The Admission by Stacy Torres.

Longreads has a great piece up by Stacy Torres called The Admission. Torres recounts her admission to a psych department at the age of 20. 

The section on how she needs to "perform" her illness in order to be taken seriously was especially poignant to me:

“We’re looking for psychiatric emergency,” Jeanne said. 

“Outpatient services are down the block.” 

“What about inpatient services?” she asked. 

“Well, that’s in here,” he motioned to the door behind him. 

Well, then what are you waiting for? Let us in. I didn’t understand the confusion. Why the hesitation? Then a thought occurred. The week before Jeanne had half-joked about how one of her colleagues suggested they might not admit me unless I slit my wrists in front of them. I clenched my teeth and slowly inhaled before getting down to business. If they wanted a wreck, I’d show them one. In seconds, liquid was spilling down the side of my face. I didn’t bother wiping the fat telenovela tears that pooled on my cheeks. The man looked embarrassed, tugging on his eyebrow, and hustled us into the room from where he first came.

This has always been difficult for me since I'm so despondent when really depressed. A friend of mine cries incessantly when suffering, and I told her once that in a way it's a blessing because it's physical "proof" of how you're feeling, whereas I just look like I'm a sleepy bitch.

Read the essay here.

A depression reading list.

Longreads shared Living with Depression: A Reading List.

They all seem to be personal essays.

I don't have it in me to read memoir right now, but thought I'd share the link.

Links on writing.

Like most of my creative pursuits, I'm always scolding myself for not making more time to write. Over the course of the last few months, I've bookmarked various articles and links on writing, so I thought I'd share them here, for my future self, as well as anybody else who might be interested.

I think of all the reading I've done, memoirs have been the most transformational for me. It's let my mind wander into considering my own story. It's helped me open up to the possibility that my own stories are worth telling.

I don't consider myself a writer, but I would like to some day.

The Best Writing Advice of 2016

33 Authors Gave Us Their Best Advice On Writing

Ignore all lists of writing tips. Including this one. And including this tip. Or at least take them with a big pinch of salt. I have never met two writers who work exactly the same way: One of the hardest, but ultimately most rewarding, things about writing is that you have to work out for yourself who and what you are as a writer, and how you yourself work best. When you’re starting out, it’s very easy to see a piece of advice by [insert your favourite author here] and think, If s/he writes like this, I must do it that way too. That can be unhelpful, and instead I think that every time you hear a writing tip, you have to decide whether it means something to you, resonates with you, or whether it sounds like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. It’s your book, you need to learn to write it your way. Now please ignore this advice. 

– Marcus Sedgwick

I also have the following lists:

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2017 

The Most Moving Personal Essays You Needed To Read In 2016

Enjoy!

Tig Notaro is just a person.

I just finished Tig Notaro's book, I'm Just a Person, which was great. 

I read a lot of comedian memoirs. Many are not great. I love stand-up, I love comedy (I know, I know, who doesn't?) and Tig is in my top 5. I had the pleasure of seeing her live in a small space during the Just For Laughs festival, and listening to Live, was an experience.

Her book is excellently written, excellently paced. It's funny without trying too hard and she shares her story beautifully.

Her observation of the absurd is perfect for the absurdities of pain and loss.

I like Tig. I like her as a comedian and as a personality, and I got that sense of her throughout the book. It had me smiling on public transit (huzzah!) and also aching for her when she described the worst 4 months of her life. Puts vertigo and bell's palsy in perspective. 

She's philosophical but irreverent. That's my language.

She's so charming. So likeable. You feel the warmth and maturity in her writing. Many comedians don't translate to the written page. Tig absolutely does.

She's a great writer and storyteller, if you love Tig, this is a great read. Highly recommended.

See her live if you can, and watch her documentary on Netflix. 

Withdrawal: an essay.

I had put aside Surviving Psych Med ​Changes and/or Withdrawal: an essay & guidebook for creative minds to read at a later time (today!). The piece, by Luke B. Goebel stuck out for me, since I have intense dis-associative symptoms when I don't take my medication. I didn't take it for a few days once due to forgetting it while on a weekend away and it was brutal. I had to ask my mom to drive since I was hearing "brain zaps" and couldn't focus. It was something I do not want to re-live.

I recommend reading his piece in its entirety. Writing, when you feel insane seems impossible. Trying to properly express the entirety of how you feel when you're manic or down is hard enough, but the experience of being in some kind of fit is so fragmented that the parts of us that are able to use language are often partially disabled. There's also trying to organise the madness of it all. It seems like a cliché to put it that way, but things that one day came and went through you become absolute certainties you fixate on, to your own detriment. So much of who you are seeps out, and so much of something darker takes its place.

Goebel:

So much of it is living without a healed self, without a celebrated empowered identity or persona as an author or person sharing how they healed. I agonize that I am not a packageable brand of salvation I can sell, a story line of resurrection and overcoming of challenges. A Ted Talk. No, I’m still trying to crystalize meaning. I’m still wild. I’m still healing this sometimes hard-to-handle self. And so are the authors I’ve mentioned, many of them, and yet they have their story sorted. I don’t need that to be resolved today. I need my medication to straighten out. But in this state, everything swirls together into madness.

