Mental Illness: The Reason I Write

You might wonder why I’ve chosen this as a subject for a blog post. Aside from anything else it seems to be something that everyone is writing about right now. Writers all over the world seem to be really picking up on the depression thing; probably because, for writers, it is such a big thing. You spend lots of time on your own, talking to yourself in your head, never quite knowing if what you’re doing is any good or if you’re just going mad, quietly, on your own and wondering if, eventually, when you release your work to the world, this madness will be exposed and you will have to go away somewhere to be treated for whatever it is that’s wrong with you.

Being a writer, and being introverted in the way that writers often are, makes you very easy to label under the banners of “mental illness” or “depression”. And you can never quite prove, even to yourself, that you do not deserve these labels.

Well, in the spirit of all that, I’m going to treat you to a description of how mental illness has affected my own life and the things that I write. I do this, both by way of introduction into my slightly odd imagination and generally weird psyche, and in order to explain the ways that depression and madness – whatever its form or voracity – can twist people in really quite terrible ways and, if you’re lucky, lead to creativity.

(I say “if you’re lucky” because many people are not lucky enough to find or make use of an outlet like this, but I should also point out the irony here which is that anything creative you might do as an artist/writer/whatever is only a way of venting some of the frustration you feel when you know that nothing can fix what’s wrong; this is a far more serious and important concern.)

The process of writing is cathartic in a way. And this is, in part, why I write.

I should say, at this point, that I am not have a mental illness (at least not an official one that has been diagnosed and medicated) – but I was brought up by a single mother who has suffered from schizophrenia for nearly three decades. To say that she has twisted me up a bit might sound unfair, but I think this is probably true.

I will try to explain this further in a moment. But, if you look at most of my work, you will see mother-daughter relationships running all through. You may even become quite bored with how many of my characters hate, complain about, or generally just want to kill their mothers. This is not just a recurring theme, it’s a fixation.

I only really noticed this after I’d put most of it up on Amazon – but I think the thought had probably occurred to me before that I was harping slightly on this. It’s true. I write about my mother a lot. But I do that because my attachment to her is the biggest, strongest, most complicated, and least satisfying relationship I have ever had in my life. And I think that it is only when you write that you realize just how crazy and screwed up you’ve become throughout your life. Because everything you write – whether you want to admit it or not – is just you in another form. You can never escape your own voice.

I, however, might really be crazy, because it is not only my voice in my head but also my mother’s and – at the risk of sounding like a total nutcase – I can’t ever get rid of that.

Living with a schizophrenic is not easy. (NB. I make no bones about the fact that being one must be bloody hard as well. But living with one, especially when you are their only child and you have very few other people to help you survive, is really not easy.)

I’m not trying to make any sort of disparaging remarks about people with mental illnesses, nor am I trying to inspire fear of them – because this is also a major problem and many different charitable organizations have had to set themselves up to sort that out.

But my mother really did drive me crazy in a way; because her view of things was so distorted and because she was the one in charge of explaining things to me.

I grew up being spoon-fed the paranoid delusions that were inside my mother’s head and, as you can imagine, I grew up rather confused and really quite terrified of everything. Your mother probably told you that there were no monsters under your bed. Mine not only did nothing to dispel these childish fears, but she even reinforced them by insisting that there were monsters, and that she had monsters – REAL ones – all around her; I would then be further informed that, as the only other person there who might be able to see them for what they were, I had to help her defend herself.

She was convinced that the neighbours had sinister intentions, or that people in the street were going to hurt her because they were looking at her strangely, or that the doctor was trying to kill her with the new tablets he wanted to put her on.

I think, when people very patiently explained to her that these things were not true, and she’d had some time to think about it, she was able to realize that she was not seeing things clearly. But it would take time and hindsight to reach this calm point after the paranoia storm.

As a child, I would be my mother’s confidante, and primary means of support and I would have to listen to her because, as a child, I had no choice.

What became a real problem, however, was that I also had no choice but to believe what she said; as a child, I had to learn from her.

This, in case you were wondering, is probably where my twisted and really quite odd imagination comes from.

It was only when I grew up a bit more and I started to see the real world and interact with different kinds of people, that I saw that my mother was wrong about a lot of things. She looked at life as if she was looking down a kaleidoscope. One twist and the picture changed, and then another twist and it would change again. And she would always believe what she saw because she saw it. But, while she was busy being twisted and turned that way, the rest of us were just seeing reality.

It was weird being a kid in my house because I saw everything from two sides, like a double-think. I saw what my mother saw and I saw how things actually were; and I knew that I was supposed to believe my mother – so I did – but I also knew what was real, and I was grounded in that.

Hence, split level brain.

I saw two ways at the same time and both were true because they had to be.
It’s hard to sort that out. And I didn’t even begin to sort it out for a long time. And I’m still only just starting to realize now how powerful my mother’s lies and delusions were for me and how much of myself and the way I think about life has been screwed up by those early years.

She’s still twisting me now, in fact, but that’s another story.

My family is quite small, and most of us don’t get on so well. I’m an only child, as I said, and my mentally ill mother makes it a point to remind me every now and again that I’m all she has left to live for and that she can’t be expected to manage without support.

