I just sneezed…

and accidentally headbutted a wall. My temple may be throbbing, but I have a talent few others possess.

On mental illness

The problem with mental illness is the stigma.

“26.2% of North American adults will suffer from a clinically diagnosable mental health condition in a given year, but less than half of them will suffer symptoms severe enough to disrupt their daily functioning.” (Wikipedia)

We’re all at it, in other words.

The last time I suffered depression was February 1987. I wasn’t diagnosed by a doctor, wasn’t institutionalised, didn’t take medication. But it was a steaming, black broth of nullness. I could hardly get out of bed, couldn’t sleep and stopped eating. Then, for the first time, I started getting interested in my depression. Read some books. Thought about where I’d come from. Made some life-changes. I can’t say I enjoyed that part of my life, but it made me who I am, and I’m glad of it.

I never suffered depression again, but I don’t allow myself to forget it. Its most important lessons for me were understand who you are and if you’re in a bad situation, get out. I don’t say that works for everyone, or even anyone else: I have no psychological training. But it does it for me.

But when you admit to having suffered mental illness, then up come the prejudices. Doubtless, some of you may now have me marked down as unstable. If reversed, I’d probably think that about you. This is a shared perception.

How many millions of bloggers have had mental health problems? How many mention it? That’s why I’m telling you about me.

I’m going to write this novel if it kills me

And thanks to an inspired bout of early-morning insomnia, I finally know how to do it. I’ve got characters, plot, theme, setting, resolution. Oooh, I’m excited.

I’ve even got chapters planned. All I’m missing is a title.

Outline:

Part One: Another City

C1 The antiquarian’s library
C2 Examples of falling in love
C3 Chimes, but no bell
C4 The harbour prostitute
C5 Blur descends
C6 The thighbone of Saint Remigius
C7 A chasm on the Maison Dieu

Part Two: The Grotesquerie

C8 First Grotesque: Elliot the Execrable
C9 Shark teeth in the tunnel
C10 Second Grotesque: A mermaid as she disintegrates
C11 The sandbank of dreamers
C12 Third Grotesque: How the sky was covered
C13 A father returns from abroad
C14 Fourth Grotesque: The melancholy homunculus

Part Three: At the End of the World There’ll be This

C15 The burial plot
C16 Parent and child, tussling
C17 All he remembered as he fell
C18 Sunlight blinking on pebbles
C19 A stormy night’s murder
C20 The woman who didn’t exist
C21 And it slid away

The day I got off the bus

Cures you whisper
make no sense
Slip gently into
mental illness

The Beat, Mirror in the bathroom

One morning, bag of unstarted homework in hand, I got off the school bus at Wymondham and sneaked down an alleyway. I squatted against the wall, bottom nearly touching the ground, hands clasped around my knees. And stayed there.

Could I have stayed in that uncomfortable position for long? Surely I must have walked around town or browsed a shop or two? I don’t know. All I remember, on that most terrible of days, is the alley, the wall, my feet, the cold.

At home my parents wanted explanations for my truancy. At school, teachers wanted their assignments, I suppose stopping off midway between them was a compromise. Why don’t I just do the damn work? I wondered then, and for many years after. But I’d confused symptoms with causes. I wasn’t messed up because I wasn’t doing my homework. I was messed up, so I couldn’t do it.

“Nervous breakdown”, so Wikipedia tells us, has no medical meaning. So let’s interpret my experience that day as a mixture of depression, anxiety, severe stress and panic attack. It was awful.

I had moved schools. I had loved my middle school, a beautiful, bright, enlightened place. My new secondary school, a grammar school with a nationwide reputation, was a dismal, ugly institution of spiteful conformity. I was used to being encouraged (I suppose you might say nurtured), but in that place, expectations were everything. Education was imbibed as a tasteless soup, with the threat of retribution if you didn’t down your portion. But I respected individuals, not authority, and had no desire to learn what didn’t inspire me.

Shocked and overwhelmed, I started feigning physical illness. When that strategy started to fail, all that was left was to skip school.

Eventually I went home and faced the music. My parents and teachers were more puzzled than angry. But I couldn’t explain what I didn’t understand myself. My form teacher kept tabs on me for a while. I felt stupid. I wondered if I would end up “going mental“.

But I had learned some lessons, even if they were the wrong ones. Education was something to be survived, not enjoyed. I would do enough to avoid punishment – which for me, was not much at all – but no more. Within a year, to my glee, my report read “he obtains high grades with a minimum of effort and sometimes shows a disturbing complacency“. I even made a cameo appearance on a friend’s report – “associates with the wrong people…”

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t an out-and-out rebel: I’d learned enough to realise my mental health was at stake down that road. I was surly and sarcastic and renowned for my bone idleness. But I was just horrifically bored.

You internalise these lessons. When my Maths teacher said I lacked the ability to apply myself like my oh-so-perfect brother, I believed him. When my Science teacher mused that maybe science wasn’t “your thing, I figured he was right. When my French teacher – referring me to the Head of Department for embellishing a particularly dull picture essay with a food poisoning scene – said I was immature and flippant, I concurred.

So in that dire miseducation, I embarked on the journey that led, nine years later, to dropping out of University.

My daughter started at school in September. Her teacher, a clever and remarkable woman, wonders if she may be classified as gifted. I should be – am – proud. But I worry. Sending her to school has brought back a wave of memories, and not many are pleasant. I hope education has changed.

I learned to be a failure at school. I don’t want her to learn that.

(For my English teacher, who was entirely blameless)