It's a difficult place to come to and to accept: there is no downhill, it's all uphill. There is no snap back into place, you'll have scars, that part of you will never go back to how it was before. You might have some good days, but you'll never be better. In Goebel's case as a writer, I can see what he's facing. I adored Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir The Chronology of Water. I felt she wrote it to me. It floored me. But in all the memoirs I've read by the mentally ill / on mental health, so many ended with a "and I'm better now" ending. It isn't the norm. Or is it? Am I part of the statistic that's forever afflicted?  Regardless, the completion of a narrative in art is a false god.

What is having a sorted story? Maybe Goebel is talking about it as a narrative, about a story with a clear arc. I know for me, I had this sense that eventually I'd get my shit together and eventually life would be easier. But that's not where I'm at. My realisation is that no, things just evolve into something else. I have the language now, I have some tools, but the struggle is still omnipresent. 

I may not be actively suicidal, but I am always fucking worrying about job security now. Always worried about being able to afford myself, afford a life. I'm tired. It's been uphill and the slope is unforgiving. I am now piecing together what it is I do have, and trying to focus on what it is I do want. How do you learn to live a life within a "normal" set of societal set of rules when there are days of your life you vividly remember wanting nothing more than to burn it all down.

This bit, ooooof:

He didn’t seem interested in my crashing. He gave me a prescription to add to the stack: Neurontin. He told me I might want to decide to get back on my medication at full strength. (It was left up to me!) Every doctor and shrink I have talked to since say it is insane to cut Desipramine in half as a starting point to weaning off the drug. Not insane—dangerous. Extremely dangerous. I smelled burning plastic that wasn’t there. I wept. I felt panic. Every day lasted and lasted for what felt like weeks.

It is beyond me, how we're asked to make life-altering, DANGEROUS decisions while possibly manic or going through some kind of panic or psychosis. WHY DOES IT TAKE THE MENTALLY ILL OF US TO POINT OUT HOW THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. I've documented my own experiences in accessing care, and time and time again I've been dumbstruck by how often we're left to our own devices. 

Read Goebel's piece. 

Mental health 'zines.

Dazed has a piece up on mental health 'zines worth checking out. 

I've been thinking a lot about taking my creative time more seriously, about really putting in the time and the word, so exploring ways in which I can write, design and illustrate is something that's been on my mind.

Buddies of mine have been making 'zines forever, it just never really clicked with me.

Seeing such amazing work makes me reconsider what it is I can really accomplish through 'zine making. Sharing my stories in a really personal way might be good for me.

I was especially drawn to shit's fucked. 

The illustrations are beautiful.

I'm checking out the site that sells it. I might order a few. Check it out!

Things are weird with me lately! I feel like I,m in a haze! I don't know what's going on! I feel like I need a good re-centring.

Any recommendations?

I Can't Go On / I’ll Go On.

I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read  I Can't Go On / I’ll Go On by Janice Lee. 

Quoting bits of it would be a disservice to the piece. Please read it in it's entirety. 

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness.

I just recently finished Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan. It was an intense read. First, because I read it in two days so I took it all in at once, and second because there were pieces here and there that poked certain parts of me.

Brain on Fire is part memoir and part investigation into a psychotic break caused by an extremely rare autoimmune disease. Cahalan is able to re-create periods of her life she has no recollection of, through the accounts of her father, mother, partner, brother and friends. Since she’s a reporter by trade, she’s able to access and include her medical reports, doctor notations and even video from a hospital ward she was in prior to her diagnosis.

There are more than a few things that poked the bear…

First, the initial few days where she knows something is wrong and nobody is hearing her, are really difficult to read. Luckily, Cahalan seems to have some good friends and works in a supportive environment, because I can only imagine what a shit-show that could have been (and is for many people suffering from non-obvious conditions). The feeling of, “I'm not right, something is wrong, I feel off,” is unsettling, but when it’s psychologically it’s exponentially more terrifying.

As Cahalan goes deeper into her story, untangling what she can, I can’t help but pull from my own experience when empathizing with her. There are significant periods of my life I do not remember. There are events and situations friends remember that I do not. There is a decade of my life that is imbued by a haze that only occasionally clears.

There are times when I feel so drained and disconnected, that it isn't hard to imagine being one notch further along, and that notch being what gets me hospitalized. I often seek mental health services when I'm on an upswing. When I'm down and out, I self-protect to such a degree that I isolate and hibernate until I have the energy to return to the world. But on those days, the days where I'm the lowest, most basic version of myself, I don’t doubt that my tone and expression would be alarming. Hospitalization stands as a possible reprieve, and a possible trauma.

Cahalan is forced to give up her apartment, and return to live with her mother. She is cared for by her parents for months. This also had me reflecting on my own situation living with my mother. Though I'm working and trying to save-up for a down payment, that rationale only goes so far. I've been such a mess for so long, I've been relegated to this decade-long childlike living situation that mirrors the feelings of infantilization and embarrassment that Cahalan describes.

Overall the book was a great read, in large part due to her prose, but maybe even more so because of how rare it is to hear the story of madness told by the one who lived it. Or lives it, presently. We are all so internalized. It’s all so frantic and immaterial. The consciousness of it slips through our fingers like mist. It takes beautiful and terrifying shapes that we want to capture and show to the world, but no matter how much we want that to happen, it’s nearly impossible. This vaporous state of being. These intangible tangents.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a recommended read.

"Depression is such a cruel punishment."

Just came across this quote from Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface by Martha Manning.

Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.

I now desperately want to read this book.