The Courage to Be Seen: Challenging Society’s Perception of Mental Health

I had a very busy week with big events and I’m exhausted.  I think for the most part I’m doing pretty well but I definitely have my moments.  When I get tired I zone out a bit and then my terrible thoughts will start popping in.  For the most part I can ignore them, but they are of course disturbing.  I look around at the tables of people, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who is seeing herself slashing her wrists while she takes another slurp of coffee.  It’s hard to accept that this is me.

I have competing forces inside of me, one is to stay quiet and stay normal. The other is to shout from the rooftops when I hear of yet another suicide by a young boy who had his whole life in front of him.  Good looking, champion on the field, well liked and gone at the age of 21.  Could I of helped him?  Could we all have helped him if we were more open? It forces me to start telling a few more people what I have been through and see the shock and horror on their face.  They are loving and supportive but blown away by the details.  I do it for him though as I struggle to tell people and wonder why it has to be so difficult.  Why is it ok for me to say that my endometriosis and ischemic colitis is finally getting better but not ok to say that I’m also recovering from Harm OCD and Depression.  They are all diseases and they are all invisible but the physical ones are easy to discuss. 

The problem is that none of these diseases are my fault, I never asked for them and I have continually fought all of them.  The mental ones though still make you look weak and like a fake while the physical ones make you look strong for toughing the pain.  I’m sure if that boy had kidney disease he would have easily gotten himself more help to try to combat what physical illness ailed him.  This is exactly the reason that I want to lay this all out on the line, all 700,000 that died of suicide last year, all the substance abusers, all of the ashamed.  I can easily walk in a room and tell everyone in the room how painful my endometriosis has been in my life.  I have much greater difficulty doing that with my self harm thoughts. As hard as I wish though to be normal, I am not and I whole heartedly believe that we could change the world if we could admit these things and make it normal. 

It’s not that I want to be some kind of martyr and have everyone say how brave and proud they are of me.  The only thing I want is to make it ok for that boy or any boy or girl to be not afraid to tell people the dark that is torturing them.  I think if just one person who is reading this recognizes that they may be heading into very real thoughts of suicide and they think of me and this book that they will tell someone they love and that someone will care for them like I was cared for by my family and friends. 

In a game we played the other night called would you rather what if the question was would you rather die trying to appear normal or would you rather live accepting your not normal?  Who says what normal is any way?  Is it normal to yell at young kids trying to do customer service? Is it normal to cry when you watch Old Yeller?  Is it normal to put away every last toy and puzzle piece on the floor at the end of the day? Is it normal to be a superstar athlete?  Is it normal to be a rockstar?  What is normal? The dictionary says that normal is conforming to a standard, usual, typical or expected.  Who gets to make the definition and who holds us accountable to conforming to the standard.  I guess society does that, but is society always right? 

Was society right when they took slaves for workers on their farms and bought and sold human beings? Was society right when they split themselves in half to argue about covid rules? Is society right to keep turning a blind eye to the major polluters in the world and keep watching our world burn and flood? Is society right to let Russia take over Ukraine or let Israel keep killing women and children in their hunt for vengeance?

How do you change what society says is acceptable? How many people have died throughout history knowing they were on the wrong side of society?

In a game of would you rather the other night by the fire, there was typically not conformity in all questions.  Typically there was either 50/50 or 75/25 to any particular perplexing humanities question.  Some even felt that when they were in the minority 25 that the rest of the people couldn’t understand their choices and in some cases even made them feel shameful that they had these opinions.  So the next time the question came around they may have been more apt to side with the crowd or “society” and less likely to stray from the “normal” of the group.  In that minority group it does not make their answer wrong but it sets them apart from the rest.  Society is then more made up of the “bully’s” of the group who may shame the others and less on what the group thinks in majority. 

How do I figure out how to be the bully in the group? Do now I have to shame others to conformity?  Or do I just need to stand up for myself and show the rest of the group that there is in fact another choice.  If I stand up do I persuade maybe the person beside me to go against the bully too?  Does that maybe start a chain reaction and more and more of the participants stray from the bully’s opinion to the other opinion that they can’t believe anyone had the balls to say out loud? I just realized that is a very sexist saying, honestly like you need balls to do something bold and brave. For me it’s about what makes the most sense for society.  Does it make sense to look at people with mental health issues as weak and undeserving of their accomplishments because they have what they have? Does it make sense to shame these people to death?

Wouldn’t it make more sense for the portion of the population like me to shout out that we are not weak, we are not undeserving or undesirable, we are not losers and we are not shameful secrets to hide away.  We are in fact the opposite, we are empathetic, caring, kind, creative and smart and we deserve the same respect as anyone else, maybe we are even in fact super in some way.  We are super writers, dancers, singers, athletes, physicists, artists, and caring sons and daughters we just happen to have disease that others do not and maybe we are not “normal” but maybe we are even better than normal instead of less than normal.  Possibly our souls have been through so much that they have a heightened sense of both darkness and light. The learnings that they are in the world to learn is how to turn others darkness into light and you likely have to be super “normal’ in order to do that! I’d rather turn one darkness into light then keep us all in darkness.  Even the dimmest stars are still stars and their contribution helps light up the sky.  Imagine how bright the world would be if we all helped the dimmer stars to shine brighter when they needed a spark. 

Chat again soon,

Michelle