I Want To Be Noticed, But We Don't Have To Be Noticed

Some people keep themselves private. I'm aware I've done the opposite and told strangers a lot about who I am. That tends to happen when you feel like an outsider, which can hit at certain stretches of recovery and, maybe, across a whole life spent with a mental illness. I have an Instagram account. Recently I put up some photos from the colonia in Mexico where I've been staying, doing work under a social worker from Canada. Part of me posted them wanting more likes than I ended up getting, and the honest part is that I catch myself in that wish and feel a flush of shame about needing it at all.

If someone reading this is just going about an ordinary day, I don't want to come off as strange. I'm only trying to put words to something I've turned over in my head many times. The root of it, I think, is that I still feel lonely in an odd way. Not constantly. The closest I can get to describing it is a sense that other people can look straight through me and read my diagnosis off me. Everyone understands nobody can actually do that, and yet I doubt I'm the only one who gets that flicker of exposure somewhere in a regular day.

When we write about living with a diagnosis, it can read as neediness to anyone scrolling past. The plain version is that we're putting out things most people keep to themselves. Admitting you refreshed a photo almost obsessively, waiting on likes, would get you odd looks if you said it out loud to the average person. That's exactly why I'm saying it. There is nothing wrong with sharing what you feel. I don't mean you owe anyone your diagnosis, but I do believe in letting people see who you actually are.

I'll be straight: I hesitated over this one. I pictured men reading it and deciding I was foolish for writing a whole post about fixating on a photograph. Then again, it's my right to share what I want, and yours too, as long as we're willing to sit with whatever comes back. I chose to tell my story to be useful to other people, and a handful of emails from readers have told me it's landing. My family isn't really on board with the blog or the advocacy, not all of it anyway. Everybody reaches a point where they have to pick, and telling my story has mattered a great deal in my own recovery.

It's less the telling itself and more the way I've pushed myself into things that helped other people while quietly pushing a few people out of my life. That sounds like a loss. It isn't, not entirely. There will always be people who don't approve of your diagnosis or of what you're building your life around, and happiness doesn't look the same from one person to the next. The last few months taught me that much.

The Instagram thing is the small version of a bigger pull. After being overlooked and left out, of course we want to be seen. What we shouldn't do is bend ourselves on purpose into the shape society expects of someone with a mental illness. That's the spot where we lose. It is so easy to obsess over a photo, to want it gone because four people liked it instead of eleven. One tap and it's deleted, and the truth is almost nobody notices or cares that it vanished.

The payoff comes from doing the harder thing: leaving it up, riding out those cringing, awful feelings, and arriving at the fact that posting it was your call. What's worth sitting in is the reason you thought people might like it in the first place. We usually act with some purpose behind it, and what anyone else says about the choices that make us happy really doesn't decide anything. - Susan Page