Only last week someone said to me, “But mental health has positive things to write about, doesn’t it? Do you always have to write about the sad stuff?”
She was genuinely concerned about me engaging the matter of the recent deaths where two young women suicided, especially knowing that I had been in a prior period of mood instability. She expressed concern for my welfare, trying to imagine how it must make me feel to engage such “dark” writing, and what impact it has on my wellbeing.
And I was impacted. It was a difficult week for me because while I am not suicidal or ideating, while in the doldrums of despair and pain, I often question the worth of living. More in that way of Mighty Shadow singing, “What is life?” asking if this is all there is and pleading with God to show me a superior place.
I know a better place. In my periods of stability, which are far greater than those of instability, I experience joy, love, and bliss. When I am in a good zone, I can actually feel happiness welling up in my insides, an experience happy people would never have until or unless an illness or incident derails their joy. My life is more richly textured from the unvarying experience of turmoil turning to positivity in this motley existence, living with a disorder.
Of course there are wonderful things that are written everywhere about mental health, mental awareness, mindfulness, positive mental attitude and a host of necessary literature for the world today. There’s no discounting the good in it either.
And while I too speak of the positive things, I am truly committed to getting people to appreciate that there is a positive conversation to be had about suffering. There is a dinner table conversation to be had about mental illness and mental health. There is a place for me to help you understand how people can be drawn to suiciding, drawing from my own life, elaborating my pain and showing how the insensibility of many, in isolation, can aggregate to compound grief in an individual to the point of death.
As dark as it seems, if in exploring personal despair I could get someone, just one person, to turn their eyes to the pain in another, then I would feel accomplished. If the people in my life would just get a peek into the congealing of disappointment and hurt, maybe I could turn their heads, hearts and hands towards helping me rather than destroying me.
I want people to understand the existence of a person living with a mental disorder and to become more tolerant in their approach and responses to their needs and suffering, but if you do not get it, I always say that either it is not for you or it is just not your time.
Everybody should be happy. I agree. But not everyone is. And if I can help someone to understand why that’s so and aid their attitude towards the unhappy one(s), then my living would not be in vain.
When I approached openness about mental health, it was because there is a dearth of writing on the most misunderstood side of the issues. There was a gaping vacancy in the literature to truly explore the tremors of the illnesses that afflict so many; very few voices that dare lift above a certain octave in support of the pain of the delusionary and disillusioned.
Of course there is a sadness about my work—darkness, even—but I find it essential to delve “where angels fear to tread” to produce a sympathetic forum for those who suffer, and awareness for those who live in the constituency of those suffering.
It is sufficiently challenging writing continuously about the depth of hopelessness, and, yes, writing about death is, in my view, a cataclysmic, but necessary exposition.
Death is not a dirty word, neither is suicide. In fact, if we embrace the issues more, it may help us deal with this shock and awe culture that spins our population into a magnified presence of outpourings and overzealous expressions. It may help us “save” our loved ones.
I believe I could have been asked to write on many or any subject, all of which I am more than qualified to engage, but this is what I was tasked to do and I do it with few regrets. This is to fill a void that has long existed in the entire Caribbean, a stilled voice quieted by shame, a silence that perpetuates stigma and discrimination and allow us to live our lies comfortably or at least discreetly.
First-person writing on mental health is not a popular genre but I was not intending to be popular through this work. All I want is to break the cycle of misunderstanding—and beyond that, to keep my voice active in the hope that one day I can influence the agenda for mental health/wellness and impact on the response to mental illness/disability/disorder in T&T.
