Mental Labels: We Must Stand Alone

Words sit heavy with me these days. Over the past two years I collected so many labels that I started to believe most of them had nothing to do with who I actually am. The labels I mean are the ones people hand to anyone living with a mental health condition. Say the word alone to most people and a certain image forms: someone sliding into depression, or someone wrapped up in a strange, inward relationship with themselves. Those are the pictures that come up.

My first three months back home from Colorado were the hardest to watch from the inside. My family couldn't find the Susanna they recognized in me. It finally surfaced that my health had been slipping since I was five years old. The warning signs existed, the doctors had told us what to watch for, but the symptoms they described didn't appear until the damage was already done.

Few people understand what it feels like to nearly disappear from your own family for a stretch of time. Or the hate mail. Or the silence from friends who never answer a message, never return a call about meeting up. One girl told me I could reach her any hour of the night when things got bad. At 3AM I called her from my bathroom floor, crying, ready to end my life. She picked up, told me to go back to bed, and said sleep would change how I felt by morning.

A support system matters enormously in recovery. With each day that passed, I felt like I was standing at the edge of the world with fire waiting below me. I'd go to therapy genuinely baffled about why I couldn't accept a diagnosis that was plainly correct. My days became a cycle of hospital stays, individual therapy, group therapy, and treatments that left me feeling worse than before.

Underneath all of it, I was empathetic, caring, hardworking, someone who loved people. The illness laid other things over that: distrust, lying, the conviction that I was living in a different reality, and pieces I still can't name. The loneliness arrived the moment I grasped that I was mentally ill. My refusal to believe it was the whole problem. The truth was that I barely knew myself at all.

Here is the part of this I want people to take with them. A diagnosis rearranges how you see yourself, and that shift runs negative every single time. You decide life isn't worth the trouble. You decide you don't belong among the rest of the people on this planet, and you pull away, suddenly afraid of being alive. I had split my existence into fantasy and reality and lived aware of both at once.

Separating and then reassembling the person you used to be, or thought you were before the diagnosis, can be brutal. More than once in recovery I had to stand alone, because standing alone pushed me to find myself inside whatever I was facing. We're working with the brain here, so medication helps, but eventually you have to lift yourself up and use this new brain, which hasn't wiped out the old you.

Humans are built to stand alone, and standing alone doesn't have to mean being by yourself. Sometimes it means accepting your illness and standing with a group of people that the rest of society has stigmatized. If every one of us were identical, we wouldn't be human. Certain people decide what an acceptable human being is supposed to look like, and those are the ones carrying the real sickness. Not the rest of us.

Being different is what we chase in life, and anyone with a mental illness carries a little extra difference compared to the ordinary person walking around. That's a reason for pride. We are unique. - Susan Page