Art as therapy, therapy as blogging
I don't know if I've subconsciously stolen this imagery from elsewhere. It seems very familiar, which made it fairly quick to draw, but I don't know if the familiarity is from seeing it elsewhere, or familiarity with the subject. I can't quite get the almost faceless image of a huddled figure out of my mind, but this is the closest I can represent the way I feel pretty much the whole time. There is sunshine there, but the figure either can't see it, or isn't looking.
When your day to day conversation with your family is peppered with words like nihilism, hypomania and a host of other philosophical and medical terms, when you keep track of the days by the letters on a foil pill packet, when you find yourself wandering around in circles, slamming your fists together and muttering, and you can't remember why, when being unable to find a roll of sticky tape takes on such huge proportions in your mind that your entire life is a failure because you can't find some damn tape to stick down a piece of paper, when real things don't appear real and the made up stuff is so vivid, and you can't keep track of the todays, yesterdays and last weeks - then things are, to put it mildly, troubled.
Yesterday I spent the whole day reading Stephanie Merritt's excellent memoir, The Devil Within. I had to put it down after the first chapter to compose myself - that entire first chapter was a mirror - those are my thoughts, my actions, my feelings, all laid bare on paper. Throughout the book, thoughts that I believed were mine alone, humiliating questions about why can't I cope, when everyone else can - all there on the page, scattered throughout the book. Someone else had been there, someone else got it, someone else confronted all the same questions as me.
There's an incredible selfishness in all of that, an egocentric introspection, but in here is all I am, and I don't even trust him, and I sure as hell don't like him. You have to be selfish when you're stuck inside here, watching as some Other moves around for you, talks for you, and you don't see anything, you just look out of eye-shaped windows and try to scream I'm still in here, please let me out.
My brother told me this is the worst I have been, but it isn't the first time I've been like this. This is me all the way back almost 15 years, this is something I've lived with, lived through, in varying degrees. This is me for my past, my present, probably my future. All of it. Manageable, yes - but likely permanent.
At the moment it has a name, it is called "depression", "deppressive illness", "reactive depression" - I'm sure the name will change after further evaluation.
But it's also called "Paul", because it's part of who I am, and always have been. And so I have to cope, because so long as I'm not going anywhere, he's not going anywhere.
When your day to day conversation with your family is peppered with words like nihilism, hypomania and a host of other philosophical and medical terms, when you keep track of the days by the letters on a foil pill packet, when you find yourself wandering around in circles, slamming your fists together and muttering, and you can't remember why, when being unable to find a roll of sticky tape takes on such huge proportions in your mind that your entire life is a failure because you can't find some damn tape to stick down a piece of paper, when real things don't appear real and the made up stuff is so vivid, and you can't keep track of the todays, yesterdays and last weeks - then things are, to put it mildly, troubled.
Yesterday I spent the whole day reading Stephanie Merritt's excellent memoir, The Devil Within. I had to put it down after the first chapter to compose myself - that entire first chapter was a mirror - those are my thoughts, my actions, my feelings, all laid bare on paper. Throughout the book, thoughts that I believed were mine alone, humiliating questions about why can't I cope, when everyone else can - all there on the page, scattered throughout the book. Someone else had been there, someone else got it, someone else confronted all the same questions as me.
There's an incredible selfishness in all of that, an egocentric introspection, but in here is all I am, and I don't even trust him, and I sure as hell don't like him. You have to be selfish when you're stuck inside here, watching as some Other moves around for you, talks for you, and you don't see anything, you just look out of eye-shaped windows and try to scream I'm still in here, please let me out.
My brother told me this is the worst I have been, but it isn't the first time I've been like this. This is me all the way back almost 15 years, this is something I've lived with, lived through, in varying degrees. This is me for my past, my present, probably my future. All of it. Manageable, yes - but likely permanent.
At the moment it has a name, it is called "depression", "deppressive illness", "reactive depression" - I'm sure the name will change after further evaluation.
But it's also called "Paul", because it's part of who I am, and always have been. And so I have to cope, because so long as I'm not going anywhere, he's not going anywhere.
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