Losing Myself Inside

One of the most disabling things I’ve experienced due to my ‘madness’ is the doggedly persistent lure which draws me towards the dubious charms of self-isolation. Ok, so the hallucinations pretty much top it for show-shopping drama – and couple that with my convictions that I was being controlled by aliens and the governing powers of the world were out to get me, you get a heady mix of prime time TV headline-grabbing craziness. When I’m acutely psychotic the world is immediate, vivid and I’m living it with an intensity that really defies description. It’s a terrible world to live in, and it’s frightening to the extreme, but I’m LIVING it. With the flip side - disconnection and detachment – I’m alone, and I don’t feel a part of this life at all.

The wall that surrounds me is a constant feature in one form or another. It hampers my ability, my will, to break outside of it and truly be with someone else. The effort involved often feels too much, and I feel so very very small. The more I stay within its confines, the easier it is to remain. Every now and then I break it down, using whatever comes to hand (a pick axe, small explosive or excessive alcohol consumption with a friend), but it’s not so easily beaten. It has an unnerving tendency to rebuild itself whilst I’m otherwise distracted. I take pills for the paranoia, depression, voices and visions – but I’m as of yet unsure how to keep the disconnection at bay.

It comes in various guises – the feeling mid-conversation that I don’t know what to say (or even why I’m even bothering to talk), the intense loneliness when I sit next to someone I love and realise I feel so far removed that I might as well be in the next room, the auto-pilot effect when I’m out doing supposedly normal things and am not ‘really there’ at all, the seductive pull of my duvet when I’ve arranged to see a mate at the pub later that afternoon (and when making the phone call – or if I’m really a wuss, a text message – feels as taxing as advanced astrophysics) and worst of all the helplessness I feel when I realise what is happening to me.

I’m generally a pro-active kinda girl (for a ‘depressive’). I like to identify the problem, roll it around in my mind a few times like a little ball of marzipan and then sort out an action plan to fix it. I need to objectify, quantify and do all the other things I berate the mental health system for doing. I need to find some order within the chaos, and some calm within the storm (and possibly some less cheesy ways of expressing myself – me? clichéd? …. guilty as charged). Actually though, I think perhaps that I need to find the storm within the calm. I need some spark to hold on to, to fight against and to knock flying with one wave of my spectacularly magic wand. Ok, to cut a long and winding explanation down a bit – I need a focus.

At the moment I’m out of focus, a bit like one of the really bad quality photographs I sometimes take. There are at least 5 of me, and none of them are in the same place at the same time. I’m blurry, and I’m not coping. Well, at least a me1, me2 and me3 aren’t. I think me4 is reasonably bubbly (it’s she that’s putting on the make up, and has even bothered to hunt out a skirt to wear today) and me5 is way past caring.

Back to the wall – it’s not made of bricks, mortar and other assorted building materials. It’s fortified by my own insecurities and neuroses, with a huge load of grief filling up the cracks like some gloopy kind of concrete that hasn’t quite set. My mood, my psychosis, my anxiety and the bad things I’ve been through laid the foundations some time ago. The different parts of it are no longer easily discernable. I don’t know which bit is responsible for which bit (making it ever increasingly hard to fight – have you ever tried to make out the individual colours that make up the weird yucky brown colour that is the result of a particularly bad mix of paints? I have, and it’s not an easy task). Cause and effect have effectively given up and gotten lost in the muddle.

I need to hang on. I need to believe that the moments of connection, of shared togetherness, are not always going to be rare gems. I need to know that I can get back into this world that everyone exists in and actually live it. I don’t want to fake it, and I don’t want to push everyone away from me. I don’t want to be normal, or one of the crowd (that would be bad, and even give credence to my earlier alien control convictions because that definitely would not be me).

All(?) I want is to be here, to want to be here and to know I’m not going to go away again.

Rachel Waddingham © 2003