fucking depressed at the moment. They might judge me as strange,
eccentric or weird. They wouldn't be able to tell that I'd woken up with
a desire to die every day this week, and for weeks before that, and
months and years where many days have been like that. They wouldn't know
just how tired I am mentally, physically and on a deeper plane. They
wouldn't know just how much I've been struggling to eat enough to
survive. They wouldn't know how low I can feel nor the depths to which
my soul pain can sink. They wouldn't know that I can barely be arsed to
change clothes, shower and stay clean.
Whenever I see people I don my mask. I clean up. I don my mask - with
clothing and with an external character I don like an actor on stage. I
do everything possible to hide what I'm like in truth.
I'm sure it must show to sensitive people. I think a lot of the
weirdness may come from the conflicted personality which hides the inner
pain but overcompensates in their creation of the mask of normality.
This is the thing with mental illness. It is unseen. It means it is hard
to recognise for the observer and for the person experiencing it. Had I
not become educated to recognise this is a state that other people call
mental illness and understand the reasons why they have that construct
I'd deal with this problem a lot differently. Now I've had time to
understand that it's not really an illness but there's still a relevance
for my life I'm able to recognise this state as severe misery but
something I function through.
The mask is not just to avoid sympathy or being treated differently.
People don't like spending prolonged periods with depressed people. Many
people don't want to spend short periods with miserable people. My
miserable state is far from the genuinely happy and fun person I am in
other periods in my life. That person is the person people like to spend
time with. The person I am behind the mask is very different and someone
people wouldn't want to spend time with, simply because the levels of
intensity and misery may be too much for them to handle. It may be
infectious too.
There is a large part of me that doesn't want what I'm going through to
be thought of using the paradigm of mental illness. The paradigm
simplifies it too much then shifts it to something a doctor is meant to
be capable of fixing. It devalues what I'm going through. It gives it a
lack of import and, most significantly perhaps, pathologises it so it is
something people shouldn't experience.
It's gotten really hard to keep the mask up. That's when it's most
difficult for me. I have to function in the real world and when I'm not
capable it takes a lot of energy and time to maintain the facade that I
am functioning ok. I've had to learn this while dealing with this
experience of being before I was medicated and now I've relearned it
since coming off medication. I'm still not finished on that path.
Part of my recovery has been about developing the mask so if I mention
I'm depressed people might think "but you don't look (or sound)
depressed." In a way that's an achievement I guess. Something out of
nothing. At least I achieve what I'm trying to do.
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