Memoir installment #21: My breakdown

What doesn't kill you almost kills you sometimes

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

I’ve really debated whether to share what follows here. It’s about the time in my life—close to 20 years ago—when my depression went from bad to worse and eventually morphed into something a lot more terrifying. I’ve talked about it a bit on the podcast, but have never approached it here—something about putting the experience down in writing, and making that public, has felt deeply intimidating. But I’m doing it now, mostly because there is too much shame around the topic of mental illness, and I’d like to play some (very) small part in making that not be the case anymore.

.

Here is the thing about losing your mind: you truly are the last to know.  

 You proceed with your life as though nothing has changed, and yet you are unrecognizable to everyone but yourself. You move with a certain frenzied force through the world, with a frantic confidence that—despite ever-mounting evidence to the contrary—everything is pretty much good, that you're on top of it. Everything is, in fact, up in flames, but your lunacy will prevent you from seeing this for a very long time. Your instincts will be screaming at the top of their lungs—on some gut-check level, you know things are way off—but you will become skilled at ignoring them.