What People Think Of Me

Mental illness is, at bottom, a matter of what the brain is doing to itself. Most people struggle to hold the idea in their heads that the organ keeping us alive can, in the same motion, work to destroy us. The brain can split into what feel like two separate people. Sometimes those two are so alike that from the outside they read as one, even though two different selves are pulling the controls.

When someone is sick, the things they end up doing are the things society quietly rejects. Thoughts and behaviors that break from what's considered normal, from what family wants, from what friends expect, from pretty much every social rule we're handed. We change, and then the people around us decide whether they can still love the person who came out the other side of a diagnosis, or whether they'll walk away.

I'm bipolar, so I'll speak the way I know how. Culture can hold a friendship together or snap it in half. In Polish culture, for instance, a mental illness diagnosis can quietly end things with a friend. We can't rewrite someone's traditions to fit our condition. What we can do is show people who we actually are, and give our time to those just starting their own fight with an illness.

I've said more times than I can count what I did when I was sick, and because of it, most of my friends think I'm crazy. I have the emails. I've had the conversations where it was written all over someone's face. I'd guess plenty of people reading this have lived the same thing.

There was a guy I loved, and I lied to him constantly, because what man wants a crazy girlfriend? He wasn't the only one. I lied to other men I was interested in, and the lying was enormous. I wrecked the relationship with my parents for most of my life because I decided they were lame and awful and strict and had no idea what I actually wanted. I made up fake boyfriends for my friends. I invented experiences. I lied to strangers, down to the woman ringing me up at a store.

When the truth finally surfaces, when you get caught doing the thing nobody approved of or expected, it can put your life at risk. It did mine. I'd built reality into some flawless place where everyone liked me and success was already arranged for me.

Admitting who I'd been and what I'd done was brutal. People I counted on to understand didn't. That reaction is the stigma of something like mental illness, right there. I have a pretty good idea what people think of me now. I know what my parents thought once it came out that I'd been using Facebook illegally and carelessly. I know what my friends probably think, especially that guy, and the others I lied to.

Happiness, for me, lived in relationships, in people, in food, in animals, and above all in refusing to look at what my life actually was. People can't picture things getting bad enough that you'd build a second world inside your skull. How is that even possible? I've done it, and I can tell you it begins without you noticing. The brain makes the shift and then treats the damage it causes as ordinary.

Because people can't relate to someone labeled crazy, they fall back on whatever they already assume mentally ill means. So why bother about their opinions? Because the illegal Facebook activity, the sex with multiple partners, the drinking, all of it, those are the exact things we have to steer clear of once we're well. Taking in how people view our past can actually help the recovery. The work is learning to accept what we're going through, move forward, and let go of anyone who doesn't believe we can become the person we're aiming at.

We don't owe anyone an apology for who we are, mistakes included, even the big ones. Getting arrested isn't good, no. But I think every brain is built differently, and there comes a point where we're allowed to make a sound choice even when we doubt ourselves.

Every day is a new day. They fed us that line in preschool and it's embarrassingly corny, yet it holds up. We wake, we see who we are, we see what's in front of us, we carry what we did yesterday or years ago, and we get a fresh chance to turn things in some direction. Which is why both other people's jabs and our own ugly thoughts deserve a grain of salt.

A traumatic experience earns the name because it strips away whatever confidence you had and convinces you, fast, that you're worth nothing next to everyone else. We can't afford to care how we look to others. That's the gift hidden in being imperfect. An even bigger gift is welcoming that imperfect self into the world after you've spent time as a completely different person while you were sick.

Not caring what society thinks, or what some guy thinks, is the key to heaven. Few people ever get to really overhaul their lives and see the world from a new angle. We have to turn the thing that traumatized us into something we can use. It takes time. Once you figure out what you've got that most people don't, you're on the road.

What others think of us, held alongside our own willingness to sit in our imperfection, is how a person ought to feel moving through life. We have to keep finding ourselves in our ordinary days, in our joy, and in some exposed part we carry that most people can't bring themselves to reveal. That's what trauma hands you, if you look at it through the lens of recovery.

Nothing great ever came from ordering fast food. Great things come when you're bad at cooking and keep working your souffle toward some French ideal, willing to improve it every single time. Each attempt feels good. What actually makes me happy is simply that I'm cooking something. It doesn't matter if it comes out awful on a given day, and it doesn't matter if it comes out perfect. The fun is in the trip you take to reach the final dish.

We need the devil and the angel on our shoulders, because imperfection and success aren't two ideals. They're a single thing that can only exist when both halves are present. Be who you want to be. Quit asking people who they think you're supposed to turn into or what they make of you.

When I sink low, I remind myself that I'm the only person named Susanna Page and that nobody else carries my genetic makeup. I'm no Victoria's Secret model, but that model I watched at the mall this weekend doesn't wear my name and hasn't lived my life. A life that might strike a lot of people as dull, when it's actually completely my own, especially now that I've survived the worst of what I've been through. - Susan Page

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