Complaint

In 2017 my friend asked me to look over her entry to the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival’s Writing Awards, which that year was on the subject of “reclaim.” And my friend is an amazing writer and so her entry was amazing, but as I read it I felt that something was wrong. It followed the structure of a story: at first, things were hard for her, but slowly they got better— there was a neat ending to things, and something was reclaimed.

The problem was that I wasn’t sure this was actually true. I suspected that for my friend – and certainly for me – mental illness was often a case of things being hard and then staying that way. Sometimes they got better, then worse, then better again; sometimes there wasn’t any kind of story there at all. I felt that the subject of “reclaim” could force people into a narrative they didn’t believe in, and said so. And so my friend changed the ending to her story, and I wrote this complaint and entered it into the contest. And then we were both finalists, and won prizes! So I guess sometimes life does work a little like a story.

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To the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival,

I’m writing to enter your competition, but I’m also writing to complain about it. I don’t know if there’s a process for this— you’ll have to read it, and decide what to do when you’re done. I’m sorry. I felt this was something important.

I don’t know the insides of your minds. I’ve heard people say that before they were mentally ill they didn’t understand it; how it corroded away the bones of what you are. After my mental illness, I saw things can be seen in more ways than I had supposed. So I can’t make any assumptions about why you chose “Reclaim” as the theme for this competition. And I’m sure you meant us to interrogate the word, to challenge it. But even then, a theme can bind what you can say. And in a contest about mental illness, it can stop us expressing the truth.

Because to me “Reclaim” is an argument, and it goes like this: mental illness is an abyss, but one that you fall into. You get ill and you don’t get better, but your illness is still a thing that’s apart from you. You’ll get out, you’ll go on, you’ll reclaim. It’s a good story— but sometimes depression isn’t a story. An abyss isn’t what our illness really is.

Because it’s not something that happens to you, depression. It’s something that consumes, and when it does you see you is a word that means more than you once thought. We see ourselves as logical people, looking out into an objective world. But really our brains are the only thing we see, because they filter our views of everything— the world is in our heads, and what’s in our heads is the world. And so when our heads stop working, everything else does, too: the breakage seeps through reality, colours everything we see. There’s no climbing out of the abyss, because the abyss is also you. You’re not just your body, or your sense of self. You are everything you see, and now it’s all gone wrong.

And I guess I think you can’t reclaim that, because there’s nothing to reclaim. An ocean can’t reclaim itself from the sea. Depression is chemicals in your brain— but after having it, you know that so was everything else! Yes, we can reason with our worlds, but that reasoning filters through ourselves: the premises we consider are altered by our minds. And “Reclaim” implies that some filters are right, and some are wrong; that it’s never fine believing things are broken. But then I ate a minced dead pig today, and didn’t think about it; a raft of people drowned so I could live in relative luxury. The planet is warming and the people are getting angry; city-destroying missiles are aimed at us all right now. And I have friends who have lost lovers and loved ones, and who did not enter this competition because they couldn’t fit the theme. They are grieving and so are their worlds; they struggle and fight and they are never listened to. Their victory is in going on, and they do not reclaim.

I do not believe mental illness is a journey with happiness as a destination. I believe the world is more broken than we let ourselves say and that there is more suffering than we allow ourselves to listen to— and that we shut this out, when we say we should reclaim. We say the people who got better are somehow spirituality better, that if they saw the things that we had seen that they would not have broken like we did. Hope is good, and so too is recovery. But those of us who can’t do either are still worthwhile, too. Mental illness isn’t always a journey, and it isn’t always a story. Sometimes, there may be nothing to reclaim.

Except for this:

There are many ways to see the world, and many ways to endure it. Some of us will never stop being unwell. But we can reclaim the idea that this is still okay. In saying this, we assert our human experience— for we are human, and this is our experience, even when it is spoken or unseen. In saying this, we will not let our stories fool us. In saying this, we can start to reclaim.

Yours,

~R