The Gift of Mental Illness

This weekend we took her cat to be euthanized. It was heartbreaking. She was trying to take control of her feelings, trying not to let the sadness break loose, forcing it inside, because it would be too difficult to cry. To be that sad again. Pacing up and down, grinding her teeth and almost running out of the clinic because she couldn't take it any more. Couldn't keep looking at her dear cat lying dead on the table. When we came out of the vet's, she said 'I think I'm going to cry now', letting go of the tears, but not too much, because too much was too scary. We walked up and down the driveway of the veterinarian clinic, my hand on her shoulder, talking about how much her and her cat had gone through together. It was sacred, primal, deeply felt.

She kept thanking me for coming along, for holding her cat while it was dying, but as hard as this experience was, I was the one who was grateful for being part of such a large crack in the virtual, zombie-like life of the average civilized human. For being part of something so pure, so real, so brave. On both of our sides. Death does that to you. It makes a crack. 'That's how the light gets in' as Leonard Cohen would say. And it does, if you let the crack be. If you don't try to patch it up with something or someone.

I remember in the beginning of her 'disease', she would cry for a year straight, driving me insane with her constant sobbing, day and night. She hardly slept, and I kept watch. I didn't understand then. Deprived of sleep, I was frequently shouting at her to stop crying, completely exhausted and scared. But she couldn't. The sadness broke her, broke her spirit, broke her mind and I was completely unaware of what was really happening, because I was running away from it myself. The sadness. My own sadness. Trying to numb it with partying, smoking pot and toxic relationships. And so my eyes were forced to break open. It took a long time, 20 years in fact. And the truth is still molding me, poking me out of all the holes I'm trying to hide in - every time.

This weekend was another eye opener. Another portal into human nature. Into myself. Into what we call strange and what all of us are running away from within ourselves. Except those who can't any more. Those who are beaten down by their own mind and the feeling of being invisible. Of being rejected by many as they have lost the ability to live a lie like many of us, or had indeed never developed a mask to hide behind. If only all of us had the capacity to see how pure life is. How 'strange' or 'different' is only 'not artificial'. And how many of us are afraid to open the window to our inner strangeness just because we fear of being rejected for it. Running away from it in others in order for ourselves not to be labeled as strange. I have often wondered why it is so easy to accept small children as cute whenever we see them talking to themselves or to their cat or their doll ... and yet we condemn this behavior in adults and label them as strange, as mentally ill. Even though all of us talk to ourselves inside our heads, sometimes even out loud when we have first made sure no one is around to hear us.

Mental illness is not an illness. It is not an 'imbalance of the brain's chemistry' as many - a - professional has told me. It is the inability to mask one's feelings. To hide behind a wall of superficial calm, outer collectedness. It's a strong urge not to be molded, not to be changed into someone else, not to be forced into a cage of other people's expectations to be 'the same as', which could be accepted as 'normal'. It is not strangeness, but indeed a feeling of extreme weakness, the inability to stand your ground, the inability to feel safe. And if we ourselves have trouble with handling the same fears, we run from it and we run from the people that show us this side of our own being. We run, driven by the fear of 'catching it', of us too losing control.

It's easier to say someone else is strange than looking into our own heart and mind. Trust me, I know. I've been scared of looking for most of my life. But now, I am learning that strange is just a word and that some people will reject us for being strange, just because they themselves are afraid of the same things we are. The only difference is they can't see, because they keep patching up the cracks before the light gets in.