Make People Uncomfortable

Thoughts, recently.  This is going to be disorganized.

–Mackenzie told me about troubles that she’d had in high school.  She sounds like Holden Caulfield.  “I was just having a real hard time in school.”  She said she didn’t have any friends, and she wrote some really dark poems about rape that scared her teachers.  They kicked her out of school and told her not to come back unless medicated.  She started taking Ephexor– a LOT.  750 milligrams in sample pills.  She said she almost killed her family by turning on a carbon monoxide-leaking air conditioner and leaving the house.  Antidepressants affect people differently, and for some it amplifies feelings of emptiness, apathy, and sadness–what you’re trying to escape or better yet cope with–to a totally dangerous extreme… Case in point.  There’s really alot more to her story, I’m not sure how much I should write here, but… left and right, I saw through her words people handling the situation horribly.  And it just made me realize how much, in general, people really don’t understand depression, or anxiety, or mental illness.  Like I thought maybe teachers or at least school officials would’ve been trained in a little bit.  I thought counselors at least might be able to get over themselves and try to help a person in conjuction with her free will and a realistic view of her circumstnaces, instead of forcing convenient theories on her or deciding on their own what they were going to fix.  … Not that they can.  No one can fix you but yourself.   But the thoughts people inject into suffering others~!  The way they’re treated!  I’m starting to believe from secondhand experience that institutions exist to protect the sane people.

Because this is my journal and because you’re willingly subjecting yourself to its words, I’m writing what I would want to say while pointing a finger into your chest.  Buddy.

 

–Don’t freak out.  They’re a fellow human being experiencing more negative emotion than you can imagine or handle and you would act the same way to try to get out of it.  You would do all the same things that seem crazy.  Actions that seem crazy usually have a real source within the person that’s indiscernible but could be found by talking to them.

–Don’t utter these familiar words: “You have a good life.  You have no reason to be depressed.”

That’s why it’s a problem.  You could have a perfectly good life (like me) but have incongruous extreme quantities of negative emotion.  What a problem!  Defined.

I realize that I sound pretty condescending, but I was aghast that so many people in Mackenzie’s life had reacted in the absolute worst ways possible.  She just kept slipping further and further downhill, and those freaking out around her rolled her down that hill when they were trying to push her up.  To be honest, my family wasn’t too hot either, but they did try and they did gain patience after a few years.  And really I’m pretty much convinced that almost no one would know how to act.  If I built a time machine, and I wrote a note to people of the past who encountered me at my worst, they would find on a folded-up piece of notebook paper tucked in their sock drawer one day:

 

 

IF YOU WANT TO HELP ANGELA:  Be calm and patient (really calm).  She gets really scared when she thinks you’re all going to leave her behind, and it makes her draw in more, and that makes everything worse.  The problems will never get talked about if she feels like she has to hide everything to keep you all safe and comfortable.   She has to find a good professional counselor whom she trusts (maybe she’ll meet one in Chicago… whoops! I let that future event slip, didn’t I?), because a neutral party will be less prone to freak out, and the counselor will have tools to help Angela learn to sort through her own criss-crossed bullet-like thoughts.  Most importantly, know that she has every reason to get better, especially if you’re reading this when you would be putting on socks, because then it means she has people in her life, like you, who care about her.