Music blared in the background
and the fan whirred faintly. My clothes were scattered quite artistically over
the floor, hiding amongst piles of magazines, an unending network of electrical
cords.
I lay limp on my bed, face
pressed into my pillows, one leg dangling off the edge for the murderers under
my bed to freely seize. That last statement isn’t entirely exaggeration. If it
were dark, I wouldn’t have dared let any part of me protrude over the safety of
the bed.
* * *
Everyone has a bit of a bonding
moment over the threat of what goes bump in the night. I generally struggle to
find others to empathise with my fears that there’s fire encircling the house,
strange men in the roof and the walls, and, somewhere out there, giant skinned
rabbits in business suits coming to cut me to pieces.
I’m not a loon, honestly. Every
now and then, my brain just likes to chuck me a wildcard, seeing how I react to
ominous voices in my head or visions of blood on my pretentiously named Goose
Egg purple walls.
The 90s heydays saw me growing up
happily, with a standard two-adults-two-kids-and-two-guinea-pigs family.
Pretending to be a dog was my forte, and the most exciting time of the year was
when we drove down to the beach for a week, to a 3-star unit with the childhood
wonders of Nickelodeon, a pool, and an ancient videogame machine that played
8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog.
Despite my carefree adolescence,
I always felt as if something menacing was looming somewhere, far away, but
still there. It’s a challenge to explain, but I almost anticipated that these
days of plastic food, Barney and dancing to Atomic Kitten were the peak of a
mountain that was soon to experience many landslides.
Life moved on. Divorce can act as
a slap in the face to some people, but my parents’ separation didn’t impact me
severely. Even at the meek age of 11, I knew that my family was just one of
those clans that operated better with some distance between them. It was
probably the most composed break up in the history of life on Earth, with my
mother and father peacefully informing me and my sister, who was 14 at the
time, that Dad would be moving away. They never fought; my Dad was just lazy, a
toxic addition to a family run by a female perfectionist.
High school was, in a word,
tragic. I awkwardly slotted in with the water polo kids, after knowing one of
them from primary school. Every lunch they would natter on about last week’s
training and the sassy new school togs, and every lunch I would sit silently,
smiling and nodding, pleading to the gods that they would never discover I was
a lumbering rhinoceros in the water.
Eventually I splashed out, pun
intended, and made the effort to find some other less aquatic friends. I shifted
between groups slightly, and by Grade 10 I found a cluster of similar girls. School
was slowly starting to reveal its tolerable side.
Meanwhile my brain, dormant until
now, decided that things were getting boring. Happy, relaxed, and contented?
Unacceptable. So the sneaky bastard searched through its decks and decided to deal
me the depression card.
It came on slowly, and initially
unknown even to me. People started getting harder to relate to, I was less
compelled to show effort, and my mother seemed to become the devil. She
couldn’t comprehend why I had developed into a wicked, hateful teen tyrant.
The forces of the world decided
this wasn’t quite exciting enough, so on came the bullying. I still have no
idea why, but I became the in joke not just to my all-girls grammar school, but
to our brother school too. Bitchy boys will be bitchy boys?
People made private groups on
Facebook with the sole purpose of posting photos of me and mocking them; at
parties, complete strangers would chase me, yelling out how ‘dank’ I was. I
didn’t dare tell anyone but a circle of trusted friends that any of this was
happening, and even they sometimes refused to believe it, or didn’t understand
the scale of what was occurring.
Eventually, this concoction of
depression and oppression triggered my first ‘blip’, as Mum calls them. I
escaped to my neighbour’s house late at night, and we walked around until a
police car picked us up. Soon after I had my first counseling session. I hated it
and, lucky me, there were dozens and dozens yet to come.
The bullying continued, I slumped
further, and the pressures of Year 12 grew. I managed to struggle on, keeping
up fairly high grades, and with a lengthy prescription of antidepressants, I
held on to my sanity by a thread.
I wasn’t getting happier though. Depression
is a strange and virtually impossible to understand unless you suffer from it.
The common impression is that sufferers are ‘emo’, hate life, hate people, and
devise ways to kill themselves every day. While I did my fair share of bawling,
I wasn’t utterly sad, and I didn’t dye my hair black. My depression manifested
itself as emptiness. I didn’t feel joyful, but I didn’t feel sad. I felt
nothing; draining, numbing nothing. I
wasn’t suicidal, and I didn’t self harm. To me, that would accomplish nothing.
