And that is all I need to know.
by Emily Willingham
[May is Mental Health Month. At DXS, every Friday is a mental health awareness day, when we bring you another in our I Am Mental Illness series.]
Sitting on a beach the other day, watching my children splash in the waves on an afternoon of such crystalline perfection it almost made me cry, I did it to myself again. Even as my children cavorted and played, even as a warm spring sun battled with a just-right cool ocean breeze for my affections, my mind hit play on the reality-check voice in my head: “What does it matter? They’re just one of billions. Just blips in the time course of humanity. They are nothing. You are nothing. We are all just nothing, living only a few seconds or 100 years for no rhyme or reason, here one minute and gone the next. What does it matter? We all end up nothing in the end.” It’s a long-winded voice and can go on like that for hours.
It’s hard to tell from the above, but I have always thought of myself as a person who tends to the happy. I laugh a lot, and probably embarrassingly loudly for anyone publicly associated with me. Laughter can be a defense, I know, but a lot of shit is just funny to me, so I laugh. Things that might be crushing do get me down, but like a resilient, puffy marshmallow, I rebound to my usual shape pretty quickly following an emotional or mental smushing. For whatever reason, my way of processing the negative is, like that awful Pollyanna, to find some aspect of it that gives a useful lesson or at least to recognize that every time I haven’t seemed to get what I want, I seem to get what I need. Obviously, my negatives have never been horrific enough to preclude the possibility of a lesson like that.
The paradox for me is that even though I seem to be naturally happy, I’m depressed, recently for a longer-than-usual period. From the mental wardrobe where my thoughts hang, waiting, whenever I pick something light and flowery and lovely, I’ll always hastily select a heavy, dark cloak to cover it up. I’ll draw the cloak over anything of whimsical, flowing, and flowered beauty, as quickly as I can. Why? Because that beauty and whimsy can’t be trusted.
So I sit on a beach watching my much-beloved children play on a crystalline day and still hear that voice, still choose that dark cloak to mask all of that is lovely around me. But why do I do it?
Somewhere along the road to adulthood, I picked up a habit. It’s probably the habit of a hard mind, one that strives for answers, to the analytical, that does not want to be duped or taken in. And what greater sham is there in life than to think that any one of us is special or deserving relative to others, that our lives will somehow follow a golden track because of some intrinsic quality we have that will confer health and happiness? That cold, analytical, and fearful part of me holds that dark cloak at the ready, at every moment of love and beauty and laughter, ready to block out the light with its reminder of the reality: That it’s all ephemeral and that our love and our laughter are simply a desperate effort to tell ourselves that something, anything, matters, makes It All Worthwhile. I like to think of it as my Nihilist Cloak.
This habitual donning of the Nihilist Cloak is now an addiction, one that an awareness of current events and human history feeds constantly. It’s one I’ve expanded over the years to incorporate what I know not about my personal suffering, which happens to be rather limited in the grand scheme, but about all the suffering that people are experiencing all over the world. Parents losing children. Young children losing parents. Tsunamis taking out a city’s worth of people, either in one, single devastating wave or slowly, insidiously in a radioactive aftermath. Gunmen and bombers ripping lives to pieces, killing children in the blink of a staring eye, oblivious to screams, heart-hardened to the death, brain flamed for murder. Factories crushing bodies in collapses from which there is no possibility of rising again. Governments killing their own people. Governments killing people not their own. And people just being assholes and worse to other people for being human and wanting the basic human rights of equality, dignity, and love.
Out of some perverted insistence on not being a dupe, on not falling into the trap of thinking that I deserve or should find pleasure in life, I keep wrapping my loveliest experiences in that dark, foreboding cloak. To avoid enjoying things for myself that I know millions do not have, I remind myself reflexively in my moments of enjoyment of those millions who lack it. It’s a constant mental counterpoint to all that is before me. To everything that is, in fact, my current reality. In my effort to avoid duping myself, to remain analytical, to remind myself of the suffering of others, I’ve diminished and darkened my own reality to the point of ruin.
Having recognized this and its effect on my mind and mood, I now understand two things. I understand how I can be both happy and depressed at the same time. As a happy person, I naturally reach for what is lovely and even whimsical in my mental wardrobe, wanting to enjoy all the beauty it has to offer. Indeed, at one point in my life, that might have been my only choice. Over time, through defensiveness and a desperate need to be terrifically realistic, not duped, I added in that dark, concealing cloak, the necessary completion of the paradoxical attire of the happy depressive.
The second thing I understand now is that the Nihilist Cloak and the nihilist voice in my head both must go. There is no space in my life for all of that nothing. With that recognition, I have some power here, some volition. I’ll no longer dupe myself into thinking that I have no right to the reality of my enjoyment and the beauty that is around me. I can leave that mental cloak to hang there, gathering dust, perhaps one day simply ridding myself of it altogether. And that voice, the one that goes on and on, so analytical, so remorseless? To it, I will say, “SHUT. UP.” I will see my children playing on a beautiful day, feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my skin, and I will say to myself, “This is good, and I am happy.” Full stop.
[Image credit: Emily Willingham.]