The frustrating thing about mental illness is, even when you know what’s going on – when you have a diagnosis, and a slightly-better-than-a-layperson’s understanding of psychology and neurochemistry, and a treatment plan – you can still be thrown for a loop. Even when you know that the voices in your head are just in your head, or that the thousands of things you’re worried are going to happen are almost certainly not going to happen, or that disappointing some random stranger is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things, sometimes you can just slip up and do a thing because your brain was like !!?!?!?!? and your mind went “Yep, that seems reasonable and not at all insane, let’s do that.”
I’m not a genius, but I’m reasonably intelligent. I could read like a 14-year-old by the time I was 5. I got not one but two scholarships to the school that I eventually graduated from. When I was in Grade 11, I got three High Distinctions in the University of New South Wales School Competitions for English, Mathematics, and Science. I averaged the equivalent of Bs through primary and high schools without effort, and before my depression and anxiety got really, really bad, I had a 6.33 GPA for my Bachelor of Journalism studies.
Unfortunately, someone being smart doesn’t matter a whole lot to mental illness or an autism spectrum disorder. Mental illness will chew you up just as hard if your smart…harder, even. And you will fall just as far, or further.
For the last year, it seemed that things were slowly but surely starting to look up. The end of last year was, frankly, a clusterf*ck: I busted both my ankles tripping over a bench, and I hit a really, really dark place soon after that due to physical pain exacerbating my depression and anxiety. But I was slowly starting to get back on an even keel. I wasn’t exactly happy, I wasn’t exactly motivated, I definitely still wasn’t employed or able to study. But the world was starting to get colour in it again, and I had found at the very least a sense of mental balance (if not a physical one…damn my ankles). Things were…not OK, really, but in the vicinity. I was hopeful. I thought things were getting better.
And then about six weeks ago, things started to tilt again. The saturation on the world got turned down. Awful thoughts, thoughts I hadn’t had since I started medication,* started up again. Thoughts like “Everything hurts. All the time” and “If I drove my car into that wall, it would only hurt a lot for a short bit and then it wouldn’t hurt at all anymore”. It was scary, and f*cked up, and I didn’t know what to do.
* Here, the phrase “since I started medication” actually means “since we found an anti-depressant that worked for me without too many side effects and by the time it actually kicked in”.
So I withdrew. Because even though I understand it was just my brain being a jerk, and that support systems are there to, y’know, support you, I withdrew, because I was scared. So I spent a few weeks stewing in a particularly low point.
And then…and then I made a huge, huge f*cking mistake. Remember how I said that, when you’re so-called smart, you understand things about your mental illness and can still get tripped up by them? Like, say, disappointing a random stranger is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things? Yeah. Well. Anxiety and depression and Asperger’s are all terrible jerks, and it turns out when someone I know and respect tells me some random stranger is going to be disappointed, I spend the next 24 hours twisting myself into knots in order to rationalise to myself allowing some random stranger to have something precious to me. And then I give the precious something to the random stranger, even though it feels wrong, even though I have a policy about these things. And then I panic, and try to fix it, and make things even worse, and alienate the random strangers and the people I respect, and feel like an evil, selfish, awful person because I made a mistake and put everyone in an awful position because I couldn’t stand up to my own f*cking brain.
I understand, now, how young unwed mothers could be coerced into giving up their babies. I always thought it took a lot of pressuring on the part of the mother’s parents or priest or doctor, but…really, it doesn’t take a lot. Just a someone you respect, and your own frailty.
I didn’t give up a baby. I gave up something pretty damn close, though.
I’m trying to be hopeful that it will all work out in the end. That the random stranger will understand that I made a mistake, that I f*cked up and I am f*cked up, and return my something precious.
There’s a lot more at play here than I’ve said, obviously. There’s a year of my something precious living elsewhere, and me not visiting as much as I should because right after they went to live elsewhere I f*cked up my ankles, and spent a good three months getting to the point where I could even walk, let alone drive. A year where I was trying to get things set up so my something precious could come back, but I made little to no progress because I was battling mental illness and physical pain. A year where the custodian of my something precious was under the impression that I didn’t want my something precious, and so they advertised my something precious as available. A year where I didn’t f*cking realise a year had gone by, because I thought about my something precious every damn day.
And I am truly, exquisitely aware of how much I f*cked up, to get us all to this point. I know it. My hiatus hernia certainly knows it. My throat is incredibly aware of it, as are my eyes. My subconscious gets it, and tortures me by either keeping me up at night or giving me nightmares about my something precious being eaten away before my eyes.
Honestly, the person I hate here is me. Because I’m smart. And I know what my mental illnesses and my neurodivergent traits can do to me. I know how they twist my thinking, how they f*ck with my perspective of time, how they make me think and do things that no other smart, regular, neurotypical person would think or do.
And they won anyway.