But, the truth is that it’s hard for me to love my mother any more because of the continued distrust that I find myself receiving from her. We like to think that, over many years of building a relationship with someone – especially someone to whom we are supposed to be so tightly bonded – that there would be a trust element there; but when your mother is schizophrenic, this trust never builds, no matter what you do. The voices or nagging doubts or whatever it is that person has in their head will always be stronger than you. You can’t make a schizophrenic person love and trust you unconditionally, because they don’t think that way about anyone. They will find it just as easy to see you as a threat as anybody else, and they will quite happily treat you like a criminal or a dangerous stranger without the slightest provocation. In a nutshell, then, their opinion of you turns on a dime.

I had some very scary experiences growing up. My mother would sometimes flip completely – sometimes in the middle of an argument and sometimes in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation – and then I would see just how dangerous she could, potentially, be. Because when she lost herself that way, she lost all ability to see reality, and she would look straight through me as if I was not there. I might easily have been a burglar in my own house. That was very frightening because it made me realize that being her daughter, and being the only person in the world who was precious to her – as she sometimes said I was – was never going to be enough.

And, to come to the point, it is as a result of all this that I have become a fractured, twisted, and terribly insecure person. I can say this unequivocally, because I’ve spent most of my life trying to make my mother love and trust me, without success. I did this by being a good girl; always doing what I was told; never having much of a life as a result. And, perhaps unsurprisingly then, I have suffered with depression for most of my life. I have seen psychiatrists, I have contemplated suicide many times (although I’ve only tried it twice), and I have done just about anything and everything I could to try to get myself out of the nightmare that has been my life for twenty-eight years.

So far, the only thing I’ve found that has worked is fantasy. I dream, and I create stories in my head.
I never used to write them down. I’ve spent years talking to imaginary friends in my head, creating personas for myself, morphing stories from television shows and books and putting myself into the one of the roles – not usually the main role though, which is probably due to some kind of inferiority thing. But, anyway, all of that probably sounds pretty weird. I talk to myself a lot, you see, which they reckon is a sign of madness – but it’s how I make sense of things. With my mother around, I never had much space to do any real talking – all her voices and worries take up all the room, so mine have to go somewhere else where they won’t be in the way.

But that’s it. That was what this blog post was supposed to be in aid of – explaining why I write and outlining all the psychological twists and turns that have contributed to my work. You could say that this is my way of saying “HELLO” to the world. So you’ll all know I’m here and that I need to write what I write because I need to escape; because I really hate real life.

Real life is hard, and thinking about it is depressing. And I hate having to sort out what’s real and what isn’t from the jumbled mess that my mother creates for me every time I talk to her. So, rather than deal with all the nightmares there, I write/read and live fiction because, in fiction, I know where I am. I am in my own imagination and all the rules are made by me, all the images are mine, all the people do what I want them to do.

Real life sees me getting pushed around by people whose logic and sense of reality are completely topsy turvy. I often compare my life to Alice in Wonderland, because I seem to be surrounded by mad-people. (I even wrote a short story called “Sentence First” that is underpinned by this comparison; it can be found in my collection, Oddities, where there are several stories that relate to my life.)

I’m rambling a little now, and I know you probably thought you were going to read some straight-forward piece about the issue of mental illness in the modern world – possibly quoting statistics and symptoms, or issuing an earnest plea for more understanding. (None of which I’m against, I should add. Such straight-forward pieces are great and usually have important points to make.) But, sadly I’m not that much of an expert on the real, widespread problem of mental illness; I only know my mother and myself.

I also don’t want to claim that I was abused as a child, because I think this would be hard to prove and I doubt that many people would have much sympathy with me – there are children being raped, beaten and murdered all over the world, so the fact that my mother told me I owed her something because my birth ruined her life and drove her, literally, crazy, might not seem so bad to some people. No, I wasn’t abused or beaten or nearly killed as a child. But it was bad being my mother’s child. It hurt. And I do not, at any point in my life, remember being very happy.

I still suffer very badly from depression and most of my life has seen me just trying to get through things. I live from day to day thinking of all the potentially horrible things ahead of me and calculating how much time it will take before it will be over so I can get onto the next stretch of time in which, if I’m lucky, things will just plateau out and be kind of ok.

I’m so used to doing that now that I’ve got comfy in this pattern. I haven’t even got the inclination to kill myself any more – not because I don’t want to, in fact I keep thinking that I probably should, but just because it seems to me that, since I’ve done this carrying on thing for so long, I might as well just keep on with it. Dying would be as much of an upheaval as changing my life.

This was not meant to depress you, but it is meant to describe a little bit about my life to you, so that you might understand where some of my weird ideas have come from. I wanted to explain how I have lived with depression all my life, but I also wanted to explain that that depression is an off-shoot of someone else’s mental illness and, while the resulting stories and all the other strange and unusual things I do in my life, might (if I’m lucky) constitute some sort of worthwhile achievement, I will really have achieved nothing because I still won’t feel better.

So there’ll be more writing to come. More stories, more weirdness and this will be because I need it. The world might try to claim my body, but my mind is free. And I have to straighten it out somehow.