I’m always returning to the struggles I encounter, because my aim is to do what I must to help others understand these issues, even if I have to do it repeatedly.
First, because I’ve had to manage my struggles for many years I have what is termed learned behaviour. I know how to set aside my ill feelings, for example, if I have to attend to a task. It’s not always easy and there are times when regardless of what I know, I still feel the “paralysis” that some experience at the idea of going out and interacting.
I am currently at school and for the semester I missed one class when my cousin died in February. Other than that, I have attended all sessions, done all the work and completed every task on time, even contributing more than others on every occasion.
I am able to do that because I have the ability and the God-given talent to work long and hard and to multitask regardless of what I’m feeling or going through. I have learned to manage through years of working successfully in demanding roles as communications manager/consultant or other permutations of the title.
That does not mean I am at the best health every day or each time I must work. What I have developed though is a good work ethic, and even if I’m socially dysfunctional (which happens at times), I appreciate teamwork, I’m committed to the course, I fulfil my role, and I respect deadlines.
So I function “normal” and even better than my peers, and in that there’s a blurring of a line that make people ignore—almost in disbelief —any indication from me that I am feeling unwell.
People do not quite yet understand though that operating at the speed and pace at which I do may be a function of the very illness that portends. That oscillation from a high wind of activity can often end in a flat lining. So after some very long nights for over six weeks mostly spent with my classmate, the dentist who is equally committed and driven, I had to call “fend.”
Imagine the confusion to some when I expressed cognitive difficulties and suggested I must take a lesser role at the end of that bruising period. The unspoken uneasiness was, for me, discomfiting. I wondered how much people had understood in our engagement that my reality is a mood swing from one end of the spectrum to the other, as a swift possibility, without warning.
Secondly, because I’ve decided to use my struggles as occasion for a discourse, I get the idea that some people read my work and feel I am “broken” while others think “If she can write that she’s not really that badly off.” Therefore my issues are discounted or they are made pronounced on either side of the divide depending on who’s making the assessment.
The “broken” thought is at times a fair assumption if it can be attributed with clarity. For those of us who manage mental illness in our life, brokenness is a common feeling. At times of depression, that low sinking, hopeless zone of nothingness really takes a toll on body and mind. You wonder “Am I ever going to piece this together again?” You question, “Why do I have to be made to feel like this?”
I woke up one morning about two years ago and asked God, “You for real? You could really sit on your throne and watch me in all this pain and do nothing?” So we understand broken as it comes and goes.
What we do not subscribe to, is the lack of understanding that broken is just a period in the struggle, a phase we go through and come out of just like the “broken” others experience with money.
For example, when we do not have money, a T&T slang is to say we’re broken, and if you are anything like my mother, when you’re broken you hit a foul mood. My mother would quarrel incessantly; I once had a neighbour who cussed his children.
But when you have money again, you’re happily treating the family to dining out and calling friends for drinks at the bar. The feeling has dissipated and no one considers you “broken” as they accept your hospitality.
They remember only the “good” you, the one who laughs, and eats well and buys rounds of drinks. They set aside anything you may have said or done in your brokenness with ease and forgiveness. At this stage my mother would be singing “How Great Thou Art?”
And that’s exactly how “broken” behaves with a mental disorder except, unfortunately for us, with rife stigma and level discrimination, and not a dollar for a national awareness intervention, you are labelled, maligned, ostracised and never forgiven for any infractions that may have occurred in your brokenness. You cannot buy enough drinks to gain the forgiveness of an ignorant circle.
The struggle is real.
n Caroline C Ravello is a strategic communications and media practitioner with over 30 years of proficiency. She holds an MA in Mass Communications and is pursuing the MSc in Public Health (MPH) from the UWI. Write to: mindful.tt@gmail.com.