What, precisely does this mean? It means I feel weird, and I don't quite know what to do with myself. It's interesting, the effect of having a label. I imagine this particular effect is broadly similar for many diagnoses, to lesser and greater degrees. It's a waveform: you just start relaxing into it, and feeling relived by it, then you think 'oh shit, there's something wrong with me!', then it all starts again.
There is a satisfying feeling of loose ends being tied up. It's the explanatory scene at the end of every episode of Poirot, the metaphorical jigsaw pieces being placed. You think of all the things that you've been feeling over the years and you squidge all of your individual experiences into the shape of the words on the leaflet you've been given.
But its weirdly hard to relinquish the long-held belief that actually you're just quite shit at life, that its your own fault and you're just not trying hard enough, to something external like an Actual Real Life Diagnosis. Bits of what I thought were my personality are instantly explained and I can't quite accept that its not just me being defective.
There is also a fear that now I have an excuse, a reason to stop berating myself, I will luxuriate in it. Will I kick back and stop pushing myself as much as I have been, and retreat? Will it take even more effort now to venture out and smile, with a diagnosis weighing me down?
People who know me may be inclined to think that this is bollocks, that I'm just going through a rough patch and will be fine in a bit. I keep telling myself that too, to be honest. I'll shake it off and it'll be fine. but this is an underlying thing that has always been there. Most of the time it lurks, but sometimes it pushes itself into the front row, knocks out the bouncers, and jumps on the stage and dances naked. In other words, its pretty damn distracting, and it takes up a fair amount of my working brain.
There are a few cruel dichotomies that I am the victim of in life. I love nothing more than lying for hours in the sunshine, yet I have the palest, most prone to burning skin, for example. And this is one too. I love being around people. I love my friends more than anything, and I rely on them for my very existence. But this thing, this bloody diagnosis, means I can end up spending the precious time I have with them fighting with my instincts to run away from them, even though I desperately want to be with them.
You could be the one person who I want to spend the most amount of time with in the world. You could be the person that I am most interested in getting to know, or the person who I most want to impress. I might be really interested in your opinions, and desperately want to know about your life. But what will most likely happen is that I will sit in awkward silence and you will think "she hates me", or "she's not remotely sociable" or "bloody hell, she's really boring". If only you could hear the things running through my head at these times though. In my brain, I am running through all of my most sparkling, wittiest, intelligent observations and quietly discarding every one of them as being too unworthy of your consideration. Yeah, I know I should let you judge that, and I think about it constantly afterwards and how stupid I have been for not saying anything, but in the moment, none of those rational thoughts help. Conversely, you could be someone who I know I will never meet again. You could be a random person on the street who asks me directions, or a train conductor, or a waitress in a restaurant I will never visit again, and I will still have the same reactions.
I can often mask it, but my body lets me down. I can be sat having a nice chat with someone I have been friends with for years, and I am internally in full on fight-or-flight mode. My heart is pounding irregularly, my brain is rushing and I blush extravagantly. If this is how I am with people who I know love me, and who I have known for years, imagine how I am when I meet new people.
Some of you might be thinking 'why in the hell is she writing about this in public?' Some would say that this is the kind of thing that should be kept under wraps, behind closed doors, under the carpet and all that kind of thing. Well, I say bollocks to that. I have written before about how stubborn the stigma of mental health is, and I just don't subscribe to the idea that we still, in this day and age, need to be embarrassed about it. It's actually really hard and scary to write about it all in public, but it makes me feel better and I don't want to hide it away. I have enough faith in you, Dear Reader, that you wont think any less of me for it or judge me too much.
Hxxx
