Whether You Succeed Or Not Is Irrelevant, There Is No Such Thing. Making Your Unknown Known Is The Important Thing – and Keeping the Unknown Always Beyond You.

It was never a conscious decision to become poorly. Many doctors would speak to me, quizzing me about the events leading up to a manic episode. Their questions are edged with a slight accusatory tone – ‘were you aware you were becoming unwell?’ At this point I’ll shift uncomfortably, because the answer is yes. I try feebly to explain, like the adulterous partner, ‘I couldn’t stop it from happening.’ And this for me is partly true. The grip of mania is vice like, so forceful that there is no way for me to wriggle out of it and shrug my way back to sanity. When it’s happening it’s like a snowball gathering momentum down a steep slope; the snowball clings to every flake of snow it possibly can whilst hurting towards an inevitable collision with the earth that will break the staggeringly colossal sphere of bright white into a fragmented mess, the beautiful purity of it ruptured into dirty muddied flakes that had been previously been whole. 

I cannot deny the impact my mental health issues have had upon my life. I will have spent a quarter of this year hospitalized come 2017. I toyed with the idea of not writing anything today, I haven’t been feeling so articulate of late. That would have been silly though. I don’t know many others who know what it’s like to spend a chunk of time in hospital for mental health related issues, besides the people I was in hospital alongside. Although I’m not unusual in that this has happened to me, I am slightly unusual that I feel able to speak freely about it. I speak because I can (Laura Marling, my hero) to anyone who thinks they’d like to listen. I have Bipolar (not sure what type though, I’m a bit rubbish) which sometimes leads me to have episodes of mania whereby my energy levels are persistently increased and I lose touch with reality. It has once led me to have a depressive episode, whereby my pleasure in life diminished, I was constantly fatigued and lost all sense of hope. This I find much harder to talk about than the manic episodes. I bare scars I wish I didn’t, but they are a part of me now and for that I am glad. The alternative is much sadder.

I adore the Georgia O’ Keeffe quote from which this blog post pinches its title from. My margins of what I deem to be a success have shifted hugely. I still have ideas of how I’d like to succeed in life but they are irrevocably different to what they were a year ago. I judge that me spending the remainder of this year without spending any time under section would make it a great success! But as O’ Keeffe says, that is irrelevant. I am making my unknown known. I have been depressed. I have been elated. I have been scared. I have thought shoes worn outside the house as optional. For these reasons you must always have hope. Try not to google ‘positive mental health mantras’ when feeling blue – most likely being told ‘you’re never alone’ in a cute font with a sunset backdrop isn’t going to make you feel less alone. Try talking to your family if you can. If you can’t, talk to your friends. If you can’t, talk to the Samaritans. Buy your favourite food. Read your most loved book cover to cover, if only a line at a day because that’s all you have the energy for. Have long baths, short showers. Basically, do all the things you can to maintain your mental health. It’s really bloody important. Don’t aspire to being happy, it’s the most nondescript word around (that and ‘nice’).  Be jubilant, be fearful, be hysterical, be furious, be gleeful. There is a spate of healthy emotions far more interesting and human than merely being ‘happy,’ 

You Are Terrifying and Strange and Beautiful, Someone Not Everyone Knows How to Love

I know sometimes

It’s still hard to let me see you

In all your cracked perfection,

But please know:

Whether it’s the days you burn more brilliant than the sun

Or the nights you collapse into my lap

Your body broken into a thousand questions,

You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I will love you when you are a still day.

I will love you when you are a hurricane.

- Clementine von Radics

This was all I wanted to hear, what I longed to hear. To be loved despite becoming a hurricane force destroying everything in my path. I had become ugly and frightening and I saw that all etched on his face. Horrifying and volatile, he’d seen something in me usually reserved only for the darkest depths of my own buried mind. He couldn’t love me anymore. To him my illness became me and I could not be extracted from the dark, thick, tar like mess of mania that had smothered me. The lightness and clean love we had known was in the past now, what was left were fragments of a relationship that had been balancing precariously on the edge of sanity. I had fallen, and he didn’t want to follow. I cannot blame him for this, but it hurt to have my safety net wrenched from under me. He was there but not present. There were no gifts, no flowers, no magazines, no letters – no condolence. He was afraid of this nonsensical being I had become. And what was worse, it was him that I’d run to.

He heard the strangest things fall from my lips, they hung in the air between us, little clouds of poison polluting the normality we’d known. It would never be the same after this, I’d disturbed him. My peculiar utterances shook rid the logical, sweet girl he’d known and I became a kind of mystery you don’t want to unravel. There was a Jekyll and Hyde monstrous moment, and the revelation that there was another version of my being that was unassembled and dishevelled shook us both. However, I knew myself, what I truly believed and why I behaved the way I did. Although the actions I displayed seemed erratic and chaotic, to me they strung together like little mismatched remnants haphazardly forming some kind of togetherness. They were an integral part of my being. He didn’t know this, and I couldn’t explain it to him. There is only one love I deigned to disclose the inner workings of my distorted head to, and she smiled and nodded kindly as I unfolded these wistful and grave ideas and laid them at her feet. I didn’t have that affinity with him. I’d lost him. We didn’t speak about what had occurred, and the silence engulfed us. I told him I felt lonely once and he asked, why, was I not with my mother? As if the simplicity of being alongside someone so familiar could cure the ache of losing my mind. No, I was not with her. I felt lonely because I was alone. 

