“You don’t look sick…?” I kept saying to her as she described her symptoms to me. A myriad of maladies, which did not make sense.
Crystal, my friend was diagnosed with bipolar in her mid-twenties. She was extremely beautiful, intelligent, and high functioning for many years, but the illness ate at her until she eventually could no longer handle the stresses of her life.
In a few instances when my friend told someone she met that she was disabled, they commented that she looked fine.
I laughed when she told me she was on disability and that she could no longer work. I thought about the welfare leeches.
Unlike other disabilities, you couldn’t obviously “see” her illness. She wasn’t in a wheelchair. Her limbs were all sound, and she was physically in great health. People often looked at her as if she was faking an illness.
As a result, my friend rarely told anyone she was disabled.
“Why can’t you look at the glass half full?”
“Pull yourself together.”
“Why are you harping on things?”
“You’ll feel better if you get out of bed and get some fresh air.”
These are just a few things people have said to my friend Crystal over the years. People including myself.
People understand migraines and flu. They understand when you have lost a limb or have cancer. People bring chicken soup and rally around people with physical illnesses.
But those with mental illnesses are often met with disbelief and a sense that the illness is not a real illness, but something that is being caused by a bad temperament.
If you just tried a bit harder, everything would be just ok.
Over the years, she lost touch with many friends as she learned to hide away from the world while she sank into the dark clouds of depression or began a new cycle of mania that lasted days, if not weeks.
Few saw the disease that ate away at the brilliant girl who held dual degrees in art and economics. The silent thief that stole away my amazing friend who was once so full of life.
Strangers, acquaintances, and even friends never saw what I had seen glimpses of.
They didn’t see when she wouldn’t sleep for days on end from stress and mania.
“Z, I feel like I am falling into a dark hole…. Someone is coming for me”, she kept repeating as she rocked back-and-forth in between bouts of anger.
She could not understand what was happening to her. How could she? The mind, the mechanism that records, registers, analyses, concludes and understands the world around you, in itself had been compromised.
They didn’t see her pacing back and forth, sick with worry as she replayed past conversations and encounters.
They didn’t see the wild look in her eyes when mania took over or as she created a shrine for her passed away boyfriend or wrote on the walls or recorded “weird” Facebook posts all night.
One barely could hold back when she, in an unaware moment, punched me hard enough to create an hour-long nosebleed.
They didn’t see the desolate vessel in the shape of that amazing girl lying on the couch for days on end, staring blankly into space.
They didn’t see the inner turmoil that ravaged at her and the dark nights when she prayed to blink out of existence in her sleep.
What people need to understand is that mental illness is a real illness.
But beyond that, it is a terribly lonely illness.
A bipolar person can do no more to curb their outbursts or control how they feel or act during a depressive or manic episode than a person with a terrible stomach infection can curb their need to throw up.
A person with mental illness cannot shrug off their mental illness any more than a person with a broken leg can mend their leg through sheer willpower.
Understand …. or at least make a genuine attempt to., but please don’t fake it. Even in their devastated state, they will know and this will destroy them more.
Don’t dare to even make a fake attempt at understanding them or what they go through.
Just don’t.
I say it because I tried that and I was one of them.
I watched her go from a stunningly beautiful girl who could hold the entire room captive, someone who had 4–5 local cops show up daily to ask for her attention, a girl who could talk art and economics with equal fluency and yet outdrink you under the table….to the hollow shell that you would barely recognize when nobody visited her anymore at her small room in Charleston, WV.
I brought her soup daily from work and when she stopped opening the door, leaving it on her footsteps.
I could never understand the turmoil that waged in her head as her mind, her most powerful ally turned against her.
I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to deal with it. She was not my priority. I had a lovely happy family to tend to.
I stopped taking her calls and put her number on the ignore list for 10 long years going without contact just because she asked for hundred dollars to buy Oxy so she could knock herself out when it got too much and offered herself to me in exchange for it when I declined to give her the money.
I walked out of her house on that balmy summer night in August 2005 and never looked back.
For 10 long years, I never cared. Just the good memories. Everything else, I erased. Sanitized.
Didn’t even remember her except for a couple of good stories on how we drank warm beer at 2 am, sitting on a lifeguard stand at Hampton beach many years ago or how we walked in the rain while people ran for shelters or how we curated music albums to pick the best songs.
But when the going got tough, I ran. Ran back to the family and never looked back at my friend or how she was doing.
It probably wouldn’t have taken much. Just a quick phone call. Her father said she always kept asking for Z — Her brown b*tch as she called me affectionately. Even when under the throes of deep mania.
He just didn’t know who Z was or that we had met for precisely three months in the summer of 2005.
“I wish I knew where you were or how I could contact you”, the little thin man said looking back into her room filled with handmade glowing stars stuck everywhere…
I held him and cried.
I cried not for her, but for forgiveness. Nothing hurts a parent more than a child. I understand that pain now.
A tad bit too late though among the scheme of things….
She passed away on January 23rd, 2019.
The coroner ruled it as a suicide.
Know that the next time you meet someone with a mental illness, that what they need is respect, acceptance, and support, not judgment or advice on how to “fix” it or worse — Your ghosting.
And no matter how much they appear to be pushing people away or hiding from the world, treat the person the same way as you would, a person with any other illness.
Offer a hug, sympathy, and some kind words, if any — And if you can, a little bit of your time…
Even if you don’t know it, it might have gone a long way to provide some normalcy in their emotionally ravaged and extremely lonely world as they single-handedly attempt to battle their protector turned foe….
Their mind.
