown of my close and personal contact with mental illness:

Bipolar 1, Bipolar 11, Major clinical depression, schizophrenia on both sides of my family, Anxiety disorder and OCD are just a few of the pretties that color out of the lines of my family history. These things have affected me since I was born and continue to affect me and my daily life. ( I personally have anxiety disorder now, and in my late teens and early twenties had clinical depression )Not only that, but as all of you know with family history and children comes the great worry.

And so it goes.

* AA does not believe you are EVER 'safe' from alcoholism rearing it's head. They don't endorse going to

meetings for any length of time and then stopping. They view it as a life long commitment. I viewed it, to be brief, like this: I got sober very, very young, and my short bout with heavy drinking was the result of an abusive childhood, which I dealt with over years and years of therapy, medication, AA and lifestyle changes, so I felt I could move on.