Most of what gets talked about as a mental illness are its symptoms or its outward breakdown (the cool kids of this school are mania, crying, and suicide attempts).
What I find ignored is the comorbidity-the smaller things of a normal every day that one struggles with as a result of current or past trauma. I am not talking about the inability to get out of bed, which is still a symptom, I am talking about how a child whose parents don’t understand English is disadvantaged in comparison to a child who does and helps her with homework in an English medium school. There are fears, maladjusted behavior patterns, and inability to do certain things that a person with mental illnesses carries around that come in the way of them living their best life. These are such subtle things, and we have been ’round pegged into a square hole’ by the norm so hard that we lose all shape, and don’t notice the things we labor through.
I discover these things sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly in therapy or while doing something mundane. I find it hard to write about them for the lack of lingual crutches of the scientific language to aid me. What does one call the lack of feeling of a connection between hunger and eating? a lack of having had a learning experience?
Trying to recognize, understand and vocalize these feel like trying to put together an IC board without ever having studied a component. And I guess that makes it that much more important to be written about. If we don’t talk about these things because we are not given the words, we will keep not finding words because they weren’t written, we won’t lend them, not normalize them, we won’t create a vocabulary for a babyr to pluck feelings from and my fear is that we will stop feeling them.
So I have decided to write about some of my – I am calling it – where’s the manual?’ experiences over the week. These will be uncomfortable to read, if not triggering, but fight the urge to feel pity, sympathy, or disassociation. Try to understand the structural struggles some mind-bodies go through that a Wikipedia list of their diagnosis cannot show the most empathetic person. See that some of us may be to teaching ourselves very basic things as adults-things the ableist world takes for granted-silently. I hope it helps you understand yourself and I hope it helps you understand someone who could use being understood.