To me, nothing would accomplish anything. So I just sat through life, enduring
pain after pain, and not wanting or bothering to do anything about it but wait
for the end of the storm.
My brain was spinning in its chair,
fluffy white cat in lap. What other tricks could it unleash? Again, it searched
through its files and found another crafty maneuver: anxiety.
The bullies started to scare me.
Before I had just hated them, every single disgusting cell of their bodies, but
now I was genuinely afraid of them and would actively avoid their stares and callous
words and any mention of them. I became stressed extremely often and easily. My
grades slipped, as I acquired irrational fears of my textbooks and studying.
Teachers stopped scolding me for sleeping every class, and started getting
worried. I wasn’t lazy, I was very ill.
Once in English class, as my
teacher was passing around worksheets, she saw me in a deep slumber on my desk.
Rather than wake me, she delicately placed the sheet on top of me and moved on.
She was probably one of my favourite and smartest teachers, and would later go
on to advise me that, “Everyone has a shit year or two. A bloody corker. You’ve
just had yours early on.” I didn’t know which was more exciting, hearing that
things would get better, or hearing a teacher swear.
The tempest raged on. I developed
other, less obvious symptoms. If my room was messy, I would feel jittery the
whole day. If I left the house with the ‘wrong’ socks on, I would feel
extremely agitated and self conscious, and usually break down with fear and
exhaustion once home. I whole-heartedly believed that every stranger was
critically judging me and did not like what they saw. Some were even secretly
plotting amongst each other to physically harm me.
That evil brain was now cackling
and rolling about, loving every minute of it. But the fun was yet to begin! It
was time to crack out the big guns – a nice strong dose of thrilling psychosis.
One night when my friend was
over. I was talking about a girl that had turned against me after I had
declined emotionally, and doctors now think that taking about such a strong
stressor was poisonous to my mind. Suddenly, just while we were talking, my friend
wasn’t… him. I didn’t know who this stranger on my bed was or why he was
weirdly staring at me. When he asked me what was wrong, why I shaking, and to
stop, I grew more afraid. He was just a pawn in someone else’s game, here to
convince me I was safe, while a greater force was looming (enter: evil bunnies
in suits).
In a nutshell, I thought and saw
some crazy shit that night and ended up in a hospital overnight, relaying my
thoughts to doctor after doctor while fighting a strong sedative they’d given
me. What moron thought to sedate me and then
bombard me with a press conference, I don’t know.
These episodes were recurring.
The one at school was quite exciting for all involved. My twitching,
nonsensical babbling and involuntary swearing at the elderly school nurse was obviously drug withdrawal, according to
my charming peers. The week after, was I at home recuperating? Rubbish! It’s
clear I was in rehab and suspended. Reemerging at school, I felt like I’d risen
again, and come back to haunt my cohort.
Having multiple mental illnesses
isn’t fun, but I don’t like to whine about it. While I wouldn’t repeat it, not
for a million puppies, it’s kind of part of me. It separates me from the common
folk who don’t understand and who maybe never will. I have lost many friends
who have become terrified of me and what they’ve witnessed, but the few who
have stuck around are dependable, and have their P’s, which is handy.
It’s important to have a sense of
humour with these things. Even my mother jokes about it occasionally. I see some
killer shoes in a magazine and tell Mum that, “I desperately need some retail
therapy!” she’ll retort with, “No, you just desperately need therapy.” I’ll
pretend to be offended but we all have a bit of a chortle, and usually go
shopping anyway.
I’m fairly sure I’m not barmy,
and when I am, they’re just those ‘blips’, my mother assures me. Even so, some
of the most creative people in history have been those with mental illnesses,
and I sure used to come up with some creative ways to avoid violin practice.
People who are prescribed
medications for depression, anxiety or psychosis will often have to take them
for the rest of their life, but it’s impossible to tell who they are. Anyone
you pass on the street could have prophesised their death last night and had to
pop some pills to calm down. I know I have!
* * *
I slowly sat up, eyes fixated on
my laptop screen and the words of wisdom I’d just churned out. My story might
have been a tad gloomy and intimidating, but hot damn it was factual. With a
mind like mine, swirling at a million miles an hour and uprooting most logical
processes, it was difficult to think of anything to write about but myself. Saving
my work, and sprawling back down onto the best mattress in the world, I cracked
open a Simpsons comic. Not hugely productive, but still totally necessary. It
was important for me not to get stressed, after all.