Izzy's blog: I walk alone

Nobody can see what’s wrong from the outside, so we have to try and explain what’s wrong on the inside. But I find it so hard to explain, I can’t give reasons or rational explanations for why I am the way I am, why I feel the way I feel, why I act the way I do. Everything just is. And I don’t know how to change it or fix it, or how to communicate it to the people who try to help.

For me, my condition feels like an invisible barrier between me and the rest of the world. I feel fundamentally different, damaged somehow, and not as good as everyone else. Like I’m trapped inside a little bubble, where nothing is quite as it should be, and everything is intensified; my perceptions are distorted and my emotions are all over the place. At times it’s calm inside my bubble, sometimes it feels as if I’m barely trapped at all, but still I can never find a way out.

Then again if I were to be “cured”, to be free from mental illness, to be let out of my bubble and into the real world then would I still be me afterwards? Would I cope? There are times when I’ve longed to be “normal” but then maybe normal doesn’t really exist, and perhaps my imperfections are ok, maybe they’re even some of my best features?  The strange goings on inside my little bubble are a part of me, they are fundamentally me and I’m not sure I’d want them all to go away, because where would that leave me, who or what would I be without them? I just want to know how to handle the problems so that when they occur I can cope with them, rather than having them overwhelm me until I feel like my brain is going to explode.

But finding a way to cope is something I haven’t really achieved on my own. I’ve found plenty of coping mechanisms over the years but none of them healthy or safe, and all of them have created further problems in themselves. What I need is someone on the outside of my bubble to look in and understand what’s wrong and to help me to learn how to cope. But help, therapy, counselling etc is so limited, waiting lists are years long, private treatment is expensive, and medication can only do so much. I wish someone who knew what they were doing would help me, but as time goes by I find myself doubting whether this will ever happen and increasingly feel like I am left to solve my problems on my own without knowing the first thing about how to solve them. “Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me, till then I walk alone”

Maybe someone in Green Day experienced mental illness, maybe not, but whatever the story behind this song of theirs it seems to capture how I feel and I take comfort in that. The loneliness, the separation, the isolation that the song is about is exactly what mental illness feels like to me and listening to the song makes me feel understood. And maybe some of what I’ve written in this blog will capture how others are feeling too, and give them some comfort. Apologies that it’s a bit of a philosophical one this time but I know that it will make sense to some of you.

“I’m walking down the line that divides me somewhere in my mind, on the borderline, but it’s only me and I walk alone”.