I Hope That the World in Which You Find Yourself is Better Than The One You Leave Behind

I don't really know where to start with this post, but I guess a good place to start is to let y'all know I'm okay - genuinely, I am alright! Although it's been a whirlwind few weeks and my memory of certain parts is hazy,but I now feel content and calm. Being in hospital with 17 other people you don't know isn't always easy (imagine halls/big brother but with everyone dealing with a lotta lotta issues) but I'm fortunate enough to have met some extraordinary people here. When I was first admitted to the ward I was incredibly confused, and quickly tried to carve an order of semblance into my chaotic life. I lined up my make-up on the mottled green bathroom side in the order in which I would apply it to my face, as opposed to delving into my make-up bag like a lucky dip. I drank untold amounts of builders tea, which I don't even like! Somewhat more embarrassingly I also instagrammed the shit of my weird life. As the lucid moments passed I was left with the sometimes devastating remnants of a psychotic episode. Each time this occurs in my life it is although the world I have become a part of is destroyed (hence the blog title, taken from 'Curve of The Earth' - Mystery Jets new album which is BEAUTIFUL) and I have to piece a new one back together from the shattered remains of the last, with improvements and alterations.

 I read somewhere that predictability is the cousin of death. My life had become mildly mundane, but I loved it. I had time during my commute to read and message friends, my job bought me enormous joy and at the end of the day I'd swim or see friends. This,it seems, was not quite good enough for my wild head. This is my third initial hospital admission - lucky number eh! I know what I'm leaving behind this time, and what I'll be taking with me. I'm often guilty of trying to make things 'nice', cuter and more appealing in general. No more. I'll still be using my panda highlighters on a regular basis but trying to make you look like a better human isn't my responsibility anymore. I've done some horrible, nasty, spiteful things - and I'm fine with that, I can live with myself. I done them for a reason. I cannot take them back, nor would I want to. I am not afraid of the darkness I embody, I like this intrinsic element of life and the way I still surprise myself by not always being pleasant and kind. In no way am I saying I'm going to become a foul person and start joyriding in my grandma's car, but I won't be trying so hard to make excuses for you being a bit of a !@#$%^&* person anymore.

I met a kind man this admission. He was younger, and cute, and has an alliterated name so I knew immediately he was brilliant. He calmed me down, made me tea (more tea!) spoke his secrets to me and stroked my hair as I read. He saw my worst and at no point was afraid of my mania, my incoherent ramblings and erratic energy. He didn't look away. He enveloped it and soothed me, and for that I will never forget HH.

It was the briefest of moments in which our worlds collided, however he made me feel truly safe. One particularly frustrating day I was running up and down the corridor (12 bedrooms, it's a fair length for laps) and he stepped out of his bedroom into the line of fire. 'MOVE!!' I hollered at him, laughing. He grinned and held his arms open and I quite literally ran and jumped into them, Ryan Gosling Rachel McAdams Notebook style! He was a slight thing but he caught me like it was the easiest thing he had ever done. He kissed my cheek and told me he would always catch me - what a cutie right?! This incredibly short, sweet encounter (he got kicked out after about a week of me knowing him) taught me a great deal, making me realise what I need in my life and what I need to let go of. By nature I'm a fairly nostalgic person, however I think it's been slowly damaging me constantly looking to the past. I've been harboring a love that's dead, and I think I'm finally over it.

That story is one of many I've collated this admission. One morning, just after coming out of my episode I rose early, before sunrise and made a tea (MORE TEA!). I stood at the meshed patio door to the bleakest courtyard I've ever seen, pressed my forehead against the cool metal and cried. The tallest girl I've ever met, a fellow patient, came and stood next to me. I whispered, more to myself than her, 'how am I ever going to get out of here?' The simple beauty of her answer will stay with me forever - 'Hope' she replied, 'your password is Hope.' That moment of clarity is made even more precious by the fact that she didn't speak to me again for a week or so. Her words struck me and I remembered the importance of possibilities, and the hope for the unknown being exciting rather than terrifying.

After that morning things became easier. I sleep late now, read poems, drink Vanilla Redbush (tea I actually like) with my friend and enjoy the nothingness of being here. Whatever becomes of my life, whether I'm in a dead end retail job, a relationship that isn't quite right or, worse case scenario, am detained under the Mental Health Act, I will not cease being wildly optimistic - it's just not in my nature.

Peace, Love and Vanilla Redbush to y'all, thanks for reading! xxx